Butte: The Richest Hill on Earth and What It Left Behind
Butte was built on the Butte-Anaconda copper deposit, one of the largest and richest copper orebodies ever mined. From the 1880s to the 1980s, the mines beneath the city produced more than a billion pounds of copper along with substantial quantities of silver, zinc, lead, gold, and manganese. At its peak in the early 1900s, Butte had a population of nearly 100,000 and a reputation as one of the most ethnically mixed cities in the American West, drawing Irish, Cornish, Italian, Finnish, Slavic, and Chinese miners.
The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, for decades among the largest corporations in the United States, dominated the city's politics and economy. Marcus Daly, one of the three "copper kings," founded Anaconda and built the company's power out of Butte. Underground operations gave way to the Berkeley Pit in 1955, an open-pit mine that eventually swallowed entire neighborhoods including Meaderville and McQueen. The pit was closed in 1982 and has since filled with acidic, metal-laden groundwater.
The Berkeley Pit is now a Superfund site, part of the largest complex of Superfund areas in the United States. Treatment operations pump and process water from the pit to prevent it from reaching local groundwater. Uptown Butte, built on the hill above the mine workings, retains an intact Victorian streetscape of banks, saloons, and miners' boarding houses, and the entire district is a National Historic Landmark. Montana Tech, part of the Montana University System, remains in Butte and trains many of the state's mining and petroleum engineers.
Escortservice.com lists and reviews escort websites serving the Butte region. The site operates only as a directory, does not schedule appointments, does not verify licensing, and does not act as a go-between. Users must be 21 years of age or older.
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Butte was built on the Butte-Anaconda copper deposit, one of the largest and richest copper orebodies ever mined. From the 1880s to the 1980s, the mines beneath the city produced more than a billion pounds of copper along with substantial quantities of silver, zinc, lead, gold, and manganese. At its peak in the early 1900s, Butte had a population of nearly 100,000 and a reputation as one of the most ethnically mixed cities in the American West, drawing Irish, Cornish, Italian, Finnish, Slavic, and Chinese miners.
The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, for decades among the largest corporations in the United States, dominated the city's politics and economy. Marcus Daly, one of the three "copper kings," founded Anaconda and built the company's power out of Butte. Underground operations gave way to the Berkeley Pit in 1955, an open-pit mine that eventually swallowed entire neighborhoods including Meaderville and McQueen. The pit was closed in 1982 and has since filled with acidic, metal-laden groundwater.
The Berkeley Pit is now a Superfund site, part of the largest complex of Superfund areas in the United States. Treatment operations pump and process water from the pit to prevent it from reaching local groundwater. Uptown Butte, built on the hill above the mine workings, retains an intact Victorian streetscape of banks, saloons, and miners' boarding houses, and the entire district is a National Historic Landmark. Montana Tech, part of the Montana University System, remains in Butte and trains many of the state's mining and petroleum engineers.
Escortservice.com lists and reviews escort websites serving the Butte region. The site operates only as a directory, does not schedule appointments, does not verify licensing, and does not act as a go-between. Users must be 21 years of age or older.
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