Butte, America’s Story Episode 275 - Anaconda Company Heritage

Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.

Depending on how you measure things, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company grew to become at various times the largest copper mining company in the world, one of the five largest mining companies of any sort, and one of the ten largest corporations in the United States. Its growth was founded on the huge mineral deposits in Butte but fueled by even larger copper deposits in Chile.

Prospector Michael Hickey named his mine on the Butte hill “Anaconda” because he recalled a phrase in a Civil War newspaper where Horace Greeley referred to McClellan’s union army encircling Lee’s like a giant anaconda snake. Hickey, a veteran of McClellan’s forces, named his claim and mine in 1875.

By 1881 Marcus Daly and his rich California backers had completed the acquisition of the Anaconda mine from Hickey and established the Anaconda Gold and Silver Mining Company. The name changed several times in a few years and when Marcus Daly died in 1900 it was called the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. A year before Daly’s death, the company had been acquired by the appropriately named Amalgamated Copper Company, a holding company, also known as a trust, formed by directors of the Standard Oil Trust to consolidate the copper industry. They succeeded very well.

Technically, the companies within the Amalgamated operated separately and independently, so names like Anaconda Copper, Washoe Copper, Bluebird Silver, Orphan Girl Mining, Parrott Mining, and Diamond Coke & Coal continued, but effectively Amalgamated ran the show. Their arguably biggest amalgamation came just two years after they were founded, when Amalgamated absorbed the Boston & Montana company, the second largest copper producer in the United States after the Anaconda itself.

Boston & Montana had a heritage based on investors in Boston, the Lewisohn brothers, who had done their fair share of amalgamating themselves, growing from a horsehair mattress making business to invest in and merge with important mines on the Butte hill, including Charles Meader’s mines near Meaderville, Charles Larrabee’s Mountain View, and their own separate company, the Butte & Boston.

After Amalgamated took over Butte & Boston, their total operation was by far the most significant in the world, and they just continued to grow. Amalgamated took over most of Augustus Heinze’s mines, including the Rarus, in 1906. They acquired some of William Clark’s most significant mines in 1910, including the Original, Steward, and Parrott, and they bought the rich Lexington mine from a French consortium in 1913.

In the wake of anti-trust sentiment at the federal level in the United States, and the legal break-up of the Standard Oil trust in 1911, Amalgamated dissolved itself as a trust in 1915, but the surviving company, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, owned all the assets of Amalgamated. Nothing really changed.

The Company, as it was usually referred to, acquired the Chuquicamata mines in Chile from the Guggenheims in 1923, and took over all the rest of Clark’s holdings following his death in 1925. Smaller operations such as the Butte-Ballaklava Company, Pittsburgh and Montana or Pittsmont, and East Butte Copper were absorbed by about 1930.

A few companies survived technically on the Butte hill until World War II and beyond, including the North Butte Company with its Granite Mountain Mine, as well as Minnesota-based Butte & Superior, but even they had been operated by the Anaconda Company under lease for years when they were formally merged on paper.

The company’s demise came with nationalization in Chile in the early 1970s and the plummeting price of copper and environmental concerns in in Butte. Five years after the oil company Arco acquired the Anaconda, their mining operations in Butte ceased.

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.