What the Berkeley Pit Left Behind

Wind comes over the east rim of the Berkeley Pit like it has somewhere to be. The railing is cold even in August. Below, the far wall of the old mine drops away in enormous steps, each bench wide enough to have been a road, each one drowned in stillness, until the bottom is lost in water the color of a tropical postcard. The sight stops people mid-sentence. The town of Butte, stacked up the mountainside behind the lookout, is easy to forget when the water is right there, glowing as if lit from underneath.

The water does not look poisonous. It looks clean, almost empty, brighter than any natural lake in Montana has a right to be. The wind off the Continental Divide carries a mineral sting, the faint smell of a struck match, and that is the only warning. No boats move. No fish feed. Gulls come over the ridge from the town dump, and they do not come down to the surface.

Behind the lookout, the city climbs the hill—brick, clapboard, corrugated tin, the black steel of mine headframes rising among the houses like church spires. Higher still, near the top of the Divide, the white figure of Our Lady of the Rockies stands with arms out, floodlit every night, a blessing for a town that spent a century taking the world out from under itself.

At the railing, the whole bargain is laid out at once. The town. The hole. The water. And the water is still coming.

The Richest Hill on Earth

The open pit was never how Butte first made its money. The hill was worked first for gold in the gulches, then silver in the hard rock, then copper, which turned out to be the true lode—one of the great copper deposits on earth, a hill so rich that men named it The Richest Hill on Earth and meant it as arithmetic. The Anaconda mine, the Speculator, and dozens of lesser shafts went down into the mountain and spread out under the city in miles of drifts and crosscuts, until the whole underside of Butte was hollow.

The Copper Kings fought over that ground with the energy of men who knew it was endless. They bribed juries and bought newspapers and left the town with a long education in who really owns a city. Mining is not a clean business, and Butte was not a clean town. It had churches and union halls and a millionaire's park, and it had the Speculator fire of 1917, which killed more than a hundred and fifty men in the dark, a loss of life that remains the worst in American hard-rock mining. The town buried them and went back down.

William A. Clark, the man the town most loved to hate, built the gardens it adored. On the bare east slope he planted grass and flower beds, laid a small lake in the ground, put up a dance pavilion and a bandstand, and called it Columbia Gardens. For the working families of Butte the park was a green heaven—Sunday dresses, boating, cold lemonade—the one place on the hill that did not smell of sulfur. The miners knew it was a gift from a man who had often been their enemy. They took it anyway, the way the poor take charity, and made it their own.

But the deep shafts could not get at the best of the ore, and in 1955 the Berkeley Pit opened on the east side of town. It was a new kind of American mine, open to the sky, worked by shovels and trucks the size of houses, and it was cheap. The pit ate rock the way the old mines ate men, and it grew. As it grew, it ate the immigrant neighborhoods east of town—the Italian and Finnish and Irish and Serbian streets of Meaderville, McQueen, and East Butte, the corner groceries, the boarding houses, the backyard gardens. Real streets with real names, condemned, razed, dug up, gone. Then the pit came for the park on the hillside, needing the ground beneath it. Columbia Gardens went the way of the neighborhoods: the pavilion, the lake, the grass that had been a miracle on a copper mountain, all of it gone into the hopper of the national hunger for copper.

That is the first thing the Berkeley Pit left behind. Not a hole—the disappearance of whole neighborhoods from the map of the country, whole blocks of Butte, and a gentler life the town has not managed to rebuild.

The Water Rises

Mining at the Berkeley Pit stopped in 1982. The price of copper had collapsed, and the company that owned the ground—by then Atlantic Richfield, which had absorbed the Anaconda Company—cut its losses and walked away. For decades the deep workings had been kept dry by pumps. With the men gone, the pumps were shut off, and the water came back. It moved through the old shafts and drifts as if it had only been waiting, dissolved a century of broken rock, and gathered at the bottom of the open cut. Then it began to climb the walls.

The water climbed past the last benches, past the cables and the ruined haul trucks too big to haul out, and it kept climbing. It was not water anymore. It was a solution of copper and cadmium and arsenic and zinc and sulfuric acid—a chemistry set brewed from a hundred years of mining—and every spring the level stood higher than the spring before. Butte, which had always known exactly what lay under the ground, began to reckon with what was rising from it.

In November 1995 a snowstorm drove a flock of snow geese off course over the Divide. The geese, white as the weather, took the Berkeley Pit for open water. Hundreds came down on the blue surface. Hundreds never rose. The deaths made the news, and the pit became something worse than a wound in the ground: a bright trap in the middle of a continental flyway. Noise and watchers keep birds off the water now, season after season. The geese go over high.

What followed was not an answer but a sentence. The pit was folded into the Superfund cleanup of the Clark Fork watershed, one of the largest in the country, and fenced. At Horseshoe Bend, on a bench at the water's edge, a treatment plant went up, built by the companies the law could still reach, and began its permanent shift. It pumps the water out, knocks the acid flat with lime and chemistry, settles the metals out, and lets the cleaned water run as an ordinary stream toward the creek that runs through town. The plant has no end in sight. It runs in rain and cold and August heat, and it will run as long as it rains on the Butte hill.

Mining City

And yet the town is still there.

Butte is smaller than it was, poorer than it dreamed, a little shaggy at the edges, unmistakably alive. The old headframes stand among the houses; some are lit at night, some rust quietly, and the town keeps them the way other towns keep statues. Open-pit mining is not finished with the hill—a working pit still cuts into the ground over the east ridge, and ore trucks still grind past the same landmarks.

The Berkeley Pit has become, of all things, an attraction. People pay at a small stand, walk out onto the overlook, and stand in the wind looking down at the impossible blue. The water changes color with the load of minerals and the light—peacock, gunmetal, a blue so bright the camera cannot hold it. It is a wonder in the old sense: something to marvel at and to fear. The town lives beside it the way people live beside volcanoes or great rivers, with the knowledge folded into ordinary errands that the ground underneath could, in some future, change everything again.

What the pit left behind is not only the lake. It is the shape of the town's memory. The copper from this ground wired the nation; it ran through the telegraph lines and the first power grids and the telephone exchanges of the early West. Butte traded its neighborhoods, its park, its green Sunday mornings, its own earth, for that current in the wire. The pit seems to call that a fair trade. The town has not agreed.

At dusk the floodlights come up on Our Lady of the Rockies, high on the ridge, and the pit below goes dark, absorbing the last of the light. The treatment plant hums. The water keeps coming, undefeated, at a pace measured in decades. The geese pass over in their season and do not come down. The town keeps its lights on, at the edge of the blue lake, at the edge of the richest hill on earth.

Photos: James St. John (CC BY 2.0); Banjodog (CC BY-SA 3.0); w_lemay (CC BY-SA 2.0)