Life Underground Episode 3 - Working for Anaconda, Part 1
Life underground - Episode 003
“Working for Anaconda, Part 1”
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana, one of the richest mining districts in the world. I’m Clark Grant, with KBMF. Today, we look at the Anaconda Company and hear stories from the men who worked for this company, which for decades was one of the biggest industrial operators in the world.
The story of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company is a well known tale of industrial domination and world conquest. As described in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the story goes something like this:
“In 1880 Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant, and a group of California investors including George Hearst, father of publisher William Randolph Hearst, formed the Anaconda Gold and Silver Mining Company to operate a mine near Butte, Montana. In 1882 the mine struck a rich vein of copper, and Daly built Anaconda’s first copper smelter to process the ore. The company reincorporated as the Anaconda Mining Company in 1891 and as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1895; during that time it built and acquired a number of works, including smelters but also coal mines and sawmills to support the copper operation. In 1899 the company, along with other mining companies in the area, was purchased by a holding company called the Amalgamated Copper Company, which had been set up by officers of the Standard Oil Trust. Amalgamated allowed its companies to operate independently, and over the following decade Anaconda succeeded in taking over all the companies held by the trust. By 1915, when Amalgamated ceased to exist, Anaconda had become the world’s largest copper producer. The company added other metals to its operations, and in recognition of its diversifying interests it was renamed the Anaconda Company in 1955.
In 1914 Anaconda had started buying into foreign mining companies. By 1929 the company owned all of Chile Copper Company, whose Chuquicamata mine was the world’s most productive. In 1971 Chile’s newly elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, expropriated Anaconda’s Chilean copper mines under powers granted by an amendment to Chile’s constitution. The Allende government was overthrown in 1973, and the new military government agreed to pay Anaconda more than $250 million for its expropriated min es.
Losses from the Chilean takeover, however, seriously weakened the company’s financial position, which was also troubled by the falling price of copper in world markets. In 1977 the company was bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), a petroleum company seeking to diversify its holdings, and Anaconda ceased to exist as a unified operation. During the 1980s, with copper prices staying low, ARCO closed numerous mines and processing plants once run by Anaconda, and finally the company sold its metals operations to a number of buyers.”
The history book tale of the Anaconda Company is but one version. This company was ultimately made up of individual lives, men and women who bought their homes, educated and fed their families and built their lives with the wages earned on Anaconda’s time. Today on Life Underground, we hear a more human side of the story of The Company, and get to know personally some of its career miners and workers.
Our first scene today: The year is 1958. Little Andy Kuchtyn is living above the Golden Gate Hotel on East Park Street, where his mother is hotel manager and his dad is working underground in the Butte mines.
[Andy Kuchtyn]
Always looking to make his nickels for that bowling machine and other stuff, Andy took it upon himself to start making a little money as a kid in Butte.
[Andy Kuchtyn]
Andy’s childhood was typical of many kids growing up in Butte, although not everyone shined shoes from bar to bar. But a lot of Butte kids did play on the mine dumps and find their way into mineyards for one reason or another.
[Andy Kuchtyn]
You’re listening to Life Underground. I’m your host Clark Grant. On today’s show, we’re delving a bit deeper into the story of the Anaconda Company by learning about the personal stories of the men who made the Company their career. That was part of an oral history with Andy Kuchtyn, conducted by Ellen Crain at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives as part of the Verdigris Project. When we come back, we’ll meet Gordon Crain and hear about his career in mining.
Generational mining was common in Butte. The Anaconda Company often had fathers and sons working in the same mines, or at least on the same Hill in Butte. Our next story is from Gordon Crain, interviewed by Ellen Crain at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. Gordon Crain’s dad worked in mining all his life, first in Idaho, but ultimately in Butte, starting in 1956. Ellen Crain is also our interviewer for this oral history with Gordon, who happens to be her husband.
[Gordon Crain]
Words to live by, “Never sleep underground.” Gordon Crain was just laying out some of the dangers of working underground in the Butte mines, which were numerous. Layin’ on a laggin’ meant resting on a board. There’s lots of terminology in underground mining that has fallen out of common parlance, but much of the living memory of this trade is preserved through our work with oral history, and our interviewer Ellen Crain does a good job in this next segment of asking Gordon to define terms when he introduces them. In our quest to understand the day-to-day conditions for men working for the colossal Anaconda Company, we continue with Gordon Crain.
[Gordon Crain]
The many aspects of the enormous hoists that ran the Butte mines can be hard to keep track of. So far, we’ve heard about the chippy, which are the cages that moved the men up and down the shafts to the stations where they could get off the cage and go to work mining. There was the special hoist for the shaft men. Then there were the skips, which hauled the ore and moved much faster than the chippies. And Gordon Crain was just describing the suicide deck, a platform beneath the chippy with no railings or sides that was used for shaft maintenance. And there’s one more!
[Gordon Crain]
Part of working for the Anaconda Company meant going along with the changes in mining technology and the desires of the Company to save costs and mine in new ways. For Butte, that meant a transition away from underground mining to open pit mining. The Berkeley Pit started in 1955.
[Gordon Crain]
This is Life Underground, and that was Gordon Crain, interviewed for the Verdigris project by his wife Ellen Crain, the Director of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. On today’s episode, we’re looking at what life was like working for the Anaconda Company. How was life as an employee of one of the biggest industrial operations in the world? How did it feel to be a miner on the Butte hill, and what exactly did these men do every day to make a living for their families?
In another of our oral history interviews, we had a chance to visit with Jim Ugrin, who made his career working on the hill in Butte as a boilermaker, just like Gordon Crain. Jim was a Butte kid who grew up playing on the mine dumps and making up games with the neighborhood kids. He told us about how resourceful you had to be back in those days, and how his friends and him would play a game they called Soccerball. They’d make a ball out of old socks rolled together and play a mixture of baseball, handball and dodgeball. Their bases were sewer grates on the corners of an intersection. Sometimes they’d play the same game, but with a stick instead of a ball, and call it ‘kick a stick.’
Like so many young kids growing up in Butte in the middle part of the 20th century, Jim Ugrin went on to work in the mines, though his life was diverted a bit after high school, when he got drafted in 1964. Aubrey Jaap collected Jim’s oral history at the Butte Archives.
[Jim Ugrin]
Jim Ugrin was an active union member during his working years in Butte. He worked construction for a time, and eventually went on to become the President of the Boilermaker’s union in Butte. Work began to dry up after the Anaconda Company was sold to ARCO in the late 70s, a period we cover in great detail in a later episode of Life Underground, and mining didn’t really resume on a large scale in Butte until Montana Resources, a private company owned by Dennis Washington, resumed open pit mining in the mid 80s. Jim was heading up the Boilermakers at that time. During his oral history recording, Aubrey brought out a couple of old newspaper articles that shows Jim on the front lines of a picket out in front of Montana Resources.
[Jim Ugrin]
Jim Ugrin left mining with a bit of a bitter taste after Montana Resources opened up with no unions, but having worked on the Butte Hill is still a point of pride today. Later in this series, we’ll take a closer look at the operation at Montana Resources, the company that Jim Ugrin led a picket against, which still operates an open pit mine in Butte today. Next time on Life Underground, we continue to look at the day-to-day experiences of the men who made up the massive Anaconda Company workforce, and get a glimpse of what it was like to work in the Butte mines from the men who lived it. This is Life Underground. I’m Clark Grant. Thanks for listening.
[credits]