Life Underground Episode 1 - Bread Pudding
Life Underground - Episode 001
“Bread Pudding”
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and produced by KBMF and the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. I’m Clark Grant. This is episode 1: Bread Pudding.
We begin Life Underground by taking a look at the geology of the Butte mineral deposit, known as the Richest Hill on Earth. Just how did the mineralization occur that resulted in America’s richest and longest-lasting mining camp? Situated on the side of a hill atop the Summit Valley in southwestern Montana, the Butte hill has seen extraction on a colossal scale, first with nearly 10,000 miles of tunnels dug by men and machines underground, and eventually with the twin open pit mines on the eastern edge of the city of Butte. From 1880-2004, more than 23 billion pounds of copper were pulled out of the Butte hill, along with nearly 5 billion pounds of zinc and 3 million ounces of gold, among other minerals such as silver, manganese and lead. To learn more about how all these richest got here, I asked Dick Gibson. He’s a geologist, but he’s also a lover of Butte history and the host of another radio program in this series, Butte, America’s Story. Dick says Butte got its name from the characteristic landscape that is unique to the Summit Valley.
[Dick Gibson]
After 140 years of extraction, mining is still a going concern in Butte, with Montana Resources operating the active open pit mine at the Continental Pit on the east edge of town. In fact, this small town of just over 30,000 people is commonly called the Mining City. Just about every other business or t-shirt has “copper city” or “mining city” in the name, and the giant head frames, the long-abandoned entrances to the underground mine systems, still dot the hillside amid the steep, winding streets of the old neighborhoods. Butte is also the home to the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, which holds vast amounts of information about mineral deposits and other geological features throughout the state. The Bureau employs one man as an economic geologist, and his name is Stanley Korzeb. In addition to Dick Gibson’s explanation, I asked Stan to help us understand a little more about the Butte mineral deposit, and what goes into getting a mine started.
[Stanley Korzeb]
Stanley Korzeb has had a long career in mining all of the world, but he says Butte is a special place. Despite more than a century of mining, Stan says there’s plenty more to mine in Butte.
[Stanley Korzeb]
Stan just touched on a lot of issues facing Butte today, from the flooding of the underground mines and the filling of the Berkeley Pit to the destruction of the historic Uptown section of Butte. Long before the idea of an open pit came about in Butte, thousands of men toiled underground in tunnels and blasted through the hard rock to retrieve the minerals deposited there millions of years ago, hoisting them to the surface from depths of up to a mile. This program brings you the stories of these workers. This is Life Underground.
The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives holds collections spanning over a century from Butte, Montana, one of the most significant mining towns in American history. At the turn of the 20th century, Butte’s population was almost triple what it is today, and during WWI, reached nearly 100,000 people. Countless men and women from all over the world came to Butte to work in the mines or in industries on the periphery of mining. The Archives’ collection of oral history recordings holds untold treasures from some of these people who built the mining city, which in turn built the industrialized nation that the United States became. Laurie Mercier conducted an oral history recording with Herbert A Mickelson in 1980. Herbert was born in Butte in 1912, shortly before the Mining City reached its peak of copper production and population.
[Herbert A Mickelson]
Herbert Mickelson is describing the process for hoisting the mined rock from thousands of feet down the Butte mines. His interviewer Laurie Mercier asks about working with mules underground, which was what they did before the development of the underground trains, called motors. Herbert was a muleskinner underground.
Herbert A Mickelson
There aren’t many old time miners like Herbert Mickelson left in Butte, but luckily the oral history collection at the Butte Archives holds recordings of some of the men who worked in Butte in the early 20th century. Herbert isn’t the only one who talked about working with mules at the mines back in the day. Fred Kuhnhenn (kyoon-y-han) was born in Zortman, Montana on the Indian reservation near Fort Belknap in 1908. He worked on farms until he was fourteen, when he dropped out of school and hit the road. He had the kind of childhood you only read about today. Fred was interviewed by Ray Calkins in 1979, and here tells one story of going to visit his grandfather when he was a little kid.
