The War of the Copper Kings

To understand Montana, you have to understand a single hill in Butte that men called the richest hill on Earth. Beneath it lay one of the largest bodies of copper ever discovered, and its timing could not have been better. Just as the world began to wire itself for electricity, the planet developed an unquenchable thirst for copper, and Butte had it by the mountain. The copper pulled from that hill ran through the telephone lines and power cables of an entire modernizing nation. The fortunes that came out of the ground were almost beyond imagining.

Three men fought for control of it in a struggle historians call the War of the Copper Kings. There was Marcus Daly, the Irish immigrant who recognized copper where others saw only silver. There was William Andrews Clark, perhaps the most ruthless of the three, who wanted a seat in the United States Senate so badly he was willing to buy one outright. He paid individual legislators documented amounts between ten thousand and thirty thousand dollars each. The United States Senate investigated and refused to seat him. He arranged a workaround through a governor he had maneuvered into office and served a full term anyway. Mark Twain, who followed the scandal from a distance, wrote that Clark was, as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag. And there was a brilliant young upstart named Fritz Augustus Heinze, who arrived from Brooklyn at nineteen years old and took on the giants with an army of lawyers and a clever reading of mining law that allowed him to follow ore veins underground beneath his rivals' surface claims.

Their feud bought legislatures, installed judges, controlled newspapers, and in nineteen oh three forced Amalgamated, the Rockefeller-controlled parent company, to shut down every mine and smelter in Montana. Twenty thousand workers lost their jobs in a single day to force a legislative concession. Clark's Senate bribery scandal contributed directly to the Seventeenth Amendment in nineteen thirteen, which required direct popular election of senators instead of legislative appointment. For a few wild decades, the politics of Montana were essentially a quarrel among three very rich, very stubborn men, and the whole state was the board they played on.