Mining the natural resources of America’s west has long been a mainstay of the economy of the western United States. It has been this way ever since people from the U.S. started settling out west. Two examples of this western mining industry, both the Anaconda-Butte Region in Montana, and the Southwestern Wyoming Region, will be explained in more detail here.
The Rocky Mountain region, like the Intermontane West, has quite an assortment of natural resources, in the form of valuable minerals that can be mined, harvested, and sold for good profits, especially on the international market, during peak times. This includes gold, silver, zinc, copper, lead, as well as a host of other minerals. Unfortunately, the market for these harvested minerals varies, making for a volatile market, and only allowing the mining companies to make a profit sometimes. Among the major mining areas of the Rocky Mountain region are the Leadville, Colorado area nearby Vail; the Butte-Anaconda district in Butte, Montana; the Coeur d’Alene district in Northern Idaho, just across the state border from Spokane, Washington; the Kootenay district in British Columbia; southwestern Wyoming, which is a newer development; and many other smaller locations throughout the district.
The Anaconda-Butte Region
One of these major mining locations, the Butte-Anaconda mining district in southwestern Montana, is a little over an hour’s drive from the state capital of Helena. This area has been in operation mining minerals since the late 1800’s when silver was discovered. Eventually copper was discovered nearby and the area soon had copper mining operations as well, so much so that it dwarfed the silver mine operations. Marcus Daly, the magnate who started the silver mines, and eventually moved to mining copper, in due course started getting financial backing from the Hearst family, known for publishing, and then the Rockefeller family got involved, it was rumored, to control the copper market.
Because of the possible wealth involved in extracting valuable ore from the ground, financial games and manipulation started to happen in this region, where the winner of the last game was sure to control the mining wealth until the next set of games.
For example, one of the largest trusts a little over a century ago, before the anti-trust laws came into effect, was the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which was formed by a trust between Marcus Daly’s Anaconda copper mines and a couple directors of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and which tried to gain a majority, or controlling share, of Anaconda’s stocks, which it eventually succeeded in doing.
Another aspect of this game was being able to have enough control over the supply of copper to control the price and make it artificially high (think DeBeers and diamonds). One of the ways to be able to control the price of copper was to control all the copper mines, which Amalgamated did by getting the two other copper mining magnates to eventually give up their mining possessions to Amalgamated. At one point, the Amalgamated Company closed down the copper mines, putting a large percentage of the state’s workforce out of work, in order to force the Montana state legislature to make some laws in their favor which led to their having a monopoly of the copper mines in the Anaconda-Butte area. Talk about leverage!
Another thing they did was buy up newspapers in the state, in order to have control of the media that helps determine perception of the company. They never let a bad story get put in the paper about themselves, only favorable ones.
They tried to help control the price of world copper prices by purchasing copper mines in Chile and Mexico, and purchasing America’s largest brass fabricator, which wholly used Anaconda Company copper (Amalgamated eventually got renamed the original name of Anaconda).
The company fell on hard times, like most businesses, during the Great Depression, came back out of that slump in the early 1940’s war effort which needed copper, fell on more difficult times in the 1950’s as the price of copper dropped and the costs of operation soared, forcing them to start doing open pit strip-mining operations, and fell on hard times again in the 1970’s as Chile’s and Mexico’s leaders confiscated their mines in order to nationalize them causing their operation to take a great financial loss. This great financial loss led them to sell the business to a company called ARCO (an acronym). A steep drop in the price of copper caused the Berkeley Pit (the name of the large open pit mine) to eventually cease all operations, only to become an EPA Superfund site, because of the contamination of nearby streams, and the fact that there is now a humongous pit where before there was nothing.
Thus marks the end of one of America’s great mining icons.
You can read more about this mining region by reading The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906 by Michael P. Malone (1995), or the book entitled Anaconda by Isaac F. Marcosson (1957). Both of these are rather old books, but tell the story of the region quite well.
