Butte's Industrial Landscape.

About the project

The Richest Hills Digital Edition (Richest Hills DE) was a teaching-resource project drawn out of my longer-running research on Helena and the Rocky Mountain mining frontier, and extended west to Butte — the "Richest Hill on Earth" that anchored the Anaconda Company's mining empire and that produced the working-class urban landscape most readers know from the historical photographs of the headframes against the Continental Divide.

The slide presentation collected here was produced for classroom use under a Montana Office of Public Instruction partnership (the Montana Historical Society's Stories of the Land textbook chapter on the mining economy linked to it) and was distributed to teachers across the state for use with the Chapter 10 educator resources.

What the presentation covers

• The geological setting. Why Butte became Butte — the Boulder batholith and the structural geology that concentrated copper, silver, and zinc in a single roughly two-mile area.
• The headframes. The visual signature of Butte and the engineering history behind it — sinking shafts thousands of feet, hoisting ore and miners through the same shaft, the consolidation of the small mines into the Anaconda Company's system after 1899.
• The labour history. Butte as the most heavily unionised city in the United States in the early twentieth century, the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW, the 1914 Miners' Union Hall dynamiting and the company-town politics that followed.
• The neighbourhoods. Dublin Gulch, Centerville, Walkerville, Meaderville — the ethnically-distinct working-class districts that organised social life around the mines, the parishes, and the union halls.
• The Berkeley Pit. The 1955 transition from underground mining to open-pit, the demolition of the Meaderville and McQueen neighbourhoods, the post-1982 fill of the pit with acid mine water, and the EPA Superfund response that has structured Butte's present.
• What survives. The standing headframes as a National Historic Landmark district; the Mining Museum; the city's ongoing argument with itself about how to tell the story.

For classroom use

The presentation is structured to support either a single forty-five-minute class session on Butte specifically, or a longer unit on Western industrial mining of which Butte is one case among several. Each slide includes presenter notes drawn from the secondary literature on Butte (Mary Murphy, David Emmons, Janet Finn, and others) and a short reading list for instructors who want to take a particular thread further.