Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet

Two: Between the Heavens and the Earth

TWO
Between the Heavens and the Earth
• 24 • The operations of nature, mechanical and chemical, are supplemented by those of man, who is a great mimic. —T. A. Rickard Thus the heavens and the earth were finished . . . —Genesis : The autumn of  in the Deer Lodge Valley was like many in southwestern Montana before and since. The days were mostly dry and warm, the nights chilly and cloudless. Relatively little rain fell to wash the dust off the quiet farming valley, and the hay and other crops grew predictably slower as the daily hours of sunshine grew shorter. This was the typical cycle of autumn, one that the ranchers and farmers had adapted to and learned to plan for during the half century since the first Euro-Americans arrived in the valley in the s. What they did not know until much later was that these welcome and predictable seasonal patterns were now conspiring with poisons in the air to make their lands increasingly dangerous. Deer Lodge rancher Nick Bielenberg was among the worst hit. He watched with growing alarm and frustration as his once vigorous herds of cattle, sheep, and horses suddenly began to sicken and die. The owner of one of the oldest and most successful ranches in the valley, Bielenberg had never seen anything like this. In the course of only a few weeks, more than
a thousand head of cattle, eight hundred sheep, and twenty horses were dead. When he talked with neighbors, he learned that many were experiencing similar stock deaths. In different circumstances, Bielenberg and the other ranchers might have blamed some exotic plague or the introduction of a new poisonous herb to the valley.In the autumn of ,though,a more obvious explanation lay on the far southwestern edge of the valley where the four tall stacks of the Anaconda Company’s brand-new Washoe smelter sent a steady stream of stinking yellow smoke rolling out over the valley.1 So began the “smoke wars,” the battle between the Deer Lodge Valley farmers and the Anaconda over whether the smelter smoke was damaging crops and livestock, and if so, what should be done to solve the problem. The Anaconda had built its first copper smelter in the sparsely populated Deer Lodge Valley in , attracted to the area for the abundant fresh surface water available from Warm Springs Creek. The Washoe was fed by company ores from giant underground mines in nearby Butte, shipped to the smelter city over a dedicated rail line. The copper deposits were rich and astonishingly big, to an extent rivaled by only a handful of others in all of human history. The work of the Anaconda’s corporate engineers had made much of this natural wealth available for exploitation, and the thousands of workers who labored underground pushed the mines deeper and wider every day. By the time Nick Bielenberg’s cattle began to sicken, collapse, and die, Montana had been a state for not much more than a decade. Nonetheless, this remote and sparsely settled region was home to one of the most advanced examples of modern mining and smelting technology in the world. The sheer size and scope of the Anaconda operations would present daunting challenges to the mining engineers, and their allied experts, as they attempted to understand and control the poisons killing Bielenberg’s animals . Ultimately, their efforts would fail, though they made significant progress before the limits of their technology, a ruthless corporate drive for profit, and a ravenous American demand for copper undermined earlier successes. The result would be the dead zones, immense areas of environmental and human destruction. But that sad outcome was still several decades in the future. Before then,the mining engineers approached the challenge of the Deer Lodge Valley smoke problem with optimism, confident that they could and must find a solution.To not mine,to abandon that colossal hill of copper ore, was simply not an option. In the minds of the engineers, as in the minds of most Americans, copper was the metal of modernity, the shiny Between the Heavens and the Earth • 25 • red stuff that was helping to take the nation into a bright new age of prosperity and ease. After all, the man many believed to be the greatest inventor in the history of the world had made it so. A BRIGHT LIGHT FROM A DYING STAR The...