Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  Once finally seated as a member of the ultimate club in Washington, Clark abandoned any talk of representing the home-state workers and fighting the Rockefeller trust. He built a 121-room mansion in New York City, with thirty-one bathrooms. He opposed Teddy Roosevelt’s antimonopoly initiatives, and he sidled up to his rival Standard Oil, now the most powerful of the Copper Kings. He helped to found Las Vegas, building a railroad with a pit stop at a desert watering hole that he happened to own. The county that holds Las Vegas would be named for the old graft-peddler and Copper King.

  With consolidation under Standard Oil, the Anaconda Company was supreme. By 1910, one out of every six people in Montana labored in the Snakes two company towns, Butte and Anaconda. It paid almost nothing in taxes. When the last of the independent Copper Kings, Fritz Heinze, waged a counteroffensive by packing certain courts with his judges, the Rockefellers showed that they knew how to slap around Montana politicians as well as Clark or Daly had ever done. The Company ordered the governor to call a special session of the legislature, for the sole purpose of passing a law that would allow Anaconda to avoid any court of law overseen by judges not in their camp. A Butte area judge issued a ruling the Company did not like, so it promptly shut down all It’s mines, putting three-fourths of the wage earners in Montana out of work. Most of them had been living paycheck to paycheck. They now waited on the sidelines, with the gun held to the governors head, as the Company blackmailed the state. The special session was called. And the special law ordered by the Company was passed. “Observers around the nation watched in awe as a ‘sovereign state’ was held up by a corporation,” wrote Michael P. Malone, the historian of the Copper King years and now president of Montana State University. Never again would Anaconda be seriously challenged. By the 1940s, when the journalist John Gunther came through, he wrote that the proud state under the Big Sky was nothing but a played-out colony.

  THE BASEBALL Copper Kings eke out a victory over Ogden on the strength of a few late-inning long balls. The next day by midmoming, uptown Butte, the part of the Hill that roared loudest and longest, is still asleep. Virtually the entire old business center, more than forty-five hundred buildings, a mound of saloons, hotels, and merchant fronts mixed in with the detritus of mining, is embalmed in a spooky National Historic District. The town leaders want to protect the slag heaps as well, freezing the poisons in a pose against the petrified buildings, the blackened cottages where children still play next to mounds of heavy metals. They look to the National Park Service for salvation: take us in, the ghost county with a surfeit of history. Their model is down below, in Anaconda, where ARCO paid Jack Nicklaus to design a golf course built over the old smelting works—it has black sand traps from slag piles, and the old 585-foot brick tower looms over the course.

  Butte has a bigger historical district than Boston or New York or even the cradle of American democracy, Philadelphia. You can walk in the near-dead town and hear how the mayor was thrown from a second-story window, or what happened when the army stormed in to keep miners working, and how the entire water supply was turned green on St. Patrick’s Day—an improvement, most people said. The streets are named Mercury, Quartz, Copper, Granite, Galena. No doubt about the intentions. No Elm Street, Oak Street, Spruce Street. No elms, oaks, or spruce, either. A few pawnshops on the fringe unlock their doors. “We Buy Antlers,” the sign says in one. “Hock It to Me” is the name of another; a window sign reads: “Fast Cash Guns.”

  Clark’s mansion, where the king stayed while in Butte, is intact, a bed-and-breakfast now. Marcus Daly, in statue form, overlooks the city from the old School of Mines, now called the College of Technology. Clark proved to have more bathrooms in his mansion in New York, with thirty-one, compared to Daly’s mere fifteen in his Georgian Revival palace in the Bitterroot Valley. But in postmortem posterity, Daly has got the better of his rival.

  Anybody with money or sense has moved off the Hill, down to the less toxic Flats, where the streets have names like Friendly Lane and Fairlane Avenue. Those without money stay on the Hill in residential hotels, telling stories of the Company. Butte has lost two-thirds of It’s peak population.

