Anaconda Copper Mine (Montana)
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The Anaconda Copper Mine was a large copper mine in Butte, Montana. It was bought in 1881 by Marcus Daly from Michael Hickey. Hickey was a prospector and Union Civil War veteran, and named his claim the Anaconda Mine after reading Horace Greeley's Civil War account of how Ulysses S. Grant's forces had surrounded Robert E. Lee's forces "like an anaconda". Daly then developed the Anaconda Mine in partnership with George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, and James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis of San Francisco.
From this beginning grew the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, a global mining enterprise featuring the Anaconda and other Butte mines, a smelter at Anaconda, Montana, processing plants in Great Falls, Montana, the American Brass Company, and many other properties, mostly in the United States and Chile. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company was acquired by ARCO in 1977.
The Anaconda mine itself was closed in 1947 after producing 94,900 tons of copper. Its location has been consumed by the Berkeley Pit, a vast open-pit mine.
F. Augustus Heinze used an apex lawsuit to extract ore from the Anaconda Mines. Heinze purchased a small parcel of unclaimed land on top of Butte Hill and several Butte judges, was able to take copper ore that was in the Anaconda companies shafts. After years of losing lawsuits to Heinze the Company shut down all operations in the state putting as much as 80% of the state workforce out of work to force the state legislature to adopt a "change of venue" provision for lawsuits. Eventually the Company bought out all of Heinze's properties and claims.
The Anaconda copper mine appeared in Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (Part 4), where Scrooge became owner of the whole mine as a result of the law of apex. Don Rosa stated that he had based the story on the history of the Anaconda mine.
See also
Further reading
- Bakken, Gordon Morris. "Anaconda and the Price of Pollution," The Historian Volume: 69#1 (2007). pp 36+ online edition, short scholarly history
- Malone, Michael P. The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906 (1981), the most detailed scholarly history
- Marcosson, Isaac F. Anaconda (1957), official company history
- Mihelich, John Anthony. "The Richest Hill on Earth: An Ethnographic Account of Industrial Capitalism, Religion, and Community in Butte, Montana, 1930-1965," (Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington State U. 1999; 337 pp) Dissertation Abstracts International, 2000, Vol. 60 Issue 11, pp 4073–4073
- Quivik, Frederic L. "Smoke and tailings: an environmental history of copper smelting technologies in Montana, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998).
External links
- Biography of Frank Little, tortured and lynched for organising the copper miners of Butte
- Carleton Watkins Interior Views of Anaconda Mines (Butte, MT)
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Coordinates: 46°01′02″N 112°30′37″W / 46.017324°N 112.510167°W{{#coordinates:46.017324|N|112.510167|W|source:dewiki_region:US-MT_type:landmark|||| |primary |name= }}
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