lost landscapes

8/18/2019 Lost Landscapes

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Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond in Butte, Montana, 1986.

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LostLandscapes

Decades of

mining and

a billion dollars’

worth of cleanuphave created

massive ground

shifts in Butte

BY EDWIN DOBB

PHOTOGRAPHY © 2016BY DAVID T. HANSON

9M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y


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MASTERS OF FIRE. That’s how shamans were regarded in prehistoric times. But so were

smiths, the largely forgotten but similarly ordained individuals who, employing heat in

a novel way, converted rock into metal and metal into objects both useful and decora-

tive. According to the Yakut, a once-nomadic people who have lived for thousands of

years in the region now known as Siberia, “Smiths and shamans come from the same

nest.” Both have been initiated into the occult arts. Both travel through the spirit world. Both possess

magical powers. Behold and beware, from raw stone comes a bowl, a mask, a blade. Incredible as it may

seem today, there was a time when such transformations were as miraculous as turning water into wine.

Kelley Mine and the pre-reclamation remains of the Irish neighborhood of Dublin Gulch, photographed in 1987.


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M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y 11

Jump to the 21st century, well into the age of disenchant-ment. What was once extraordinary has become routine. The

new masters of fire are international mining companies hell-bent

on extracting and smelting mineral ore on a scale and at a rate

sufficient to satisfy the ever-growing appetites of a global urban-

industrial civilization. We subordinate entire mountains of rock

to human intention, converting them into buildings, bridges, and

railroads, along with all manner of vehicles and machines, appli-

ances and gadgets, including our so-called smart devices, made

possible by a newly exploited class of minerals called rare earths.Every year we go to greater extremes, both technologically and

geographically, to acquire tin, lead, iron, and nickel; copper,

silver, and molybdenum. Earth first, as a provocative pro-extrac-

tion bumper sticker says, we’ll mine the other planets later.

But simply because an activity is commonplace doesn’t mean

it is wholly or even mostly under our control. Nor does it mean

the consequences are always and everywhere beneficial. As

the smiths knew well, wresting ores from the earth and subject-

ing them to fire is a risky endeavor, and very likely an affrontto the gods. Consider what’s at stake. What took nature millions

of years to forge we would dare re-forge in a matter of days.

Creation, the world as it is, doesn’t suit us. We can do better.

And we can do it faster.

The proper term for this attitude is hubris. And one of its

contemporary signatures is the sacrifice zone, a speculative term

first used to designate areas permanently devastated by nuclear

attack, but which seems like a good match for altered landscapes

where the damage caused by large-scale industry—steel mills,

chemical plants, oil refineries, mines—is grave and enduring.

One of America’s premier sacrifice zones is located in

Butte—the island of industrial frenzy that journalist Joseph

Kinsey Howard called “the black heart of Montana.” And it was

Butte’s fallen status that brought landscape photographer David

T. Hanson to town in the mid-1980s. The heroic period of copper

mining—when Butte contributed mightily to the electrificationof the country, which benefitted everyone—had recently ended.

Underground mining: Gone. The Anaconda Copper Mining

Company, one of the most powerful corporations in the world:

Gone. The once-formidable and often radical Western Federation

of Miners, which was founded in Butte: Gone. Also missing was

much of the original part of town, including several ethnic neigh-

borhoods, plus Columbia Gardens, an immense amusement park

and playground, all of which had been destroyed to make way for

the Berkeley and East Continental pits.

Apart from their considerable aesthetic quality, the photos

Hanson took 30 years ago are fascinating because they reveal

The shift to open-pit mining, which started in the mid-1950s, altered the

currency Butte was forced to pay to stay in business and keep the U.S.

supplied with base metals. No longer was the cost measured chiefly in terms

of harm to human beings but instead in terms of damage to land and water.

A waste pile on the edge of Corktown, another Irish enclave, pictured in

1985. The waste has since been removed, and the land has been covered

in new soil and seeded.

All photographs in this

article are from the series

“The Richest Hill on Earth

(1985-1987)” in Wilderness to

Wasteland by David T. Hanson

(Taverner Press, 2016).


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what Butte looked liked during the early years of the environ-

mental era, a major turning point in the town’s evolution. Much

has changed since then. Mounds of mine waste have been

hauled away. Contaminated areas have been capped with cleansoil and re-vegetated. Former railroad beds have been converted

into public trails. Even long-idled mine yards have been refur-

bished and put to civic use—one as a senior citizen center,

another as an outdoor concert site, yet another as a cathedral-

like museum of extractive industry.

