A Different Kind of Hot Spot

Ghosts dwell among the living in Butte, Montana, a mining town haunted by its glory days, when the population was three times what it is now. It is haunted by the thousands of miners who died here, taking copper out of the underground tunnels with drills and dynamite. And from the viewing stand on the lip of a noxious 1,800-foot-deep mine pit that sits next to the Uptown neighborhood, it’s clear that the city is also haunted by water.

The Berkeley Pit has been filling with groundwater since 1982, when the company that owned it quit mining here and turned off the pumps. Butte’s most distinguishing feature now is Berkeley lake, but that nondescript name obscures the reality that the wine-dark water is as acidic as Pepsi, filled with heavy metals and capable of killing migrating birds that might mistake it for a refuge. The water fills nearly 1,000 feet of the pit and is rising slowly up the walls, which are tiered like a wedding cake, lifeless beige-and-gray rock with roads angling up the sides.

But these things don’t trouble Jeff Francis, who visited Butte in 1995 and was smitten by the architecture and the people. The Florida resident sold his antique and collectible show business in 1999 and began splitting his time between homes in Butte and Florida. He has spent roughly $1.5 million on 12 historic commercial buildings built in Uptown between 1890 and 1920, put new roofs on them and replaced the windows. Butte, he says, will not just come back, but will come roaring back. “Wide-open spaces, peace and serenity, outdoor recreation, it’s all in vogue,” he says. “Butte has it. Look at Park City, Aspen, Telluride. They were all mining towns filled with arsenic. Look at those places.”

The fundamental challenge for Butte is to move from Old West to New West, from a post-industrial relic to a quaint, historic mining town with fishing, hunting and other recreation in the mountains around it. Unlike Bozeman, Mont., which is so full of Southern Californians that Francis calls it “Bozangeles,” Butte’s mother lode is its abundance of history, its extraordinary, if decaying, Victorian architecture, and its authenticity.

“I truly think Butte is on the verge,” Francis says. “I feel strongly about it.”

Although urban pioneers such as Francis see opportunity, some find Butte’s status as one of the country’s largest Superfund sites too hard to ignore. The copper mine there, once called “the richest hill on Earth,” as well as thousands of surrounding acres, have been targets of a massive cleanup by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Uptown is a jumble of mine sites and residential neighborhoods, with mounds of mine waste sharing lots with dilapidated apartment buildings. But Sara Sparks of the EPA, a Butte native, says the waste is not as bad as people fear. “As long as you don’t eat it or inhale it, it’s not a problem,” she says. “When I look at the pit, I see beauty. I see ore bodies and veins and it absolutely intrigues me.”

And so, two bedrock Western realities exist side by side in this tiny Montana town: the devastation of ruthlessly exploited natural resources, and an enduring sense of opportunity that is almost irrationally exuberant. Unresolved is whether the city can overcome its pesky status as a Superfund site, or even better, if it can somehow turn it into an attraction.

People here are pragmatic. After the 1982 departure of the Atlantic Richfield Co., which bought the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Co. in 1977, the city went looking for--and found--another mine operator. But where 15,000 miners once took ore out of the hill by hand, the 350 who continue to work the mines now haul ore in $2-million trucks bigger than a house. The town also has been battered by the recent bankruptcy of Montana Power Co., founded to provide the mines with electricity.

But existential questions haunt everyday life in Butte. What is its future? Can a once-thriving city of more than 100,000 residents survive after losing population in every census since 1920, except for a half a percent gain from 1990 to 2000? What sort of future awaits the roughly 33,000 people who remain?

One thing that Butte understands is the boom-and-bust cycle, and it’s proud of its ability to tough out the bust periods until the next boom arrives. Between songs on the local rock station, the DJ intones not some generic slogan such as “rock music for the Rockies,” but “the spirit of Butte, America will never be broken,” and it’s not hard to find people who share Francis’ optimism about the future.