The Southwestern Wyoming Region
While one mining region seems to have come to its end, another mining region seems to have been born, or perhaps we should say reborn, showing the process of death and rebirth, or boom to bust back to boom, this time in the area of minerals mining. In this case, as the mining region in Montana was coming to its end, another region of the Rocky Mountains was turning out coal, iron, and trona, which is also called soda ash.
The trona, or soda ash, mining operations dominate in this region, and unlike the mining operations in the Anaconda-Butte region, where all the local mines were owned by a single owner, who also controlled local newspapers and local politics, and who also happened to be American, in the case of trona mining, the mining operations are spread over several companies, almost all of which are foreign operations, being Japanese, Australian, French, Belgian, Korean, and so forth. I suppose that is just the times we live in, where the economy is increasingly globalized rather than just local, state, or national, but that also means that the profits end up going somewhere else as well. Trona, you will find, is used in many processes, including being used by the pharmaceutical industry in the making of drug products, glass, soaps, baking soda, and other useful products. It has been said that southwestern Wyoming produces a quarter of the world’s need for trona (read more here).
Like in other places scattered throughout Wyoming, there are many coal mines in operation in southwestern Wyoming. The Bridger Coal mine by Rock Springs, Wyoming, which has both a surface strip mine, and underground operations, is the largest of the coal mine operations in Sweetwater County, and is representative of the vast amounts of usually clean, low-sulfur coal that can be had for the asking (read more here). The Green River Basin, which includes southwestern Wyoming, northwestern Colorado, and northeastern Utah, is known for its large amounts of coal and trona deposits, and since this area has only started opening up to mining operations in the last few decades, there is still a large amount of potential there (read more here).
There is even the possibility of starting a uranium mine. There used to be uranium mining in the past in Wyoming, but since the price of uranium has gone up, the motivation to open up new mines to extract that commodity is extremely high. Of course, one of the main reasons for wanting to extract uranium, besides being used in the making of nuclear bombs, which hopefully will become politically obsolete within the next century, is the fact that it is used in the uranium enrichment process at nuclear power plants to produce electricity. If we decide to go the path of Germany, who recently decided to eventually dismantle all nuclear power plants in their country, then perhaps the demand for uranium will dramatically decrease, taking away the need for a uranium mine.
Besides trona, coal, and uranium, there is also iron mines, and the extraction of oil and natural gas, which also provides much needed work for the local population. Iron is needed in the making of steel products of all sorts, and is always in demand. All of the mining operations together have helped to drive people to the region for the possibility of work, and have re-stimulated the area’s economy.
The area also has a past when it comes to mining. Copper Mountain in Freemont County, Atlantic City, South Pass, and Lewiston, were known to be mining hot spots in the past, with the extraction of such minerals as gold, copper, iron, and aluminum, but many of those operations closed down years ago, only to leave behind either ghost towns or very sleepy, almost dead townscapes. The fact that new mineral wealth has been found in the region in the last few decades show that a new era has already started, and has already helped to rehabilitate the economic viability of the area. Of course, the state of Wyoming has had several cycles of boom and bust – perhaps this is just another of them? Let us hope not!
Conclusion
So, mining in the Rocky Mountain region, besides tourism, has become one of the economic backbones helping to drive local economies of the region, and has become an important source of different minerals that are used, not just nationally, but globally, allowing for some of the regions wealth gains to come from international sources. Mining, of course, is a volatile industry, where profit margins for mining companies can vary considerably based on prices at any given moment, and cause a booming operation to quickly become a bust.
Make sure to look below to find more articles that might also be of interest to you:
Sources and Other Readings:
Please note: Click on the website links to go to that website, and click on the book titles to find out more information about that book.
- Malone, Michael P. The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906 (1995)
- Marcosson, Isaac F. Anaconda (1957)
- While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills … and languishes
- Green River Basin, WY – ANSAC
- uranium mining in southwest Wyoming
