Butte Mining Through the Years

By editor

Butte, Silver Bow County, Montana

In the grand saga of American industry, few chapters hold as much grit, sweat, and stubborn persistence as the mining story of Butte, Montana. This town, perched on a hill that seemed ordinary enough, turned out to be what some called the Richest Hill on Earth. But the road to that crown was no smooth ride, and the machines and men who carved wealth from rock left behind a tale tangled with irony, ingenuity, and the peculiar ways of fortune.

The Old Lexington Stamp Mill was Butte’s first such contraption, erected in 1867 by one Charles Hendrie, a man who apparently thought the long haul from Chicago to this rough patch of Montana was worth the effort. The mill was manufactured in Chicago, then shipped by rail to St. Louis, floated up the Missouri River to Fort Benton, and finally hauled by ox cart over rugged trails to Butte. The logistics alone could make a prospector reconsider his life choices. Prisoners from Montana’s state penitentiary were put to work with sledgehammers, breaking down boulders from the Lexington Mine into “manageable egg-sized rocks” before the mill could crunch them further. This particular mill kept grinding until 1955, though by then it had moved to Pony, Montana, where it was busy crushing tungsten ore rather than the silver and copper that first drew men west.

Before the Old Lexington Stamp Mill even began its mechanical moan, Butte was already fiddling with smelters. The first smelter, known as the Ramsdell, was built in 1866 but seemed cursed with bad luck or poor engineering. It was moved twice, each time in search of better heat and incline, but failed miserably at both locations. While the smelter sat idle, a prospector broke in and managed to pound out an oyster can full of silver nuggets from the slag. This accidental discovery quickly escalated when another fellow found six or seven beer kegs of silver concentrate hiding in the slag heaps. When Charles S. Warren was hired to finally dismantle the misbegotten smelter, he stumbled upon about 1,000 pounds of copper trapped in the furnace. One can only imagine his thoughts on the inefficiency of it all. Here was a machine meant to process riches, but it was leaving mountains of metal to rot.

By 1887, Butte had shaken off the dust of a rough mining camp and boasted a school system, fire department, and police force. The town was growing fast and rough, as mining towns tend to do when money is involved. By the turn of the century in 1900, Butte had become the largest city between Minneapolis and Seattle, with a population swelling to 30,000 souls. The mines beneath the hill were a labyrinth that stretched more than 10,000 miles of tunnels, shafts, and drifts. To put that in perspective, that’s enough underground passageways to circle the earth and then some. The miners worked around the clock -- twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week -- on what would become a mineral bonanza.

The mining methods evolved as Butte’s fortunes waxed and waned. The earliest form was placer mining, from 1864 to 1875, where hopefuls used water to separate gold from the waste rock. Tools were simple: rocker boxes, sluices, dredges, shaker tables, and the ubiquitous pan. The gold, being heavier, would settle at the bottom. But the easy ore was soon exhausted, and by 1875 Butte was nearly a ghost town, a fate familiar to many such boomtowns. Hydraulic mining, which blasted away hillsides with high-pressure water, also played a part but was no salvation.

Vein mining took over from 1875 to 1979, a method involving picks, shovels, drills, and dynamite to chase the veins of silver, copper, lead, zinc, and manganese winding through the earth. Horizontal stations were cut every 100, 135, or 200 feet below the surface. From these stations, miners drove drifts and crosscuts to intercept the veins. Massive iron head frames crowned the vertical shafts, and of the original structures, 13 remain today as monuments to this subterranean endeavor. According to research by the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the underground workings include roughly 10,000 miles of tunnels: 4,200 miles of vertical shafts and 5,600 miles of main horizontal openings. Now many of these tunnels are filling up with groundwater, the earth reclaiming what man tried to take.

From 1948 to 1967, Butte experimented with block cave mining, a low-cost method suited for small ore pockets not worth the expense of vein mining. Miners divided ore bodies into blocks measuring 80 by 120 feet and undercut them from below, causing the ore to cave in and crush itself for easier removal. This technique was innovative but also a sign of the declining ease of mining in the area.

The economic and social forces driving Butte’s mining boom were powerful and intertwined. The arrival of railroads, particularly the Northern Pacific Railway in the 1880s, connected Butte to national markets and allowed for the influx of supplies, machinery, and labor. Banking interests, notably the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, came to dominate the scene, controlling not just the mines but the town’s politics and economy for decades. Land speculation surged as investors anticipated the wealth buried beneath the hill, often with little regard for the environmental or human costs.

Butte produced over $43 billion in mineral wealth. That figure, adjusted for modern values, is staggering, especially when one considers the rudimentary tools and dangerous conditions the miners endured. Yet this bounty came at a price. The mines and smelters left behind a legacy of pollution so severe that the area became the nation’s largest Superfund cleanup site. The environmental damage -- heavy metals leaching into soils and waters -- continues to pose challenges today.

James A. Murray, a noted mining engineer who worked in Montana during the late 19th century, once remarked on Butte’s paradox: “Butte is a place where men’s hopes run as deep as the mines themselves, yet the earth’s riches are as stubborn as the rock.” It was a land where dreams of fortune and the harsh realities of mining life collided daily.

The tale of Butte’s mining years is not just about machinery and money. It is about the men who wielded sledgehammers on boulders, the engineers who designed mills shipped across the continent, and the communities that grew around the relentless pursuit of metal. It’s about the thousands who risked life and limb underground, chasing veins of copper and silver that fueled the nation’s industrial rise. It’s about the unintended consequences of progress -- the slag heaps that held untapped riches and the poisoned soils that took decades to confront.

Butte’s story is a stubborn one, marked by human ambition and the hard realities of geology. The hill gave up its treasures, but not without exacting a toll.

See also

• Butte Mining Through the Years at Butte, Silver Bow County
• [