That’s particularly remarkable when you consider Butte’s past. Its giant “lake” once was a long, rounded hill at the base of the mountains along southwest Montana’s Continental Divide, with thick, extraordinarily rich veins of copper shot through it. Beginning in 1864, and later spurred by the nation’s need for copper wire during the age of electrification, the region attracted tens of thousands of miners, laborers, entrepreneurs, bar owners and prostitutes from around the world, like a mountain of sugar drawing ants. They swarmed over it, inside it and around it, honeycombing the hill with thousands of miles of tunnels until most of the high-grade ore was gone. In 1955 Anaconda began switching from underground mining to open-pit mining, moving in with steam shovels to cannibalize much of the city that copper created.

When copper prices plummeted in the 1970s, new owner ARCO decided that the world’s greatest copper play was over. By 1982 ARCO was ready to leave behind the mountain and the city. The closure was a blow to Butte, but it could have been much worse. The mess might never have been cleaned up had ARCO been without resources. In what was one of the costliest mistakes in mining history, oil-rich ARCO got stuck paying the bill for a century’s worth of Anaconda’s unbridled extraction. Now, nearly two decades after the astronomically expensive cleanup began, things are winding down. But for anyone tempted to think that the city’s problems are over, there’s a deep, open wound in the earth that Butte will have to overcome or ignore.

A hard-hatted Steve Walsh, vice president of Montana Resources, which now mines copper in Butte, stands on a catwalk above cement reservoirs filled with swirling water the color of chocolate milk. These vats are part of a new $20-million water treatment plant built to head off a calamity. The pit water rises at the rate of more than half a foot per month. When it rises 200 more feet, by 2018, it will reach what engineers call the “critical water level”--5,410 feet above sea level. That means toxic water could begin seeping into a nearby aquifer officials are trying to save from further pollution.

That’s no small problem. Oxygen was pumped into the thousands of miles of tunnels here for years, life support for underground miners. The oxygen caused the rock to oxidize and become more acidic. When rain falls on the acres of earth exposed by the open-pit mining, the water picks up sulfur and turns to a weak sulfuric acid that is strong enough to dissolve metal and worsen the problem with the already tainted aquifer.

The pit water has other problems, such as toxic metals cadmium and copper. In 1995, for example, 342 snow geese migrating from Canada to California set down on the lake. They never took flight again. Necropsies showed burns and sores in their esophaguses and stomachs from drinking and feeding in the water. Now federally mandated round-the-clock patrols keep birds from landing.

After years of study and legal wrangling, this new treatment plant is the solution to the great acid lake. When the water reaches 5,410 feet in elevation--50 feet from the point where the water would seep away from the pit and into the aquifer--it will be pumped through the plant, cleaned and discharged into Silver Bow Creek. To keep other water from being contaminated, this pumping will go on day and night. Until the end of time.

Pat Williams is an intense man with a stentorian voice and deep appreciation for the contradictory, bittersweet nature of Butte. His grandparents came from Ireland after the potato famine to work in the Butte mines. He says his grandmother remembered her mother telling her, “Now when you get to the New World, don’t stop in America--head straight for Butte.”

Williams recalls hearing the ear-splitting sound of the shift whistle at the Original Mine. “When the whistle stopped, I could hear the sounds of the shuffling feet, conversation and laughing of thousands of miners coming off shift, and thousands of others going to work,” Williams says. At that time, almost everyone lived and partied on the Butte hill and worked its mines.

As nostalgic as Williams gets, he is clear-eyed about Butte’s problems. His grandfather, a miner, died of silicosis (caused by silica dust in the lungs) before Williams was born. As a child, Williams played on the city’s slag piles, which he “thought God put there.” Born in 1937, Williams was steeped in Butte’s Democratic labor politics and was elected to Congress, where he championed wilderness protection and hard-rock mining reform. He retired in 1997, after serving nine terms.

He remembers the dark day in 1982 when ARCO officials asked to meet the Montana congressional delegation. There was talk of refurbishing the Anaconda smelter or building a new one, and Williams assumed the meeting was about that. Instead, the company announced it was closing its Montana operations.

After a stunned silence, Williams recalled that Sen. John Melcher, a Democrat, asked, “Which one?”

“All of them,” the official said.

When? Williams later asked. “In the morning,” came the reply.

