Butte Montana

Butte Montana
Well I arrived in Butte Montana just a short drive from Deer Lodge and what a surprise I was in for. This was the copper capital of the US and had dozens of mines starting in the 1860’s and the last one closed in about 1980 (that is underground mines. Butte is supposed to have about 10,000 miles of tunnels I believe under the city and about 400 miles of mine shafts. Unfortunately now they are all filled with water because as the mines closed they shut off the pumps used to keep the water out and they filled with water rather rapidly. I spent my time at Montana Tech College which is devoted to mining, engineering, and geology pretty much.
In its boom days around 1900 Butte was about 130,000 people but now has less than 40,000. Montana Tech is where the Mining Museum is and they have recreated a whole mining town there as it must have existed in the 1900 with buildings that were relocated from there original sites and exhibits of every kind. There is even an optometrist office.
You can see the Gallus of most of the mines that were in Butte. These are the large towers above the mine shafts that pulled up the ore and dropped the men into the mines.
I took a tour of one of the mines The Orphan Girl called that because it was so far away from the other mines. We went down into the mine with helmets and lights and saw how the ore was extracted before heavy machinery using mules and ore cars and before that with hand winches to lift it out of the ground. Later in the mine we saw the progression of the mechanization of the mining with air powered drills and loaders to move the ore to the surface.
We were told of the word’s worst mining disaster in 1917 here when 168 miners died because of a fire in one of the mines (the Granite Mountain Spectulator Mine). A real tragedy and there is a large memorial in Butte to the miners lost in all mining accidents.

1 A real man's minor
2 The cage to take you down
3 Into the unknown
4 Mining Museum