They call it “The Richest Hill on Earth.” In the fifty years after the first picks were swung into the nearly bares slopes above Silver Bow Creek some three billion dollars in mineral wealth was extracted here. G.O. Humphrey and William Allison found the first placer deposits in Silver Bow Creek in 1864. There was quickly a mining camp of several hundred prospectors but there wasn’t that much gold and even less water so most moved on.
Those that stayed soon discovered rich ledges of silver and a silver boom was on in the 1870s, enough to sustain a real town. A townsite patent was issued in 1876 and the city was incorporated in 1879. By the time the railroad arrived in the mid-1880s Butte boasted a population of more than 10,000. Also about that time America was becoming electrified and electricity required copper. The silver miners knew there was copper in Butte Hill but there hadn’t been any market for it and the cost of smelting copper was high. Now they went after it with a vengeance and found some of the richest veins on earth. Butte mines supplied one-third of all the copper in the United States through World War I.
Three men in particular clawed for the riches in Butte Mountain - Marcus Daly who arrived in town in 1876 to supervise silver mines; William Andrews Clark, a banker who piled up mining properties that went into default; and Fritz Augustus Heinze who was late to the party but whose wily legal maneuverings and miner-friendly dealings helped him unearth hundreds of thousands of tons of high grade copper ore. The battles waged by the “Copper Kings” had widespread ramifications in Montana politics, its labor heritage and its financial landscape. It all ended with the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which Daly had started with help from George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, swallowing up most of Butte’s mines by 1913. By 1929 Anaconda was not only by far the largest company in Montana, it was the fourth largest company in the world.
But the demand for Butte copper had already long peaked by then. Other mines were being opened around the world, the Great Depression was on the doorstep and the costs to add ever-deeper tunnels to the 2,000 miles of passageways already under Butte Hill were skyrocketing. In the 1950s Anaconda began the controversial practice of strip mining, leveling entire hills to bring out the copper. The company shut down its mining operations in 1982, leaving one of its strip mines - the Berkeley Pit - to be declared the largest Superfund environmental disaster site in America.
Downtown Butte, called “Uptown” for its position on the hill, experienced its biggest building boom from 1890 until the United States entered World War I in 1917. Not much was built after that as the demand for copper withered away but there also wasn’t much torn down either. Our walking tour of The Richest Hill on Earth will see many of the same buildings we would have seen on the same route 100 years ago and we’ll start at the showcase home of one of Butte’s Copper Kings...
They were known as the Four Georgians even though they weren’t all from Georgia and there may have been seven and not four. The prospecting party had been working Montana Territory near Virginia City most of 1864 before trying the Little Blackfoot Creek and then crossed the Continental Divide to begin the summer in Prickly Pear Valley, which had gotten its name during Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery when Captain William Clark had to delay a scouting party to yank cactus spines out of his feet here.
After six weeks the prospectors had little to show for their efforts when they tried a spot they had dramatically named Last Chance Gulch because it was going to be just that for their time in the valley. On July 14, 1864 the Georgians found a gold nugget in the gulch - the first of $200 million (some $4 billion in today’s money) in gold that would be pulled from one of America’s most famous placer deposits. The Four Georgians were gold chasers, not builders, and they didn’t stick around to nurse a proper town into being from the busting gold camp that sprung up in the Prickly Pear Valley. Local lore insists they needed an extra heavy wagon to haul away all their gold dust after selling their claims in 1867.
The streets of the town were laid out by Captain John Wood in 1865 and he didn’t need a straight edge for his drawings - Main Street ran up the winding gulch and side streets had to negotiate around the various claims of the miners. When it came to naming the town suggestions like Crabtown (after one of the Georgians, who was from Iowa), Pumpkintown and Squashtown (it was autumn during the naming meeting) and Last Chance (historic but depressing) were rejected in favor of Helena, after the hometown of one of the committee members back in Minnesota.
Most of the gold was scraped from the surface within a few years but the territorial capitol came to Helena in 1875 and the Northern Pacific Railroad pulled into town in 1883 which insured the boomtown would not turn into a ghost town. In fact by 1888, Helena was home to fifty millionaires and boasted it was the richest town per capita on the planet. The riches were on display along Helena’s streets as its culture and architecture earned the town the sobriquet “the Queen City of the Rockies.”
But the boom times never came back after the gold played out - the town’s population didn’t reach its 1888 levels again for fifty years. When Montana became a state Helena had to survive two elections to maintain its position as capital, first in 1892 in a run-off with every aspiring capital town in the state and again in 1894 to beat back a one-on-one challenge from sore loser Anaconda and its leading cheerleader Copper King Marcus Daly.
The town was rocked by an unusually persistent series of earthquakes in 1935 that caused millions of dollars in damage, but not so much that was lasting. It was a different story in the 1970s, however, when Helena became an enthusiastic player in urban renewal. The carnage included 228 buildings and about 150 businesses. About that time Main Street, which had been switched to Last Chance Gulch Street in 1953, was closed to vehicular traffic, emulating a mania across America for pedestrian malls. Most of the malls have been re-opened to auto traffic but Helena’s remains and that is where we will begin our walking our after a short detour to visit a souvenir from gold camp days...