  What is strange is how all the main thoroughfares have half disappeared. Wide business avenues start in the west end of town, run straight for a few blocks, past a high school, a museum, a library, a hospital, a courthouse, and then fall off the earth. They are gone, along with the buildings, the homes, the cranes, the tunnels, the entire neighborhood of Dublin Gulch, and Meaderville, where the Italians lived. In their place is a fence; behind the fence is the end of the line for the Copper Kings, the second original sin of the American West. We, all of us—anybody who has ever used a phone or turned on a light—own a share of it. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, or so the brochures all say—the biggest draw in Butte. Come see the horror! The monster that ate Butte! The raped and plundered West! But it is summer, peak season in Montana, and as I walk through the tunnel to the big draw, I am alone. At the end, the light opens up, and there it is, more than a mile and a half wide: the Berkeley Pit. It takes your breath away. As with the Grand Canyon on first sight, so the Pit has a staggering effect. Nearly two thousand feet deep from the edge where I stand to the bottom of the sludge, the Pit is a six-hundred-acre stew of strong poisons: arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, sulfate. Dashiell Hammett, a Pinkerton guard on the Hill for a time, wrote a novel about Butte, calling the place Poisonville. The books title was Red Harvest, but he only touched the surface. This harvest in the Pit grows every day, three to five million gallons of additional groundwater blending with the heavy metal stew, surrounded by tiers of scraped-away earth. The acid is strong enough to dissolve quarter-inch metal in a matter of days. A flock of snow geese, lost on their southern migration during a storm, landed in the Pit at dusk not long ago, seeking a momentary refuge. More than 340 died, their insides corroded by the lethal liquid.

  By 1955, the Company couldn’t afford to mine copper the old-fashioned way, burrowing deep under the Hill. It’s competitors, Phelps Dodge being the biggest, were taking copper out of the earth in cheap Third World locations by simply ripping open a big gash in the ground. Similarly, the more logical, bottom-line way to do it in Butte, the Company’s men explained, was to dig an open pit, to essentially turn the Hill inside out. The problem was that much of uptown Butte, and thousands of homes, were part of the Hill. The Company presented the dilemma to the community as a choice: let us cannibalize the city and it will die gradually, or we pull out and Butte dies a sudden death. Butte chose long-term pain. Some of the gallows were dismantled, the timbers caved in, houses scraped away, buildings torn down. One neighborhood after the other fell to the Pit. Then came the big streets, the stores, the hotels. They all went. The earth movers worked around the clock, trucks the size of houses, with eleven-foot wheels, cutting twenty-five hundred miles of terraced roads around the Pit. They didn’t just chew at Butte; they ate the town in gulps. The hole grew to epic size. In 1974, after nearly a century, the Company started pulling out of Butte. They laid off half their workers in Montana. Open-pit mining was automated. Machines could do what the backs of immigrants used to do. Finally, the Company gave up altogether. Anaconda had been forced to hand over It’s big copper operation in Chile—nationalized by a socialist government— and the losses were staggering. The Snake was dead. Of course, the end was tied to a series of events more than 10,000 miles from Montana. People in Butte were the last to know, an old song, not unexpected.

  Anaconda’s operations in Montana were sold to ARCO for a fire-sale price, but the oil company had no idea how to play at Copper King. It clawed away at the Pit for six more years, then folded up the operation completely in 1983. The Hill was silent.

