Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives World Museum of Mining, Butte William Clark, Fritz Augustus Heinze, top and Marcus Daly, bottom, engaged in a fierce battle to control the state's copper empire at the turn of the century.

6. The Copper Kings

They commanded empires of ore and blurred the line between politics and money

By JOHN STUCKE of the Missoulian

The copper kings. Books have been written about their classic battles in turn-of-the-century Butte.

With egos too big for spacious Montana, three men made legislators little more than yes votes, and turned judges into political pawns and newspapers into attack dogs.

Their dealings lent an air of sophistication in a state where cattle outnumber people, yet it gave Montana a political black eye – the kind of big one you could expect by telling an off-colored Irish joke at the M&M on St. Patrick's Day.

William A. Clark was the first of Butte's copper kings. An entrepreneur, he owned a bank in Deer Lodge but knew his future was Butte.

By 1876 he took over mining properties when owners defaulted on loans.

That same year, an Irishman with the fabled ability to peer into the ground for the next great strike, came to Butte to run a silver operation in what is now called Walkerville.

During the next 24 years, Marcus Daly and William Clark would turn Butte into the biggest copper producer in the world. And they would fight like hell.

Daly wanted to leave his mark in business. Clark pined to be a statesmen – already he was wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most. Each wanted to reach his goals at the expense of the other.

Clark made a quick fortune with mines, small smelters and other enterprises.

Daly struck partnerships with financiers and developed the original Anaconda mine, which hit the world's purest collection of copper more than 300 feet underground.

The race was on.

Daly and his partners bought up adjoining properties, imported laborers from around the world – especially the Irish – and went to work on a smelter west of Butte along the bank of Warm Springs Creek.

He founded a town there and nearly named it "Copperopolis." That name, however, was already taken so he settled on Anaconda. Today, the Old Works that Daly built is covered by a grassy carpet that beckons golfers.

Daly's company was reorganized during the early 1890s, when it issued $25 million of stock that put ownership of the Butte Hill into the hands of out-of-state interests.

Still, the likable Daly ran the local operation until 1899 when the Standard Oil Co. bought control.

The 1890s probably remain the most colorful, troubling and uproarious decade in modern Montana history.

The lessons learned had far-reaching effects for the young state and set its course for the next century.

Steering that history were Daly and Clark, and a bit later the third leg of the copper king trio, Fritz Augustus Heinze.

Much of the "War of the Copper Kings" boiled down to Clark's ego, Daly's spite and Heinze's stealth.

Clark used his newspaper, the Butte Miner, to trumpet his run for senator from Montana and criticize Daly.

In response, Daly launched the Anaconda Standard, a broadsheet with splendid editing and artful taste.

But the two papers engaged in the sort of fight where truth was surrendered.

Daly succeeded in thwarting Clark's crooked attempts to land a Senate seat.

In return, Clark became a Helena hero by making sure it would be the state capitol.

Daly wanted his company town of Anaconda to be the seat of state government, and his supporters ridiculed "Helena's social airs, its cultural pretensions and its black and Chinese elements.

"Helena, they intimated, was a sissy and un-American town!" wrote historian Mike Malone in his book "Montana -- A History of Two Centuries."

Clark, meanwhile, fashioned small copper collars that symbolized the danger of having a state government in Anaconda.

In the end, Clark won that fight and Helena houses the state's copper-domed capitol.

And he also went to the Senate amidst one of the worst vote-buying bribery schemes in American history.

In 1900, the Montana Legislature sent Clark to Washington D.C. as senator, only to have the deliberative body refuse to seat him.

Clark returned to Montana and had Lt. Gov. A.E. Spriggs appoint him senator while Gov. Robert B. Smith was out of state on business dealings earlier arranged by Clark's people.

Clark then served in the Senate until 1907.

Even after Daly's death in 1900, Clark was still doing battle with Anaconda and joined forces with Heinze.

The two blasted Anaconda through their newspapers, prompting the company to begin buying up other state newspapers to make it a fight.

But when Clark went to the Senate, he became a conservative friend of Anaconda and broke his alliance with Heinze.

The clever Heinze used his control of judges and exhaustive teams of lawyers to give Anaconda fits.

But he finally lost and struck a deal to sell out his mining properties to Anaconda by 1906.

Today, a statue of Daly overlooks Butte from a perch at the campus entrance of Montana Tech. Clark's elegant mansion sits one block west of the Butte-Silver Bow County Courthouse. Both stand as reminders.

For Montana, Clark's greatest gift to the people was Columbia Gardens, the grand amusement park that unfortunately burned and was dismantled by Anaconda in the 1970s.

Although he amassed great wealth, his heirs didn't leave much in Butte or Montana.

And Daly, the fair workers' hero, established a company that for many years ran Montana like it was a subsidiary.

Their influence is long. Maybe for the wrong reasons.

– John Stucke covers business for the Missoulian.