AT FIRST, they were welcomed. They were courted. They had money and grandiose plans and industry. And who cared if they came from London or New York or San Francisco. It was a huge piece of the country, bigger than any state but Texas or California, and nobody lived there. Nobody, of course, if you discount the natives. The Blackfeet in the north, the Crow, Arapaho, and Shoshone in the south, the Salish in the west—the bison-fed tribes of Montana, living off the surplus of a state so endowed with wildlife that it could feed all of Europe—had been pushed to the edges after the buffalo herds were crushed. Then, the first order of business was to give away much of the state. No territory in the West was more parceled up and handed out than Montana. The government wanted a railroad through Montana, a northern route from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound. It would carry people one way, and beef, minerals, and timber the other way. When Governor Racicot spoke of trying to break the “extraction mentality” of his state, he was referring to the flow of natural resources out of Montana, a one-way street for nearly two centuries. The resources, as imagined, always went out, but the people never came in. One of the first major actions taken by the United States in It’s territory of Montana was to hand over a huge portion of the state to a single railroad company. Trying to encourage development, the government made a deal in which the Northern Pacific could have a certain amount of acreage for every mile of track it built. In all, the railroad was given forty-four million acres, the biggest land grant in history. Throughout the West, the railroads got 174 million acres of public land— about equal to the size of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England combined. Of this, seventeen million acres were in Montana. Instantly, the government had given rise to a land baron from afar, who controlled the states choicest parcels of property—the lush river valleys and the most heavily forested slopes. And today, Montana is still fighting abuse of those lands, the unrestricted logging, the subdivisions along the scenic areas.
The first train entered Butte in 1881. It was still a mining camp, a repository for hormonal excess and primal greed, with a residual population of gold and silver prospectors, traders and merchants, whores, pimps, and buffalo killers. Early on, outsiders never had much good to say about the town. It was most often called, simply, “a deplorable place.” A thousand people lived there, among them Marcus Daly. An Irish immigrant, he was in his mid-thirties when he arrived in Butte; the new country already had been very good to him as he made his way through the mines of Nevada. He was managing a silver mine in Montana for some outside interests when one particular hill in Butte caught his attention. The mine was called Anaconda, named by a former Union soldier for the way the Army of the North tried to wrap the Confederate Army in a snake grip, in the words of Horace Greeley. Daly thought the mine had potential, but he lacked money to develop it. He found help in a group of investors, men from New York and San Francisco. One was George Hearst, who had made enough money on his own from California gold fields to become a tycoon. One year after the railroad arrived, after Daly and his investors had just bought the Anaconda mine, a worker was scraping away three hundred feet below ground when he found what looked like a vein of copper. Daly examined it himself and was astonished. It seemed like nearly pure-grade copper, five feet wide, not the speckled mix that usually ran through the subsurface. This was an artery that would go from underground to the bank, with very little in between. They kept digging, following the vein, and it just kept getting wider and richer. At six hundred feet, the vein was a hundred feet wide. Daly and Hearst and a few outside investors now sat atop the richest find of copper the world had ever seen—more than four billion tons of red rock ore. Of course, they kept it secret at first. The Anaconda was barren, they told everyone, and promptly closed and sealed it. Then, they quietly bought up many of the neighboring mines around Butte. “The world does not know it yet,” Daly said. “But I have It’s richest mine.”
Their timing could not have been better. Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone, and Thomas Edison had created incandescent electric light. Copper was the perfect medium through which to run the electricity needed to power two of the biggest technical advances in civilization —communication and light. The new American age would have to come through Butte, or at least through the men who controlled Butte.
Copper ore still had to be shipped east, to be crushed and smelted. That meant Daly was a mere provider of raw material. So he decided to build his own stamping mills, where the copper would be separated and reduced to dust, and then, about twenty-five miles to the west, he constructed an enormous smelter to melt down the ore. This industrial complex soon became the town named for the mine. Anaconda, by the 1890s, was the biggest smelter in the world. It’s smokestack, at 585 feet high, was the world’s tallest brick structure. And Anaconda Copper, the company that ran it, was known as the Snake, or simply the Company. Daly and his cohorts bought up dozens of other mines. Soon, they had the biggest gold mine in the West, Homestake in South Dakota. To keep the furnaces burning at all hours, they needed coal; so they acquired some of the biggest coal mines in the country. To supply timbers that would be used to frame the hundreds of miles of underground tunnels, Anaconda joined the Northern Pacific Railroad in a deal that created the states largest timber company, getting most of It’s wood by illegal logging of public land. They had seven sawmills working two shifts a day and a company timber town of their own, outside Missoula, called Milltown. To keep public opinion on their side, Anaconda started buying up newspapers, and soon, nearly a half dozen of the biggest dailies in Montana were mouthpieces for the Snake. The biggest paper, the Standard of Butte, had the largest circulation in the Northwest outside of the Oregonian of Portland.
