FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS, the Pend d’Oreille and Salish people have lived in what is now called western Montana, harvesting bitterroot in spring, then camas and wild rose in the summer. The valley where Butte sits was a common hunting area, where people fished the clear waters of Snt’apqey, now called Silver Bow Creek, with arrows.
The easternmost edge of Salish and Pend d’Oreille territory extends to where the city of Anaconda is now, 24 miles west of Butte. In 1855, the Hellgate Treaty ceded 12 million acres of Indigenous land to the United States; the people were forcibly moved to the Flathead Reservation, far to the northwest.
Catholicism had already arrived: In the 1820s, Catholic Iroquois employed by fur-trading companies told the Salish and Pend d’Oreille of the “black robes” — Jesuit priests — and, in 1831, the tribes dispatched representatives to St. Louis, asking missionaries to return West with them. In 1840, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet traveled to the region to preach the Gospel.
But Indigenous stories aren’t widely celebrated in Butte. The stories it tells and re-tells are copper-colored — tales from that postcolonial moment when America became a capitalist paradise and Butte its gilded Garden of Eden.
Butte began as a silver-mining camp in the mid-1860s. But after rich veins of copper were discovered in the early 1880s, a five-square-mile section of the town was heavily mined, producing about a quarter of the world’s copper supply, and roughly half of the United States’, within two decades. By 1882, the mines had produced 9 million pounds of copper; by 1896, they had unearthed 210 million.
The world rushed to Butte: Men from China and Finland, Ireland and Sweden, Italy and Serbia and Germany scrambled toward Montana, vying for jobs in mines run by the Anaconda company and others. Back then, the city was thick with acrid, arsenic-laden smoke from smelters dotting the landscape. Sometimes it was so thick, street lights were turned on at midday. “The thicker the fumes the greater our financial vitality,” boasted the local newspaper. “Butteites feel best when the fumes are thickest.” Mining waste was dumped in piles around the city. All the trees were cut down to make way for the mines.
Meanwhile, the Copper Kings made Butte their playground. The millionaires exerted political influence and controlled the newspapers. By 1888, William Clark had built a 34-room mansion in Uptown Butte, uphill from the rest of the city, for the equivalent of $8 million today. The buildings of Uptown, now part of one of the nation’s largest National Historic Landmark districts, still show off the gilded side of the city’s past: Streets are dotted with palatial brick Victorians, addresses painted on in flakes of 24-karat gold. The Hotel Finlen still drips with crystal chandeliers.