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163 F o u r The Ecology of Ore Processing Pollution and the Law in the Deer Lodge Valley DOI: 10.5876/9781607322351.c04 The great bulk of the metallic ores, when in their natural situations, constitute a most heterogeneous mixture, in which the really valuable metal exists only in a small proportion, chemically combined with one or more mineralized substances, and entirely intermixed with sparry and earthy matter, and ores of inferior metal. John R. Leifchild, Cornwall: Its Mines and Miners (1855) Between Butte and Missoula the lovely and limpid river which Lewis and Clark marveled at is now transformed into a muddy, slimy, dirty river, as foul looking as the water of the Chicago, the Tiber or the Yarra-Yarra. Along its banks have grown up communities rich, and even luxurious, and the wondrous prosperity of Butte is responsible for the destruction of the beauty of the once lovely Hell Gate River. Pete O’Farrell, Butte: Its Copper Mines and Copper Kings (1899) The amount of arsenic present is very large. Horace J. Stevens and Walter Harvey Reed, The Copper Handbook (1910) By the turn of the twentieth century, the mass production of copper in oversized ore-processing plants comprised the material heart of a new energy regime in the United States. In urban centers back East, in Europe, and in Japan, electrification was changing the face of domestic life, work life, and leisure time. Alongside the internal combustion engine, electrification systems created the technological context for vast changes in US culture, contributing to a growing emphasis on the domestic and institutional consumer—predominantly urban and aspirationally middle class. The rural mass production of metals —copper, zinc, lead, iron, silver, and eventually bauxite and uranium—represented the necessary material precondition and continued prerequisite for the generation of this mode of production. It was an energy regime of intricate machines made of mineral-based materials. It was a mining society.1 the ecology of ore processing 164 Electricity was first used in the urban streetcar systems constructed in the 1890s but was then extended into the apartments and houses of city dwellers served by electrical-generation utility companies, which built vast networks of municipal and domestic power throughout the developed world (indeed, defining the developed world as such) during the first quarter of the twentieth century. This development produced growth seemingly without end. The presence of electrical power as a regular part of domestic life encouraged markets in new domestic electrical goods. Middle-class consumption became an increasingly important and distinct source of economic growth. Electrical systems and many of the technologies they supported became so much a part of everyday existence that modern life became virtually unthinkable without them. This world-historic technical accomplishment was not only made possible by the profligate production of copper; it also, in turn, linked the western mountain copper production centers ever more intimately with the environment of modern urban places and assured a regular market in copper for years to come. By the turn of the twentieth century, the volume of trade in copper products attracted new levels of finance in the form of trust companies eager for a chance to participate in the apparent riches of the western metal production that supported the new technologies of the urban environment. For eastern financiers with extensive fortunes and, more important, access to the fortunes of others, copper mining and processing became a gamble of significant consequence. Despite access to vast sums of liquid capital and the best mining and engineering minds on the planet, the new investors still had to produce copper at a low enough cost to return a regular profit. This persistent challenge had already placed Montana’s large-scale copper industry on a path of endless and costly reinvestments. Ore qualities and market prices could not be trusted. During the entire period of initial consolidation in the 1880s and 1890s, the large producers in Butte had battled over underground ownership of ore lodes, and Butte residents had objected to the pall of smoke polluting their valley air. One of the many obstacles to profitability had been the limits on the space and volume of throughput imposed by the size of the Summit Valley. By the beginning of the twentieth century, centralized processing appeared to be the only solution to the ongoing market chaos. Copper’s new role in urban life had inspired confidence in a steady market for the metal, and financedriven consolidation began in Butte at the hands of...

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