The wealth that came out of Butte was prodigious. By the 1890s, cable cars lined the streets and a big brawny downtown section catered to thousands of miners and a handful of men who governed every aspect of their lives. Butte was well-built, chiseled and ornamented. Opera singers from Milan did a circuit of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Butte. The middleweight boxing championship of the world was fought in Butte in 1884—and given the audience, the fighters had to offer them their moneys worth. The match, between Duncan McDonald and Peter McCoy, lasted two hours and thirteen minutes. When George Hearst died in 1891, he owned just under half of Anaconda. His son, William Randolph Hearst, came into a fortune of $18 million. From that money, largely derived from the ground beneath Butte, came a newspaper empire that spawned a war in Cuba and inspired the movie Citizen Kane.
Before New York was known as the city that never slept, Butte was awake at all hours. When dark eyed men came up from their shirts underground, they walked just a few feet and started drinking. There were 212 taverns in 1893 and sixteen gambling dens. The men poured down pints of black Guinness and shots of Murphys. A bucket of beer cost a quarter—to go. A shot was a dime. Once liquored up, a miner would wander another few feet to Venus Alley, where more than six thousand prostitutes worked during the peak years of the copper boom. Asians had their own brothels, the most popular of which was called The Lucky Seven. The whores worked out of “cribs,” a mattress and wash basin in a single, small room. When Charlie Chaplin came through Butte, what fascinated him most were the cribs. More than twenty-five languages could be heard on the streets. Underground, notices were posted in fourteen languages. Butte had a Finntown, a Dublin Gulch, a Chinatown, a Dogtown, a Little Italy. The city was full of Hungarians, Serbs, Italians, blacks, Croats, Greeks, Chinese—the polar opposite of monochromatic Montana today.
Butte was multicultural, yes, but clamorous with racial conflict. The Chinese had made possible the greatest boom in the state, by building the railroads, and made up nearly half the population of early Butte. But they were not allowed to own placer mines or work underground. “The Chinaman is no more a citizen than a coyote is a citizen and never can be,” went one Butte editorial in 1893. The Irish soon dominated, and they of course hated the English miners, from Cornwall. Job notices at the Anaconda w
ere posted in Gaelic. St. Patrick’s Church had three different units of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. From one town in County Cork alone came 1,138 people to work the mines of Butte. By 1900, it was the most Irish city in America—36 percent of the population immigrating from the Emerald Isle to a brown hell in the northern Rockies.
Writers, politicians, actors, and others among the professionally curious came from thousands of miles to get a look at Butte and sample a taste of life at It’s most un-Victorian. There was a hermaphrodite named Liz the Lady, who charged for a peek. One reporter called Butte “the most Western of American cities, a place of tremendous disorder, of colossal energies at play.” An East Coast newspaper said Butte was “simply an outpost of Hell.” Carry Nation brought her temperance crusade at the height of It’s power to the city, but Butte proved to be the place where the sobriety movement had It’s last stand. First she was laughed at by a mob outside a bar. Then a brothel madam kicked her to the ground, and likely would have stomped her to death had not the sheriff intervened. Carry Nation never again entered a tavern.
The city is perched on the side of a steep hill, five miles from the Continental Divide. There was no separation of homes and mines. The big coal-burning smokestacks spit their effluents of arsenic and sulfides down on the roofs and backyards of houses owned by miners and their families. Slag piles of mine tailings rose next to schools, next to churches, bars, on sidewalks. A visitor in 1917 compared the Anaconda smokestack to a volcano dumping a stream of heavy metal contaminants on anyone within a hundred miles. Everywhere, it seemed, the big elevator rigs loomed, the black headframes that rose 125 feet above ground. They held little cages that men locked themselves into for lowering deep into the guts of the earth. In the mines, the temperature averaged ninety degrees.
