#butte #anacondacopper #montana

This video is a short history on the copper mines of Butte Montana. It tells you about the very start all the way to present day. We look at the founders of the mines, the miners and the labor strife and the massacre of striking miners.

Whenever we think of Butte, we tend to think of copper. And rightly so, because Butte is well known as the King of Copper when it comes to copper mining towns. However it never started off that way. Butte actually started out as placer gold camp back in the 1860s after the miners started moving north from California after the big rush there started to die off. Within a few years however the gold ran out and mining slowed down to an almost stand still until the 1870s when some silver was found. Even with the mining of silver the area never saw any real action but around the late 1880s when the country started to get telephones and electricty, that's when things started to get happening. It wasn't so much the silver that attracted the miners, but it was the high copper content of the ores that that drew in the interest and big money and put this place on the map.

By the mid 1880s, Butte had become a major copper producer and by 1896, the mines around Butte were producing over 25% of the world’s copper. These mines supplied work for over 8,000 men and by 1917, Butte had a population of over 100,000. Copper ore mined from the Butte mining district in 1910 alone totaled 284,000,000 pounds at the time, Butte was the largest producer of copper in North America and rivaled in worldwide metal production only by South Africa. The same year,in excess of 10,000,000 troy ounces of silver and 37,000 troy ounces of gold were also discovered. The amount of ore produced in the city earned it the nickname "The Richest Hill on Earth."

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