Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
often sick with burning eyes, bloody noses, gagging, and lung disease. The copper
baron William Andrews Clark was quoted as saying, “I must say that the ladies are
very fond of this smoky city...because there is just enough arsenic there to give them
a beautiful complexion.” Eventually an antismoke ordinance was passed, but it was
never enforced because smelter operators threatened to shut down if the laws were
applied. No one questioned who was in power in Butte.
When the copper smelter was erected in Anaconda in 1894 by Marcus Daly,
Butte's air improved dramatically. But Deer Lodge ranchers and farmers who lived
in the valley between Butte and Missoula suffered devastating crop failures and live-
stock losses. The Anaconda Company built an enormous smokestack in 1918 (at 585
feet, it surpasses the Washington Monument) to disperse the smoke, but farmers ar-
gued that they were just spreading the poison over a wider area. During this period,
the Anaconda smelter was thought to have released up to 36 tons of arsenic into the
air every day, as well as alarmingly high levels of lead and other heavy metals. The
case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the company won.
By the 1970s it was apparent that the air and water pollution was still hurting live-
stock and agricultural soil throughout the Deer Lodge Valley. The reservoir at Mill-
town, east of Missoula, was so tainted with copper waste that the drinking water was
contaminated. Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) bought the mines in 1977, in-
heriting little more than the bill for cleanup, and within a few years had to shut down
both the smelter in Anaconda and Butte's Berkeley Pit. The cavernous pit filled with
toxic water from the underground mines it was built on. The EPA rated the area the
most polluted in the country, worse than Love Canal in New York. Today, visitors to
the pit can experience the eerily changing tints of the stagnant pool, which in 1995
claimed the lives of 342 snow geese that landed in the water during their migration.
The cleanup is well underway but expected to continue for decades, with the final
bill running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Copper King Mansion
The
Copper King Mansion
(219 W. Granite St., 406/782-7580,
www.thecopperkingmansion.com
,
9am-4pm daily May-Sept., by appointment Oct.-Apr.,
adults $7.50, children $3.50) is both a museum and bed-and-breakfast. Guided tours show
off this 34-room Victorian home built in 1898 for the infamous King of Copper, William
Andrews Clark. Considered one of the wealthiest men in the world in his day, Clark could