For every action, physicists say, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That principle holds true in Butte. The presence of a domineering corporation drove people to go to college to get better jobs, to form labor unions, to push for voter initiatives, to make life better. That law of human nature is what turned Williams into an environmentalist. “There’s two types of environmentalists, a Walden Pond environmentalist and a Berkeley Pit environmentalist,” he says. “One wants solitude, and one wants to make sure that the environmental damage that came from extraction industries never happens again.”

The landscape near Butte was every bit as dirty as the hill was rich. Millions of tons of mine waste and tailings were scattered throughout neighborhoods and on rural landscapes. Much of it has been cleaned up; some remains. Then there is the water. The richest hill on Earth is--was--at the top of the Continental Divide, where everything flows downhill. For more than 100 years the hill was pouring toxic metals and other waste directly into Silver Bow Creek, a headwaters of the Clark Fork River. As late as the 1960s, the Clark Fork ran red with waste. Flooding carried things farther, especially in 1908 when a wall of water pushed homes, trees and mining debris 100 miles downstream. Mine waste is deposited in swaths 300 to 500 feet wide and 6 feet deep along the banks of the river. Copper levels are so high in some places that the riverbank, the flood plain and the bones of dead cattle are bright green from the oxidized copper. Meanwhile, the Milltown Dam, about 115 miles from Butte, has trapped tons of waste as it flowed downstream. Both the waste and the dam are slated for removal.

ARCO, an affiliate of BP, the British Petroleum company, has paid dearly for the cleanup. The waste along the Clark Fork River is being removed at the cost of $100 million, and it will cost another $100 million to remove the dam and clean the toxic waste behind it. In Butte, an area at the beginning of Silver Bow Creek has been completely rebuilt, and artificial wetlands constructed to clean the groundwater that flows into it. ARCO is counting the days. “We’re winding down,” says ARCO Northwest Regional Manager Robin Bullock. “We’ve got a lot of things done.”

But even at $1 billion or so, the cleanup is far from perfect and much of the pollution will be around forever.

If money cures all ills, as they say, Butte will make a comeback. Many elegant brick buildings downtown and Victorian homes in Uptown are empty or are being sold for a song. A three-bedroom home--with a new lawn, new siding and new windows as part of the Superfund cleanup--can sell for $40,000.

The largest tourist attraction in Butte is the pit, the panoramic layered rock wall that will forever be the city’s dramatic backdrop. But can Butte make the transition to a New West, a desirable place for retirees and tourists and small businesses seeking a way out of the city? Ellen Crain, a native who heads the Butte archives, a repository for documents on the region’s history, wonders: “How do you sell a town when you’ve got that huge body of water staring you in the face?”

Give the locals and ARCO credit for trying. In the nearby town of Anaconda, on the site where a gigantic copper smelter once stood, ARCO built a multimillion-dollar Jack Nicklaus-signature golf course with a smelting theme that includes black slag in the sand traps. Hiking and biking paths wind through parts of Butte. Uptown was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. People come from all over the world to research the history here. And Butte is getting into the festival business. This summer Francis is bringing in 200 to 300 vendors for an antique and collectible show.

The Rocky Mountain West has undergone an extreme makeover in recent years, from wild to mild, and sold its soul to nostalgia--or as director John Ford said, the art of presenting Western history “not as it was, but as it should have been.” But Butte is still much the way the West was, warts and all, more like “Deadwood” than “Little House on the Prairie.” The next boom, conventional wisdom holds, is in post-industrial amenities, the kind that Francis says Butte has in spades.

Given the magnitude of the problems and Montana’s shift from a mining economy, one might think that the era of huge open-pit mines is over. It’s not.

Although hard-rock mining technology has evolved since Butte’s boom days, it still means turning publicly owned mountains into dust to extract gold. One extraction method is cyanide heap-leach mining, in which rock is ground into small pieces and placed in huge flat-topped piles on top of black plastic liners. Sprinklers are set up nearby to spray a solution of cyanide and water onto the rock. As the cyanide percolates through the rock, tiny specks of micro gold cling to the cyanide. The gold is then stripped from the solution, leaving behind the pit and mountains of processed rock.