At It’s peak, Butte was an aboveground city of 100,000, and an underground city with a network of tunnels much more extensive than the streets. There were twenty-six hundred miles of crosscutting tunnels under Butte, and forty-six miles of vertical shafts. The city was perforated like a pincushion. When the men came up, on the many subzero Montana winter days, the steam from their wet bodies heralded their arrival, like a puff of smoke from a magicians stage.
In one neighborhood, the air was so thick with black clouds that it was called Seldom Seen. But so what if you couldn’t breathe, if the streetlights were sometimes turned on at noon to light the soot-darkened city? It was the richest hill on earth, the Copper Kings proclaimed, the biggest city between Minneapolis and San Francisco, with ambitions to pass them both. At first, the miners were well paid. Daly had a soft spot for his fellow Irishmen, and early on he acceded to most union demands. The princely sum of three dollars a day set the standard, a huge wage before the turn of the century. But after the crash of 1893, unemployment loomed. A group of out-of-work miners commandeered a train and rode to Billings, demanding full employment. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops. It was the first of five times that armed soldiers of the American government would be used to keep Butte’s miners in place.
Still, compared with other Western mining towns, Butte was, at least at first, an oasis of stability. In Idaho there was open war. Owners of the silver mines of the Panhandle tried to break the unions, slashing wages and firing anyone who wouldn’t go along. The miners responded by blowing up the Frisco Mine near Wallace. Then they hijacked a train and went over to the rich Bunker Hill Mine, and blew that up. The explosion could be heard thirty-five miles away. Governor Frank Steunenberg declared martial law, and sent in National Guard troops to round up the men. The governor was assassinated in 1905. His confessed killer, an anarchist named Harry Orchard, told authorities that leaders of the American labor movement were involved, among them Big Bill Haywood. These labor leaders were kidnapped from Denver and taken to Boise, where they were tried for conspiracy in the death of the governor. A legal showdown followed, featuring Clarence Darrow, who defended Haywood and two others, against William Borah, the prosecutor and later senator. Darrow was victorious, and Haywood and his cohorts were freed.
The labor wars did not come to Butte until World War I, when wages were cut, hours increased, and the polyglot city in the Rockies was disparaged as an outpost of radicalism. Butte did have a socialist city government for a time, and it was the early nerve center of the Industrial Workers of the World, the leftist labor union. The Copper Kings took advantage of wartime restrictions against free speech and assembly and hit the unions hard. In Spokane, any union leader who stood atop a soapbox with a speech was arrested and thrown in jail. For good reason, the Spokesman-Review, editorialized. “They are notoriously and avowedly hoboes and bums,” the paper said. Free speech was outlawed in Montana as well. The legislature passed a law making it a crime to join the Wobblies, or to write or say anything “disloyal, profane or scurrilous” about the government. In Butte, the I.W.W. leader Frank Little was snatched from his boardinghouse one summer night in 1917, tied to a car, dragged along dirt roads in the mountains, and hanged from a railroad trestle. In Miles City, another labor leader was beaten unconscious at an Elks Club. Many in Butte claimed to know who had killed Frank Little. But no one was ever charged with the crime.
Mail to the unions was intercepted at the post office and taken to the company’s headquarters, where Anaconda men would pore over the correspondence, looking for inside information. A union hall was dynamited, reduced to dust. Wages dropped from three dollars a day to a dollar a day. Mass strikes were called. The company dispatched armed guards and Pinkerton agents against the pickets; machine-gun fire mowed down one group of miners, causing fifteen casualties. The Copper Kings called on the government, which sent in army troops. Now the richest hill on earth was under martial law. Soldiers with fixed bayonets forced the Butte men back into the mines. If there was ever any wonder about what sort of stories grandfathers in Montana told grandchildren about the bad old days of Butte—or how the state came to believe in the collective mantra of “They’re Trying to Screw Us”—consider a two-thirds wage cut and a work order that came at the end of a rifle from one of your own countrymen.