[Fred Kuhnhenn]
Fred dropped out of school after the fourth grade and ran away from the reservation. He didn’t want to attend the boarding schools so he went off where they couldn’t find him. He worked on trucks and did odd jobs for a while, but came to Butte in 1926 when he was 18 years old. He eventually made his way to Butte because he had an uncle there who said there was plenty of work in the mines. His uncle told him:
[Fred Kuhnhenn]
The Butte that Fred Kuhnhenn describes is but a memory now. Butte in the early 20th century is often described as the “wide open town,” a place where the mines went 24 hours a day, and men slept in hot beds which they rented for an 8-hour period, until the next guy got off shift and needed a place to sleep. There was widespread prostitution and gambling, and over 200 saloons. Visiting Butte in 1903, Teddy Roosevelt described it as “mercurial” and a “wicked, wealthy, hospitable, full-blooded, little city, [which] welcomed me with wild enthusiasm of a disorderly kind.” He continues, “The crowd was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey, and in their desire to be sociable, broke the lines and jammed right up to the carriage…In Butte, every prominent man is a millionaire, a gambler, or a labor leader, and generally he has been all three. Of the hundred men who were my hosts, I suppose at least half had killed their man in private war or had striven to compass the assassination of an enemy…The millionaires had been laboring men once, the labor leaders intended to be millionaires in their turn, or else to pull down all who were. They had made money in mines, had spent it on the races, in other mines or in gambling and every form of vicious luxury, but they were strong men for all that. They had worked, and striven, and pushed, and trampled, and had always been ready, and were ready now, to fight to the death in many different kinds of conflicts. They had built up their part of the West, they were men with whom one had to reckon if thrown in contact with them.”
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana that draws from the oral history collection at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. I’m Clark Grant. This is episode 1. We’re talking about the old days in Butte, at its peak one of the most vibrant cities in the West, with nearly 100,000 inhabitants towards the end of World War 1. Known as the Gibraltar of Labor, Butte has had a reputation for organized labor for over a century, and was the battleground for countless strikes and episodes of severe labor strife that saw martial law established in the city on several occasions. With copper in high demand during the world wars, the federal government intervened when production slowed on account of strikes and labor unrest. There are famous pictures of national guardsmen stationed at the gates of mine yards with machine guns aimed at strikers and children. In another photo, a company of armed men guard the courthouse, with their Gatling gun pointed towards the Carpenters Union Hall across the street. Ray Calkins of the Butte Historical Society conducted numerous oral history interviews in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Colin Christie, whom Ray interviewed in 1979, had moved to Butte with his parents in 1891 from Kansas. They operated a jewelry store in Butte for over half a century. Here he talks about the presence of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, in Butte.
[Colin Christie]
That infamous incident Colin Christie describes was the dynamiting of the Miner’s Union Hall, which took place on Main Street in Butte in 1914. Colin Christie here recalls the early days of Butte in the mid 19th century, before all the fighting and heavy mining really began.
[Colin Christie]
The old days in Butte were characterized by fighting. Fights not only between the miners of differing nationalities, but fights between the unions and the mine owners, and by the fights between the mine owners themselves. The grand legal and political battles of the day became known as the War of the Copper Kings, and were primarily fought between William A. Clark, Marcus Daly an F. Augustus Heinze. Colin Christie was old enough to have actually met these Copper Kings, and here Ray Calkins asks him about it.
[Colin Christie]
Colin Christie was 91 at the time of that interview, which was conducted in 1979. The War of the Copper Kings was all but over by 1907, when all the big mines were consolidated into the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which eventually became the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, one of the biggest industrial operations the world has ever seen. Anaconda effectively controlled the State of Montana up until the mid 20th century, and was responsible for building Butte into the economic and political center of the state. Next up on Life Underground, we look at the beginnings of the Anaconda Company and hear from an interview with a man Mr. Christie mentioned in the previous clip, Mr. Reno H. Sales.
In 1966, the Vice President of the Anaconda Company V.D. Perry describes Reno Sales as the “Father of Mining Geology. Sales conceived and perfected a system of precise geological field mapping during the early days at Butte, Montana…In the same way that good English composition reflects clear thinking, Sales’ mapping inspires sound geological reasoning. Sales’ accomplishments as a leader and teacher have provided examples and inspiration for a new generation of mining geologists. Thus, through his own work and through them, he has made and will continue to make major contributions to geological science.” That high praise came from a top executive at one of the world’s biggest mining companies, the Anaconda Company.
[Reno Sales]
Reno Sales was also close to court cases involving the Anaconda Company and the law of the apex, which said that wherever an ore vein reached the surface, that surface owner owned the vein wherever it ran underground.
[Reno Sales]
That was Reno Sales, chief geologist for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company from 1906-1948, interviewed by Henry Carlisle in 1961. This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana that draws from oral histories at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. I’m Clark Grant. Thanks for listening to episode 1. Next time, we take a closer look at what it was like to actually work underground on the Butte hill, the site of some of the richest mines in the world.