Marcus Daly verified Butte's first remarkably dense deposit of copper himself, at the 300-foot level of his Anaconda mine.
At the 600-foot level, he found the purest - at 55 percent - deposit of copper sulfide ever mined.
"They simply laid the copper sulfide ore among logs in huge piles and ignited them," said Missoula historian Don Spritzer.
Eventually, as the piles of waste rock grew, they covered the banks of Silver Bow Creek and the headwaters of the Clark Fork River.
When the tailings began to wash downstream, no one cared. It simply made room for more waste.
What happened, then, when William Clark - another of Butte's Copper Kings - decided to build a dam across the Clark Fork River at present-day Milltown could have been predicted.
Clark bought the townsite and much of the farm land below it in 1903. In 1905, he bought 20 acres at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers.
Meanwhile, he acquired water rights on both rivers, sufficient to operate a power plant.
And on Friday, Sept. 13, 1905, construction of the "great Clark dam" began. Built of timber cribs filled with rock collected nearby, the dam was among the largest hydropower plants of its time.
The electricity produced followed two 11,000-volt transmission lines to Missoula and another, smaller line to the nearby Montana Improvement Co. sawmill owned by Daly.
Clark soon built his own sawmill, the Western Lumber Co., in Milltown and an electric street car line from Missoula to Bonner.
On Friday morning, Jan. 10, 1908, the Missoulian announced the dam's completion and its reservoir's filling:
"The gates of the huge dam were first lowered on Sunday evening. They were lowered in a gradual manner and in the short space of 26 1/2 hours a stream of water 15 inches deep was flowing over the large spillway, while the waters were backed up the Missoula (Clark Fork) River a distance of one and one-half miles, completely inundating land that but a short time ago was used for agricultural purposes."
"The back waters also extend a considerable distance up the Big Blackfoot River, and in one place cover a former county road to the depth of 12 feet. The deepest spot is near the center of the dam, where the water measured 27 feet yesterday afternoon. The total area of the ground covered by the pent-up waters is nearly 600 acres."
Construction superintendent George Slack used the occasion to boast about the building materials consumed by the dam's construction.
"Two million feet of timber were used in the dam proper," he told the newspaper, "while in the concrete work, which is of vital importance, 5,000 barrels of cement found their way. Just how many thousand tons of granite are in the huge dam is a pretty hard question to answer; hundreds of tons of structural steel are also to be found in the great mass of strength that is nearing completion, and when the last piece of timber is added to the dam it will be in such condition that the highest waters ever known in this vicinity will not affect it in the least."
Clark's dam remained intact for exactly five months before the flood of 1908 left it in shambles - and delivered the clot of metals-polluted mine tailings that, nearly a century later, still choke Milltown Reservoir.
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