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  • The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana, and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit by Brian James Leech
  • Sarah Stanford-McIntyre
The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana, and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit
Brian James Leech
Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019
376 pp., $29.95 (paper)

The City That Ate Itself focuses on Butte, Montana, birthplace of the Anaconda Mining Company and a city synonymous with the negative consequences of extractive industry. Part environmental history, part labor history, and part story of urban decline, this book describes just how much environmental contamination and social disruption one extractive community would accept in order to preserve the industry that gave it life.

Leech begins his narrative with the arrival of silver mining in Butte. Copper was discovered under Butte Hill at the end of the nineteenth century and silver followed soon after. The Anaconda Company was founded in 1881 and the city of Butte was founded to house the growing population. Anaconda expanded its operations, creating a rabbit warren of tunnels that stretched beneath the entire city. On the surface, ramshackle structures housed a colorful array of ethnic neighborhoods populated by immigrant communities from Ireland, southern and eastern Europe, and Mexico. Leech details miners’ social and cultural geography including foodways, drinking culture, kinship networks, and the construction of religious and civic institutions. As in other western mining towns, ethnicity was tied to union membership and helped to predict individual labor militancy. However, these traditions waned by the mid-twentieth century as the majority of Butte Hill’s valuable minerals were exhausted. Anaconda invested less and less into its home-town, shuttering popular municipal attractions and laying off workers. The Berkeley Pit mine opened in 1955 as the most dramatic of these cost-cutting measures.

Leech makes his most interesting scholarly interventions in his discussion of how Butte residents assessed the risk of living atop an underground mine and then directly next to the ever-expanding Berkeley Pit. Because the mines stretched directly below residents’ homes, domestic life was uniquely hazardous. Homes were beset with explosions, falling debris, sinkholes, contaminated water, and shifting structures. Later, open pit mining worsened the problem. While dependent on the company, many residents argued that Anaconda should be held responsible. Leech provides close analysis of records from Anaconda’s insurance claims department, in which industry geologists fielded local complaints and set often-arbitrary parameters for the level of noise and structural damage deemed safe. Leech explains that Anaconda manipulated community psychology, creating, for example, a predictable blast schedule set for the same time each afternoon. Such practices allowed residents to get used to the constant noise and chaos of living within an active mine site.

The City That Ate Itself is a story that illustrates the challenges faced by community activists. As the pit expanded, Anaconda bought up homes in advance of condemnation, offering residents money or alternate housing far away from the pit. As neighborhoods disappeared into the pit, some residents rallied. However, the city’s fundamental dependence on Anaconda created a sense of grim inevitability that overshadowed these [End Page 148] efforts. Leech punctuates this discussion with poignant oral histories of former residents who mourn the loss of their homes, communities, and social identities.

Leech’s story of community destruction culminates in the mid-1970s with an announcement that the pit would expand to devour the city’s entire downtown business district. The industry that created Butte would seemingly consume the entire city. Leech tracks city council efforts to secure federal grant money to move business activity out of town altogether. Leech contextualizes this proposal as part of a broader 1970s push for city-center urban renewal projects and a national discussion about urban blight. In this discussion, Leech misses an opportunity. Scholarly work on urban blight rarely features the Mountain West, and it would be interesting to see Butte placed more clearly within this broader legislative and political history of American industrial decline and urban renewal.

In his final sections, Leech discusses the downfall of the Anaconda company in the early 1980s. The Berkeley Pit and other operations were sold, mining in Butte was shuttered, and the city center was spared from demolition. The...

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