  Butte had given a lot to keep electric lights shining, war machines moving, telephones buzzing. At least $22 billion in mineral wealth had been taken from the Richest Hill on Earth. The copper helped to make life easier for most everybody in the Western world. It helped to win t
wo world wars. Then came the bill. When the Company, and later ARCO, stopped digging, they also stopped pumping water from the Pit. From then on, it became the ugly bath, growing daily. Water seeped from springs and wells deep in the earth, it came from rain and snow overhead, and it poured in from the big mining tunnels that had been crisscrossed beneath the ground. Aquifers were drained. Groundwater, coursing through bedrock, poured into the Pit. Engineers came up with dozens of ideas, Star Wars-quality plans to transform the liquid into something usable or less lethal. But there would be no way, they said, to control the amount of liquid in the Pit— which meant that it would keep growing. By 1985, the Pit held a 441-foot-deep lake of red liquid. Now, it is 900 feet deep, and rising more than thirty feet a year. By the time it reaches the 1,100-foot level, in the year 2020, it will overflow and start to run downhill, seeping into the alluvium and contaminating the water of the people who live in the Flats and beyond, killing what hasn’t already been killed in the Clark Fork, the most eastern drainage of the Columbia River. Fishermen who snub the broken town of Butte will look to the Hill with some of the same trepidation as do pensioners living in the old hotels. The United States has declared the Pit and the mine waste down to Anaconda a massive Superfund site—virtually the entire county wears the scarlet letter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s tag for ruined landscapes—the most polluted place in America, holding thirty billion gallons of poison.

  Pit-Watch is the name of a little newsletter distributed to the people of Butte. Diagrams show what will happen when the Pit reaches something called Critical Water Level—the point of overflow. By then, according to Pit-Watch, somebody, perhaps at ARCO, perhaps at the federal government, perhaps even a friend of Bill Murray’s with money and heart, will have figured out a way to keep the Pit from killing off the rest of Butte.

  Above the Pit, to the north, I walk through abandoned neighborhoods, the land charcoal-colored, to an overlook. There is a tentative memorial here on Granite Mountain, something to show the world that more than a prime piece of Montana land was sacrificed to the Copper Kings. On June 8, 1917, a shift boss descended two thousand feet into a mine shaft to help untangle a cable. His light touched insulation and a fire started. Flames raced up the shaft, consuming the oily timbers, pushed upward by the draft. Then— poof—all oxygen was sucked out of the mine, stolen by the fire, and everybody below was burned or suffocated. For some of the men, death was slow, over a period of hours. The last lines of Magnus Duggan:

  “My dear wife and mother. It breaks my heart to be taken from you so suddenly and [unexpectedly but think not of me, for if death comes, it will be in a sleep without suffering.”

  James Moore wrote this to his wife:

  “There is a young feller here, Clarence Marthey. He has a wife and 2 kiddies. Tell her we done the best we could, but the cards were against us.”

  The worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history took the lives of 168 men at Granite Mountain above Butte. At the half-finished memorial here, the names of the dead are etched on the ground, and a frayed Pepsi banner, the corporate sponsor, blows in the wind. A young miner and his family are sitting up there with me as the banner flaps around. He tells his kids to get away from the mines, from Butte, from a Montana ruled by somewhere else. But he himself is hoping to work on the Blackfoot River, where Phelps Dodge wants to mine gold and build a new pit. They are going to pay fifteen dollars an hour, he says.

  “What good is the money when this place will kill you,” his wife says.

  The fire under the ground of Butte was only the most dramatic form of miners’ death. Most men died from lung disease, silicosis; one study showed that 42 percent of the miners of Butte had this dread respiratory sickness.

  “But look at how damn beautiful it is,” the miner says, dragging on a cigarette and motioning to the mountains all around, off to where the statue of Our Lady of the Rockies is standing, well above the Pit.

  MONTANA HAS never learned to say no. The people curse and swear off ever again giving their backs to distant tycoons with promises and cash. They will do as the governor says, break the extraction mentality, learn to master their own destiny, join the rest of the West in freeing themselves of timber and mining. But then something new comes along. There is a Butte in every Western boom, every rootless dream, every scheme presented as a forward-looking opportunity by senators who are only slightly less obvious than Clark was in his betrayal of the state. They believe a story, told in many forms, that sounds so good at first, and always has the same ending. The frontier was closed, the historians and census takers said, in 1890, but Montana gave America one last shot at a land bonanza. The old buffalo grounds of eastern Montana, dry and windswept, arctic cold in the winter, frying-pan hot in the summer, were opened by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. Anybody willing to improve land could claim a stake of 320 acres. The rush was on, prompted by railroads based in Chicago and New York. They pushed a vision of Eden on the High Plains. The immigrants came one last time, breaking the sod. In the end, Montana had more homesteaders than any other state; it was the last frontier of free farming. All told, 114,620 people filed claims on twenty-five million acres from 1909 to 1923. The state put out pamphlets promoting the opportunity. “There is no place where failure is so remote,” they said.

