Anaconda Copper

Anaconda grew out of “the richest hill on earth,” the copper mountain under Butte, Montana, that Marcus Daly began working in 1881. By the early twentieth century it was one of the largest corporations in the world and the unchallenged master of its home state: it employed Montana, owned much of its press, and ran its politics so completely that Montanans simply called it “the Company.” Its reach extended far beyond Montana, above all to Chile, where its Chuquicamata mine was the biggest open-pit copper operation on the planet and the source of most of Anaconda’s profit.

That concentration of value in Chile is what killed it. On 11 July 1971, under President Salvador Allende, the Chilean Congress voted unanimously to nationalise the great copper mines — Anaconda’s Chuquicamata and El Salvador among them — and the company lost the assets that made it rich at a stroke. Allende called the day a second independence; for Anaconda it was the beginning of the end. Stripped of its Chilean profits and squeezed by falling copper prices, the remnant could not stand alone, and in 1977 it was bought by the oil company ARCO and dissolved, the Anaconda name retired. What it left behind in Montana was the Berkeley Pit, a flooded open mine of acidic, metal-laden water that became one of the largest toxic-cleanup sites in the United States — the afterlife of the company that had owned the state.