Taken together, then, Hanson’s images document the land-

scape that predated remediation and reclamation—in other

words, the most recent stage of disruption, of human interven-

tion, in a place that for a hundred years underwent continual

disruption, much of it devastating. For isn’t this more of the

same? In the eyes of the gods, is trying to restore Eden any less

arrogant than destroying it? Our purposes may change but not

our perennial discontent, nor the cultural crucible in which we

try to remake the world in our image, no matter how fractured or

contradictory or provisional it may be.

OF ALL THE WAYS WE DISRUPT NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS,

one of the most aggressive is mining, an activity

that entails not only disfiguring the land but plun-

dering its mineral-laced depths. Underlying the

Butte mining district is a now-flooded network of

staggering scope and complexity—some 10,000 miles of shafts

and tunnels. Miners at the Mountain Con, on North Main Street,

drilled and blasted to a mile beneath the surface, the same level

as the Pacific Ocean but 700 miles inland, in the middle of theRocky Mountains. They were among the thousands of men who

labored around the clock in the mines, constituting an eccen-

tric brotherhood, in exile from the sun, from women, from the

coming and going of seasons; a brotherhood that existed for

only one purpose—to remove as much ore as possible as fast

as possible. And that enterprise was as dangerous as it was

destructive. From the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, an

average of one man died underground every week. Thousands

more were injured, permanently maimed, or sent to early gravesby silicosis. Improve upon things as they are? Maybe. But not

without paying a price.

The shift to open-pit mining, which started in the mid-1950s,

altered the currency Butte was forced to pay to stay in business

and keep the U.S. supplied with base metals. No longer was the

cost measured chiefly in terms of harm to human beings but

instead in terms of damage to land and water. The ore contained

less copper, so more of it—much more of it—had to be extracted

and milled. Instead of penetrating the earth, the Anaconda

Company now turned the earth inside out, exposing the violent

processes that had been hidden from view. And the additional


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Mountain Con Mine,

Centerville, 1985. This

area has been restored.

The mine yard is now a

park, with grass and picnic

tables, and is part of a

trail network that

spans the Hill.


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rock those processes produced had to go somewhere.

Because the original town and business district were located

atop the ore body—on the northern slope of Summit Valley,

an area locals call The Hill—mine yards and mine waste hadalways intermingled with neighborhoods. Like smelling the odor

of sulfur and hearing the blast of shift whistles, a classic experi-

ence on The Hill was looking out a kitchen window and seeing

head frames—the black, derrick-like structures that lowered men

into the mines and lifted ore out of them—towering over nearby

houses. Where one worked was inseparable from where one lived,

a fact that was once a defining feature of vernacular architecture

in most American industrial towns. But the amount of material

that came out of the Berkeley Pit was so great (about 700 million

tons over the life of the mine) that a new kind of wastescape

was created—plains and plateaus of lifeless yellow overburden

and, to accommodate the water-and-rock-dust slurry flowing day

and night from a nearby mill, an immense impoundment called

the Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond. The most distinctive—as

well as most fateful—characteristic of this ravaged area, which

also includes the Berkeley and East Continental pits, is that it

embraces the old part of the town along its eastern and northern

borders. The industrial shadow of black-hearted Butte.

Hubristic as it may have been, addressing the highly toxic

and visually distressing legacy of mining became necessary

to Butte’s survival after the Berkeley Pit closed in 1982 and

Anaconda’s successor, the oil giant ARCO, shut down all opera-

tions. A few years later, the smaller, younger East Continental

Pit reopened, but the mine, along with the mill, employs only

about 320 non-union workers. The Mining City could no longer

rely on its namesake industry to drive the economy. But it wouldbe difficult to attract new businesses and young professionals

with families to the weary, wrecked place depicted in many of

Hanson’s photos. Was it possible to overcome that handicap, to

escape the grip of the past?

At a time when Butte had every reason to despair, it came up

with a gesture that was extravagant, to say the least, as well as a

wee bit crazy. On the East Ridge, the section of the Continental

Divide forming the eastern boundary of Summit Valley, a group

of unemployed but highly skilled men who had spent most oftheir adult lives working for Anaconda erected a nine-story-

high Madonna-like statue. Gazing down at the town and mining

district from 3,500 feet up, Our Lady of the Rockies held her

arms outstretched, palms open and turned upward. She seemed

to be both blessing Butte and imploring the heavens for mercy.

“She looked around,” as former ironworker John T. Shea puts

it, “and said, ‘This town needs help.’” And, incredibly, help

arrived, though in a form that at first looked more like a curse

than a cure. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency desig-

nated Butte a Superfund site—the equivalent, in bureaucratic

terms, of a national sacrifice zone.

