In 1874, a scant decade after Butte’s founding, the boom town was already on the verge of a bust. It’s population, which had climbed to about a thousand, may have dropped as low as 61. The town was down – but, if you know anything about Butte, far from out.
A few prospectors renewed their interest in the settlement over the next year and found deposits of gold, silver and copper the first wave of miners had overlooked.
“These were daring, innovative individuals,” Chief Executive Matt Vincent said. The character traits of those first rugged miners came to embody the legendary spirit of Butte, an ethos unlike anywhere else in Montana. In this city’s 150-year history, generation after generation of Butte residents have faced new challenges and — somehow — always found a way to thrive.
Sometimes, with a little luck. In those early days, copper was the most abundant but also the least valuable of the findings – until the world changed. The telephone and light bulb were invented over the next few years, and suddenly copper went from an afterthought to a maker of fortunes.
Those who put their faith and sweat into the town were richly rewarded. By 1917, Butte was one of the largest cities in the Northwest, and one of the wealthiest. As the town was built, so was something else.
“It’s independence, but it’s also interdependence,” said Dick Gibson, a local expert on Butte history. Miners who came from far corners of the globe congealed like copper in a mold. “It’s an amazing combination of rugged independence that comes from the adversity that the miners had to face.”
That adversity also created strong bonds between miners, regardless of ethnicity.
In 1917, still at its peak population and economic production, Butte endured one of its darkest moments – the Granite Mountain Mine disaster.
Noxious fumes spewing from a fire choked the mine and killed 168 men. But in the wake of the disaster came stories of men who held out against the fumes and rescuers who braved miles of shafts still contaminated with carbon monoxide and tar-smoke.
Ethnic neighborhoods, so diverse that no-smoking signs were printed in 16 different languages, banded together to save nearly half the men that were in the mine and remove the bodies of those who didn’t make it out.
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