The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit by Brian James Leech (review)

Anyone who has traveled west on I-90 through southcentral Montana has likely experienced this incongruous sight: rising from the High Plains, a Tim Burtonesque fortress of red-brick dilapidation looming over the suburbs and strip malls of modern Butte. Those who exit and wind up the hill toward the old Central Business District can also park, stride onto a viewing stand, and gawk at the massive Berkeley Pit, its dark, toxic waters shimmering under that big Montana sky. Many excellent historians have tackled aspects of Butte's distinctive story, often focusing on its rough-and-tumble labor history and its vibrant ethnic cultures. In The City That Ate Itself, Brian James Leech has superbly synthesized this fascinating place's varied historical strands, capturing the ups-and-downs from its Civil War–era beginnings to the still uncertain postindustrial present and future.

Earlier chapters build upon and augment studies by David M. Emmons, Michael P. Malone, Mary Murphy, and others, exploring the centrality of mining in the evolution of Butte's working-class culture and neighborhood development and the unsettling transition from underground to open-pit mining. The second half of the book, which discusses the consuming of archetypal ethnic neighborhoods as the Pit expanded from the 1950s to the 1970s and the recent decades of coming to terms with the social and environmental costs following the Pit's closure in 1983, adds much to the city's story. Leech vividly describes post–World War II developments, such as the emerging environmental and historical preservation movements, Anaconda's far-flung financial challenges and declining prestige among Butte residents, and the jarring impacts of mine closures, beginning with the remaining underground operations in the 1970s. The author also skillfully pulls in a multitude of ideas orbiting in the 1960s and 1970s regarding technocratic problem-solving in addressing the deterioration of Butte's urban core. Leech concludes with an evocative summary of Butte residents' recent efforts to reclaim not only the landscape but also community, for instance with baby boomers' revival of ethnic pride through heritage festivals and reunions for neighborhoods that literally no longer exist.

Leech's sourcing for this impressive study presents a potent model for similarly ambitious scholars. Particularly notable are the use of oral history interviews (including ones he conducted) and Anaconda Company records that include correspondence regarding neighborhood residents' complaints about pit blasts and negotiations for property acquisitions to accommodate the Pit's expansion. There is considerably more going on in The City That Ate Itself than can be covered in a short review: open pit work's effects on male workers' sense of camaraderie, independence, and status; the impacts of noise, hazards, and displacement on social geography; excellent technical descriptions of evolving mining methods. Suffice it to say, the book is a significant contribution to understanding the history of "an industrial center in the middle of the rural West," (4) and, in a larger context, provides a template to investigate the social and environmental histories of other industrial cities across the Great Plains and mountain regions.