The EPA rescued Butte, an irony that a surprising number

of Butticians have yet to realize or acknowledge. Established in

1980, the Superfund program provided mechanisms for clean-

ing up the country’s most dangerous industrial landscapes,places that had been abandoned by their original corporate

owners, many of which no longer existed. The great American

vanishing act. In the case of Butte, however, the owner, ARCO,

was very much present and flourishing. What’s more, under

the Superfund law, the company was responsible for redressing

the whole environmental shittaree, including the Butte mining

district, the degraded stream banks and contaminated water of

the upper Clark Fork River, the metals-laden sediment behind

Milltown Dam, and much else, almost all of which was caused

by the previous owner, Anaconda. ARCO did everything it could

to avoid its inherited liability, including enlisting high-octane

lobbyists to persuade Congress to change the law, but to no avail.

So far, ARCO has spent about a billion dollars on remediation

and reclamation in the upper watershed, and more work remains.

THE RESULTS HAVE BEEN DRAMATIC. Besides the fields

of bunchgrass, walking paths and picnic areas, and

spruced-up mine yards, Silver Bow Creek, once an

industrial sewer, now so closely resembles a healthy,

free-flowing stream that cutthroat trout have made it

their home. All manner of debris, from dilapidated buildings to

abandoned equipment to slag piles, have been removed.

In the eyes of some natives, however, the transformation,

while necessary, is as much an occasion for grief as it is conso-

lation. That may strike the River-Runs-Through-It enthusiast asmadness but it’s an attitude borne of a singularly Montanan way

of life; indeed, from an economic standpoint, a way of life that

until the late 20th century was more representative of the state

than any other. What the last best place did best was exploit

its abundant natural resources, of which mining was the most

extreme and lucrative form.

We forget this at our peril, just as forgetting any formative

stage of development is perilous. And reclamation can be a

kind of forgetfulness, of self-induced amnesia. In other words,well-intentioned environmental remedies can also exact a toll.

Against this backdrop, Hanson’s photos assume a mourn-

ful cast. As forbidding as some of the subject matter may be,

the images nonetheless depict yet another of Butte’s many lost

landscapes. Almost as bad as erasing remnants of the past are

attempts to prettify them. A contentious example—friends and

former neighbors in Butte will disagree with this—are the red

lights that now adorn several of the surviving head frames. The

impulse is understandable, even laudable, but those iconic

structures are the industrial equivalent of grave markers.

Turning them into gaudy all-season Christmas trees violates


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the distinctive character of one of the most distinctive places in

the world.

But that’s not the only way in which, borrowing from

Faulkner, the past isn’t past. While Butte continues to evolve—through not only reclamation but historic preservation and,

most important, economic development, especially such vision-

ary efforts as the three splendid festivals the community hosts

every year—a large portion of the physical legacy of indus-

trialized mining will never be erased: the Berkeley and East

Continental pits, along with much of the intervening and

surrounding expanses of sterile waste rock. (In principle, the

tailings pond can be capped and planted. It remains to be seen

whether that will happen.) This is partly because mammoth pitmines are permanent disfigurements; the cost of restoring them

to their original condition would dwarf the value of the metals

they yield.

But it’s also because the community considers much of the

desolate region on its border sacred ground. This is especially

true of the Granite Mountain Speculator Mine Memorial, on

Butte’s northeastern edge, and which overlooks a wastescape

that, to the discerning eye, reveals the dilemma of large-scale,

industrialized copper mining—on the one hand, the ambi-

tion and, yes, even nobility of the work, as well as the contribu-

tion it made to the country; on the other, the hellish social and

environmental consequences. Hanson echoes that sentiment in

eloquent terms. The Butte mining district and other disturbed

sites he has photographed across the country are, as he writes,

“both arena and metaphor for the most constructive and mostdestructive aspects of the American spirit.”

Butte is unusual in that, for all the qualities the arena

and metaphor share with a historical battlefield—think of

Gettysburg—it is still “alive.” Mining continues. The East Pit

grows larger every day and the earthen berm of the Yankee

Doodle Tailings Pond rises ever higher. From much of the valley

floor, where the newer part of town is located, the ridge behind

the tailings pond is no longer visible. The dominant feature of

the landscape is the industrial shadow.That shadow is Butte’s burden. But it may also be the town’s

salvation, protecting it from those long on wealth and privilege

but short on imagination, the seasonal second-homers and itin-

erant recreationalists who owe allegiance to no particular place

or time. For Butte is a town where one cannot escape the conse-

quences of our urban-industrial way of life, where the sacrificial

nature of civilization is laid bare, memory manifest as geogra-

phy, for all time. Behold and beware. No matter how economi-

cally and culturally robust the community becomes—and do not

underestimate its capacity for reinvention—Butte will never be a

place for the faint of heart.

Lexington Mine, in Walkerville,

a Cornish neighborhood, 1987.

The surviving head framesmemorialize the work miners

did underground.

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