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

Three: The Stack

THREE
The Stack
• 64 • And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. —Genesis :– The city of Anaconda is related to Butte but resembles it not at all, for it reaches skyward with the world’s tallest stack, from which the gases of the smelter are vented  feet into the Montana sky. —“Anaconda,” Fortune () The first stop of the specially chartered train that Saturday morning was in Garrison, a tiny farming and ranching community at the far northern end of the Deer Lodge Valley. The train then headed south toward Anaconda, pausing at every small country rail stop along the way to pick up passengers . Everyone rode free that day, courtesy of the Anaconda, or the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, as it was now called. When the train reached the stop at the company’s two-year-old Washoe smelter complex, company president William Scallon welcomed the crowd of nearly a thousand farmers, ranchers, and their families. A rare photograph from that summer day, July , , suggests a mostly eager and attentive audience that seems to crowd forward, curious to hear the words of Scallon and the
Washoe managers. A few, though, hold back, looking away toward the distant mountains or down to study their boots. Almost all are dressed in their Sunday best, as if they were on a church outing or a Fourth of July picnic. Most of the men wear suits and ties, the women long proper skirts and blouses. The girls in their bright summer dresses and hats stand out, floating like flecks of white in a sea of darker shades. A few women have opened their parasols, seeking some meager protection from the already hot Montana sun. The Anaconda-Amalgamated had invited the Deer Lodge Valley farmers and ranchers to the smelter for a tour of its brand-new three-hundred-foot smokestack and flue system. In a few more weeks, the Washoe officials explained , the smoke problem that had been killing the cattle and horses in the valley during the past year would be over. Much of the arsenic dust and other pollutants would settle out in the big new flue, while the tall stack would carry whatever remained so high into the air as to render it harmless. Over the next few hours,Washoe officials escorted their guests on a tour of the refurbished smelter. The bolder among them rode lifts up to the rim of the three-hundred-foot stack, where they could enjoy a breathtaking view of the nearby town of Anaconda and the long, narrow Deer Lodge Valley stretching off to the north. For many, though, the highlight of the tour was the luncheon, which the company held inside the giant Washoe flue. As one longtime Anaconda resident later recalled, “The setting was one of the most novel ever seen in the west.” At the point where all the smaller flues converged, the new smoke chamber opened up to some sixty feet wide and forty feet deep. Here the company placed enough tables for a hundred guests per sitting and served a lunch catered by one of the best restaurants in Anaconda. Fittingly for a copper smelter, hundreds of dazzling bright electric light bulbs lit up the space, lending a carnival atmosphere to the dark cavernous brick interior of the flue. Exactly which company official conceived of this brilliant bit of industrial theater is unknown. Perhaps it was Scallon himself, or maybe the clever Washoe manager, Frank Klepetko. Regardless, to stage a formal sitdown luncheon right in the belly of the Washoe’s new smoke flue was a dramatic way of suggesting that the company had solved the pollution problem in the valley. Perhaps many of the Washoe’s guests that day believed it. Surely many must have wanted to believe it, especially those who came from the neighboring company town of Anaconda, whose survival depended on the smelter’s continued existence. To witness the towering smokestack, to sit with a hundred others in the echoing chamber of the The Stack • 65 • mighty flue,to hear the learned engineers explain how it all worked—even the most doubtful among them must have felt some spark of hope...