  And of course, their hearts were broken. The land was too dry, the weather too extreme. Half of all the state’s farmers lost their land by the mid-i920s, and sixty thousand people left the state. Sections of Montana, today, have big, nearly bankrupt counties that are more empty of people than they were a hundred years ago. The last big homestead rush was a fraud. Still, when a new mine comes along, or some video from an agricultural center in Iowa promises a new miracle, or the time comes at the ballot booth to choose the old colonial pattern or to look within and try something different, Montanans lose their memories. They elect people who will not change the law that allowed the Copper Kings to take twenty billion pounds of metal from the ground without paying royalties, the one that will allow Phelps Dodge to open a new pit above the Blackfoot River and do it all on federal land for the 1872 price of $2.50 an acre. They know, as their grandparents knew, that somewhere not in Montana, it is happening now—They’re Trying to Screw Us. But they don’t trust the New West either, or what they perceive as the New West. They hear the new Montana residents make fun of miners, joke about cancer and “Butants,” while buying mountain bikes and cell phones, forgetting how the copper got into those toys. They see the movie companies come to places like Libby and Livingston, throw money around for a few months, and then leave without much to show for it. “In the West, the mythic value attaches to the hard stuff,” says the Montana writer and environmentalist Donald Snow. “Logs, haystacks, cattle brands, ingots. It’s the moral supremacy of hardware.”

  The hope for the Big Sky country, the colony, is not for all the people who can’t learn from history to wash out on a big demographic storm, replaced by enlightened urban exiles. You hear such talk in Missoula sometimes, or in Glenn Close’s coffee bar in Bozeman, safely inside the zone to the west of the Crazy Mountains, where Montana’s literary belt begins. But it won’t happen. There is a reason why most of the real estate sold as ranchettes in Montana over the last two decades is not occupied. Visitors fall in love with Montana in the summer, slap their $10,000 down payment on the desk for a twenty-acre piece of heaven, then are bone-chill shocked by the fact that snow can fall any month of the year, and usually will. One study showed that 80 percent of newcomers to Montana move away within five years of arrival.

  WHEN I was done with Butte and the Copper Kings, and done with Miles City and the barren homesteads overrun with tumbleweeds, I went out to a big graveyard downslope from the Pit. Just now, among the slag heaps and black gallows of old Butte, the living are still looking to hold on, heeding the call to dig in—like Acoma on the bluff, like Supai in the Grand Canyon, like St. George in the desert. I liked this place. I liked it for It’s toughness, for It’s
black-lunged ghosts, for putting a ninety-foot virgin on the Continental Divide and hoping for a miracle, for having the gall to say that one of the most ruined landscapes in the West is worthy of the National Park Service, for a tavern called the Helsinki Inn, holding to precarious ground just a few feet from the Pit. The cemetery gave me hope. That miner could linger at the site of the worst accident in the history of hardrock extraction and be drawn to the mountains. And so here in the cemetery, the families of the dead could also look beyond what had brought so many of them to an early grave. The soil held bodies that died for Daly, Clark, and Rockefeller and people who had gone to the poorhouse on Northern Pacific promises of a good land there for the taking. On their tombstones were etched what they wanted to be remembered by: outlines of Montana, mountains carved into graveyard granite, the land that killed them. They loved this damn hard ground, for all It’s torture; when some way is found to make it love them back, Montana will be free.