One of the hottest topics in Montana during the past year was an open-pit gold mine planned for the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, featured in Norman Maclean’s novella “A River Runs Through It.” Pat Williams opposed the mine. Montana, he says, needs to learn the tough lessons of Butte. “Cyanide technology encourages large companies to tear out whole mountains to recover enough gold to fill a small Toyota pickup,” he claims. “The pit they leave would be larger than the Berkeley Pit.”

That kind of mining is a not-so-subtle financial sleight of hand that moves public dollars to private pockets. A company can be profitable by turning a mountain into dust as long as it ignores, defers or passes on to others the real costs--land and rivers despoiled, miners dead from silicosis, the future at risk.

That’s the lesson of Butte, the Love Canal of the Rockies, and Montana voters have learned it well. In 2000 they voted to ban new cyanide heap-leach mining. On election day last year, Canyon Resources, the company behind the Blackfoot mine, asked them to repeal that ban. The repeal failed. Montana is moving away from the kind of mining that left it so scarred.

But as Butte moves into its future, whatever that may be, a few things are certain: The water in Berkeley lake will continue to rise, the pumps will continue to pump, and a mammoth reminder of the city’s extravagant past will be just a stone’s throw away, forever.

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The Really Wild West

If you think Butte’s hangover is something, the local sentiment holds, you should have been here for the party.

The Butte hill was indeed the richest on Earth. Although Montana Resources mines profitably these days (in a much smaller pit near the Berkeley Pit) with ore that contains just three-tenths of 1% copper, early miners here extracted ore that was 40% copper. Money poured in. William Andrews Clark, a shrewd businessman who bought several local silver claims in 1872, was making $7 million a month and built a mansion in Uptown Butte for $260,000. Marcus Daly, a genial white-haired Irishman--who later became Clark’s nemesis--bought some of the old claims as well, including one called the Anaconda, after which he named his company.

Clark, Daly and a later entrepreneur, F. Augustus Heinze, came to be known as “the Copper Kings,” and they battled tooth and nail for control of the hill. They bribed officials, bought votes and judges, used their newspapers to advance their cause, and sent hundreds of men into each others’ mines to steal ore. Miners fought hand-to-hand battles using dynamite, fire hoses and electrified mine-car rails as weapons. In the end, only one company remained--Anaconda.

The Anaconda Copper Mining Co. dominated Montana’s economy and politics--the so-called copper collar. From the Hennessy Building in Uptown Butte, it presided over its Montana monopoly: vast tracts of timber, four of the state’s five major daily newspapers, railroads, banks, coal mines, streetcar systems, the power company and key portions of the state Legislature.

Butte peaked at the turn of the 20th century--an urban island in an ocean of wilderness, the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco. Tall, elegant office buildings and apartments, luxury hotels, opera houses and turreted mansions were built Uptown. Immigrants flocked to work in the mines from every corner of the world. Every few blocks another large church was built to accommodate the mosaic of faiths.

Those who worked hard played hard. Butte was full of taverns, which often celebrated opening day by flushing the key down the toilet--because there was no reason to close with thousands of miners working round the clock. Brothels lined one section of town known as Venus Alley. “It looked like a street leading into Hell,” one journalist wrote. The city was a power onto itself, and so unlike the state around it that it earned the derisive local nickname “Butte, America.”

Despite its aspirations to greatness, Butte’s grittiness was never far away. Mine tunnels snaked beneath the city, and some still do. Neighborhoods were clustered around black iron towers rigged with pulleys and cables that lowered cages filled with miners into the tunnels. Half a dozen of those silent forms still dot the skyline. Piles of ore were reduced to concentrate by simply setting fire to them, filling the air with lung-searing smoke containing arsenic and sulfur. Combined with smoke from the smelter, Butte was often dark during the day, so streetlights came on at noon.

The city’s history remains real and unpretentious. The streets are named after Pyrite, Galena, Mercury and Platinum. Miners lived--and still live--in the tiny incorporated town of Walkerville on Butte’s north side. The few buildings that made up the commercial district are boarded up, though a bar called Pisser’s Palace is still open. Crammed into a warren of narrow streets and alleys, tiny shacks--some brightly painted and well-kept, others crumbling, with blankets hanging forlornly in the windows--share a hillside piled with mine waste.