In the late nineteenth century, the Butte hill held some of the richest copper deposits on earth, and copper was becoming essential to a nation wiring itself for electricity. Three men fought for control of that hill. Their struggle, waged from the late 1880s until 1906 with money, newspapers, lawyers, and political campaigns, is remembered as the War of the Copper Kings.
Marcus Daly was an Irish immigrant who learned mining from the ground up in California and Nevada. He arrived in Butte in 1876 to examine properties for the Walker brothers of Salt Lake City, and in 1881 he purchased a modest silver claim called the Anaconda, with backing from San Francisco investors George Hearst, James Ben Ali Haggin, and Lloyd Tevis. Digging deeper, the Anaconda gave up its silver and revealed an enormous body of copper ore. Daly organized the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, built the town of Anaconda around his smelter, and became the most powerful employer in Montana. By the mid-1890s, his company was among the largest copper producers in the world.
William Andrews Clark reached Butte by a different road. Born in Pennsylvania, he came west during the gold rushes and made his first fortune selling supplies to miners, then moved into banking. He bought mines, smelters, water works, and street railways, and he built the Butte house now known as the Copper King Mansion. Clark and Daly had once worked together in Montana politics, but by the late 1880s they were bitter rivals. The feud became public in 1888, when Daly used his influence to help defeat Clark's campaign for territorial delegate to Congress.
Their rivalry soon covered the whole state. When Montanans voted in 1894 on a permanent capital, Daly spent heavily for his town of Anaconda, while Clark backed Helena. Helena won, and Daly never forgave the defeat. Each man controlled a newspaper, Clark the Butte Miner and Daly the Anaconda Standard, and each paper attacked the other camp without restraint. In 1899, Clark's supporters in the Montana legislature elected him to the United States Senate, but evidence that his campaign had bribed legislators led a Senate committee to recommend against seating him, and Clark resigned in 1900 before the Senate could act. After Daly died in November 1900, Clark was elected again in 1901 and served a full term.
The third Copper King arrived as the first two were nearing the end of their fight. Frederick Augustus Heinze, usually known as F. Augustus Heinze, was a young mining engineer from New York who came to Butte in 1889 and built the Montana Ore Purchasing Company. In 1899, Standard Oil leaders Henry H. Rogers and William Rockefeller organized the Amalgamated Copper Company and acquired Daly's Anaconda interests, intending to gather most of Butte's mines into a single trust. Heinze refused. Drawing on the old mining law's apex rule, which let the owner of a vein's surface outcrop follow that vein beneath a neighbor's land, he claimed valuable ground inside Amalgamated's mines and tied the trust up in more than one hundred lawsuits, aided by friendly Butte judges.
Amalgamated answered with its heaviest weapon. In the fall of 1903, the company shut down nearly all of its mines and plants across Montana, putting thousands of men out of work, and it kept them closed until a special session of the legislature passed a law allowing litigants to seek a change of judge. The shutdown showed how completely Montana now depended on a single industry and a single company. Heinze fought on for three more years, but in 1906 he accepted a reported 10.5 million dollars from Amalgamated for his Butte holdings and agreed to end his lawsuits.
With Heinze gone, the war was over, and one company stood in command of the hill. The organization that emerged, known again simply as the Anaconda Company, dominated Butte's employment and Montana's public life for decades. The Copper Kings left behind mansions, a state capital fight that is still retold, and a lasting lesson about the Gilded Age. In Butte, private fortunes and public power were built from the same copper, and the contest for it shaped the city as surely as the mines did.