The Richest Hill on Earth | Post 32 | Montana
From canal-side mills in upstate New York to remnants of steelworks in West Virginia, my trip across Street View America has turned up plenty of visual evidence of eras bygone. But no place has left as conspicuous a trace as Butte, Montana.
The perpetrator is again industry — primarily copper here — but the gateway clues in Butte go beyond the usual rusted facility or brick warehouse to a diverse set of unmissable relics and scars. You can see it in the skyline; you can see it in the land; you can see it in the houses and streets.
It’s possible I found Butte so historically expressive simply because the city, once the largest between Chicago and San Francisco, stands in dense contrast to the vast sparsity I’ve traveled since leaving Rapid City, S.D. Though this project has repeatedly argued that stories and significance are to be had in the remotest of spots, the virtual traveler needs to be vigilant at the Street View wheel in rural parts, chasing up the mundane and anomalous alike. Perhaps less so in Butte, population 34,000.
In fact, pre-Butte, this segment from Yellowstone National Park to southwestern Montana offered several narratives. First, as I filed out of Yellowstone with droves of August tourists, I got a close-up look at geothermal activity — not Old Faithful — and then encountered an explosion of pent-up commercial activity the instant I crossed the park’s exit gates (note “Pegman’s” location in the inset map of the West Yellowstone, Mont., image below).
Second, throughout much of rural Montana, the land/zoning/geologic pattern runs the same: long parallel bands of straight highway, flat farm land, and stunning mountain ridge.
At one point, though, a bolt came loose on my Street View eyes, resulting in a long stretch of nauseating lurches:
As in Wyoming (and elsewhere), the intensity of expanse hits not when a landscape is empty, but upon the accent of a solitary detail. It might be cross-country cyclists, a man and his truck, an automotive lawn ornament, or the Jefferson High Panthers returning home from a game — they represent an 1,100 square mile school district.
I explored a few small towns, particularly enjoying the happenings and details of Whitehall: A front stoop of yard gear; truck repairs; boys behind a picket-fenced yard; a downtown book club; bowling; fins and an old truck.
Just before Butte, greater Three Forks foreshadowed the influence of mining in the region. The tip-off was a discreet Adopt-A-Highway sign modestly acknowledging Imerys Talc America Inc. A local outfit? No, just around the bend was North America’s largest open pit talc mine and the Montana operations of the world’s leading talc producer, French multinational Imerys S.A.
When I reached Butte itself, I found the outskirts historically unpromising — new suburban construction and strip commerce.
But my southern approach soon led directly into a neighborhood of quaint, unassuming houses whose age, clustering, and proximity to a stripped hillside smacked of one thing: housing for Butte’s turn-of-the-century copper miners.
Indeed, I believe that’s the rim of the environmentally-infamous Berkeley Pit at the far end of Atlantic Street. An update to the nearby, more lethal Berkeley Mine shaft, the Pit was carved out of neighborhoods similar to Atlantic and 2nd Streets in the 1950s and yielded serious quantities of copper for three decades. Now shuttered and filling with groundwater, the open pit is today a lake so acidic and so saturated with heavy metals that 350 migratory geese died in its waters after touching down in 1995. Wikipedia says plans are afoot to ensure the Pit’s water level does reach the natural water table — an occurrence predicted for 2020 that would suffuse Silver Bow Creek and Clark Fork River with the same chemical poisons. The Berkeley Pit’s mark is visible from much of town, and for $2 from a rim-side viewing stand.
Remarkably, the Berkeley Pit’s presence contributes only a fraction of the Street View traveler’s experience of Butte’s copper past. Climbing from the old working class neighborhoods up the copper-laden hill that made Butte rich, I passed the wealthy’s Victorians and crossed Granite, Quartz, and Copper Streets. (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Aluminum, and Iron ran to the south of my stroll.)
Most iconically, I paused at several of the 14 extant headframes that straddled Butte’s mine shafts, including The Steward, the city’s “most productive copper-silver mine.”
Stately pockmarks amidst the present-day cityscape, they are right there to behold, tall and surveying, visible among brick buildings, or found just around the corner — as much a part of Butte’s contemporary fabric as The Mother Lode Theatre.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Yellowstone National Park, Wyo.
- West Yellowstone, Mont.
- Island Park, Ida.
- Ennis, Mont.
- Whitehall, Mont.
- End: Butte, Mont.
Trip to date:
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Please Note the Difference Between Street View ART and Street View TRAVEL | Post 33 | Montana
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Is Mountain View Prejudiced Against Rural America? | Post 31 | Wyoming
