The War of the Copper Kings

By Editor

Butte, Montana, 1876-1910

Marcus Daly arrived in Butte in 1876 to inspect a silver mine for the Walker brothers of Salt Lake City. He inspected it, bought it for them, managed it successfully, and then noticed that the silver ore was underlain by copper ore of exceptional grade. He sold his interest in the Walker properties in 1880, bought the Anaconda Mine with money from San Francisco capitalists, and began extracting copper. He was a practical man who understood ore bodies, and the Anaconda Mine was one of the finest ore bodies in the world.

The copper had to get somewhere. Daly built a smelter at Anaconda, thirty miles west of Butte, and he needed a railroad to carry the ore from the mines to the smelter. He built one. The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, completed in 1894, was a short line of twenty-six miles designed for one purpose: moving copper ore from the mines to the smelter at a rate that justified the cost of the smelter. It was electrified in 1913, making it the first major electrified railroad in the United States, and it ran electric locomotives over its route until 1967. It was a railroad built by a man who understood what a railroad was for.

William A. Clark also understood what railroads were for. Clark had arrived in Butte before Daly, had made money in banking and merchandising and mining, and had built the Montana Union Railway to connect Butte to the Utah and Northern line at Garrison. He wanted to be a United States Senator, and he used his newspaper, the Butte Miner, and his money, and eventually the bribery of members of the Montana State Legislature, to pursue that ambition. The Senate refused to seat him in 1899 because of the bribery. He ran again and won a legitimate election in 1901 and served a single term. He was not a man who gave up easily.

F. Augustus Heinze arrived in Butte in 1889 with a degree in mining engineering from the Columbia School of Mines and a talent for litigation that proved more valuable than his engineering. He acquired mining claims adjacent to the Anaconda Company's holdings and then argued in court, under the apex law, that ore bodies that apexed on his claims belonged to him regardless of where they ran underground. The apex law was a provision of the 1872 Mining Law that allowed a miner to follow a vein wherever it went, even under another man's claim, if the vein apexed on his own ground. Heinze used this provision to tie up the Anaconda Company in litigation for years, extracting settlements and buying time while he extracted ore from ground that the Anaconda Company believed was its own.

The Anaconda Company responded by shutting down its mines in 1903, throwing six thousand men out of work, and announcing that it would not reopen until the Montana Legislature passed a law allowing the company to change venue in its litigation with Heinze. The Legislature passed the law. Heinze eventually sold his Butte holdings to the Amalgamated Copper Company, which was the Anaconda Company under a different name, for $10.5 million in 1906. He took the money to New York and lost most of it in the Panic of 1907.

The three men who had fought over the richest hill on earth left different legacies. Daly died in 1900, before the fight was fully resolved, and his company became the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which dominated Montana for the next seventy years. Clark built a mansion in Butte that still stands, served his Senate term, and died in New York in 1925 having spent his later years collecting art and building a railroad in Arizona. Heinze died in 1914, broke.

The Anaconda Company, which had absorbed all three of their enterprises, became the fourth largest company in the world by the late 1920s. It owned the mines, the smelter, the BA&P Railroad, and most of the newspapers in Montana. It owned, in various ways, the state government. It was a monopoly of the kind that the Gilded Age produced, built on the labor of men who worked underground for wages and the ore of a hill that had been producing copper since 1880 and would continue to produce it until 1983.

The BA&P's electric locomotives ran their last trip in 1967. The line was converted to diesel. The mines closed in 1983. The railroad was abandoned in 1985. The right-of-way is a trail now.

See also

• Copper Kings, the full history of Clark, Daly, Heinze, and Murray
• Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, Daly's copper railroad
• F. Augustus Heinze, the engineer-litigant who fought the Anaconda Company
• Anaconda Copper Mining Company, the monopoly that emerged from the war