The labor wars happened after Marcus Daly died. During his peak years as a Copper King, he had one persistent problem: William Andrews Clark, a pinch-faced, elfin man with a whisk-broom beard and standup hair. He hated Daly, calling him a tyrant, a pimp, a fat blowhard, and names that would make the women who worked the cribs on Venus Alley blush. Clark owned his share of copper mines around Butte, and he had his newspapers, smelters, and city blocks as well. He gave his miners turkeys on Christmas Day but generally stayed away from the underground men. His best-known line in defense of Butte came after an outsider disparaged the city’s unbreathable air. “The ladies are very fond of this smoky city,” he said. “There is just enough arsenic there to let them have a beautiful complexion.” If he was kidding, nobody could tell.
Clark wanted to be the richest man in Montana; but more than that, he wanted to be a United States Senator. He had power, but no personality. “His heart is frozen,” said one contemporary, “and he has a cipher in his handshake. He is about as magnetic as last year’s bird’s nest.” Montana became a state in 1889. The year before, it had elected a representative, likely to be the next senator, by statewide vote. As a Democrat in a one-party state, Clark seemed a shoo-in. But his rival Daly had ordered that the two most populous areas, his company towns of Butte and Anaconda, vote Republican. He wanted a Republican senator to keep the Republican administration from prosecuting Anaconda for It’s massive and illegal logging operations on public land. The gambit worked, in that it delayed prosecution for a decade. Clark was incensed. For the next decade, there would be furious buying and selling of legislators, judges, and newspaper editors as Clark and Daly tried to foil each others plans. Daly wanted the state capital to be his company town, Anaconda. He spent fifty-six dollars a vote in a statewide election, but lost. Clark gave free dinner and unlimited drinks to everyone in Helena, the eventual capital, as a reward.
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br /> The case that set the standard for bribery in Montana revolved around Clark’s third attempt to win a Senate seat, in 1899. This time, he was taking nothing for granted. His men showed up in Helena with stacks of cash. In the legislature, which would choose the next senator, the Democrat Clark needed nearly a dozen Republican votes. Monogrammed envelopes— W.A.C. stamped on the fold—stuffed with crisp $1,000 bills were handed out to select Republicans. “What’s the going rate for votes today?” they asked around Helena. The market settled at around $10,000 per man, but some held out for as much as $30,000. It was an astonishing display of corrupt frontier democracy, and it was like watching a hanging in the village square—everybody condemned it, but nobody turned away. One morally troubled state senator, Fred Whiteside from the Flathead Lake area, rose to shame his fellow legislators. He, too, had been offered $30,000 to send Clark to the Senate but had refused. “Let us clink our glasses and drink to crime,” he said. “The crime of bribery as shown in the evidence here introduced stands out in all Its naked hideousness, and there are forty members here who today are ready to embrace it.” Clark won the Senate seat nonetheless, picking up his eleven Republican votes. It had cost him $270,000. Whiteside, the pesky moralist, was removed by his fellow legislators. And a grand jury in Montana that was assigned to consider prosecuting Clark for bribery found no evidence—after each juror was paid a purported $10,000 by Clark.
But in Washington, the Senate refused to seat Clark. The bribery evidence was too overwhelming. The facile Copper King found a way around it, though. Clark resigned. Then he had the Democratic lieutenant governor appoint him as the next United States Senator. There was, after all, a vacancy—his own seat. The Republican governor was away, but when he came home, he threw the appointment out. Clark dug in. The next year, 1900, brought another chance. This time, Clark would buy the legislature at the local level, making sure that enough of his people were sent to Helena, which would then send him to Washington. Nobody could prove open bribery with monogrammed envelopes. It was more like traditional American influence-buying. Clark barnstormed the state, holding himself up as the homegrown savior against outside interests. In part, he was right. Standard Oil, the Rockefeller dynasty built on monopolistic domination of the early oil industry, had bought effective control of Anaconda. Hearst was gone. Daly was sick. And now the biggest copper supply in the world was controlled by the Rockefeller family and a few major stockholders on Wall Street. “A foreign corporation,” Clark’s forces called the Snake. Allying himself with another Copper King who had used endless lawsuits to give himself a toehold in the Montana mining empire, Clark brought home his handpicked legislature. And as one of their first orders of business, they sent William Clark to the United States Senate. Less than a week later, Marcus Daly died.