Copper Mining

For nearly seventy years, Butte made its living underground. Thousands of miners followed rich veins of copper deep below the hill in a warren of shafts and tunnels. In 1955, the Anaconda Company changed the direction of mining in Butte. Instead of going deeper, the company began to dig from the surface down, opening an enormous open-pit mine on the east side of the city. The pit took its name from the older underground Berkeley mine near the spot where the digging began.

Few places on earth have earned a nickname as confidently as Butte. The mining district that residents called "the Richest Hill on Earth" was concentrated in only a few square miles of granite above the city, yet within that small area lay one of the greatest concentrations of valuable metal ever found. The hill produced copper above all, but it also yielded large quantities of silver, zinc, lead, manganese, and gold.