Anaconda Copper

Daly partnered with George Hearst, James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis in 1881 to develop it, and the company expanded dramatically in 1882 with the discovery of huge copper deposits.

In 1899, with Hearst and Tevis deceased, Haggin retired and Daly restructured the enterprise into the Amalgamated Copper Company, bringing in H H Rogers and William Rockefeller.

Its former operations are now the largest Superfund site in the country; CERCLA liability passed to BP upon its acquisition of ARCO.

Marcus Daly, a self-taught miner, engineer and geologist, bought a small silver mine called Anaconda in 1880.

At the time, Daly was working for the Walker brothers, mining investors and bankers from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Lacking capital to develop the mine, Daly sought financing from San Francisco mining magnate George Hearst and his partners, James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, of Hearst, Haggin, Tevis and Co. and the Anaconda Company was born in 1881 with Daly as a 25% partner in the enterprise.

In 1899, Daly teamed up with two directors of Standard Oil to create the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company which grew to become one of the largest trusts of the early 20th century.

The company was managed by the Ryan-Kelley team and was growing fast, expanding into the exploitation of new base metal resources: manganese and zinc.

In 1926 Anaconda acquired the Giesche company, a large mining and industrial firm, operating in the Upper Silesia region of Poland.

Under the pressure of a "joint account" set up by Ryan and Rockefeller of nearly a million and a half shares of Anaconda Copper Company, prices fluctuated from $40 in December 1928, to $128 in March 1929.

The United States Senate held hearings on the stock manipulations, concluding that those operations cost the public at the very least, $150 million.

[citation needed] In 1929 Anaconda Copper Mining Co. issued new stock and used some of the money to buy shares of speculative companies.

Anaconda ranked 58th among United States corporations in the value of World War II-military production contracts.

Later in 1971, Anaconda's Mexican copper mine Compañía Minera de Cananea, S.A. was nationalized by president Luis Echeverría Álvarez's government.

Six years after ARCO acquired rights to the "Richest Hill on Earth", Butte's mines were completely idle.

The areas of Butte, Anaconda, and the Clark Fork River in this vicinity became highly contaminated by a century of mining and smelting operations.

Milling and smelting processes produced wastes with high concentrations of arsenic, as well as copper, cadmium, lead, zinc, and other heavy metals.

Beginning in 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency designated the Upper Clark Fork river basin and many associated areas as Superfund sites—the nation's largest.

Since then, ARCO and BP have spent hundreds of millions of dollars decontaminating and rehabilitating the area, though the job is far from finished.

Glencore continued CFAC operations through 2009, when it temporarily shuttered the plant due to high electricity costs and low market prices.

[18] While campaigning, "Anaconda's supporters portrayed Helena as a center of avarice and elitism while promoting their choice as the pick of the working man.

Flexing its political muscle again in 1903, the Anaconda Company closed down operations within all of Montana, putting 15,000 men out of work until the legislature enacted the regulations it demanded.

Montanans were angered by this decision and from that point forward, to suggest a politician "wore a copper collar", could cost him the election.

In the early 20th century, Butte's culture with its perverse pride in its wide open character was a response to the people's belief in the all-encompassing power of the company.

Butte's bars, gambling dens, dance halls, and brothels were among the few public institutions not owned or controlled by Anaconda.

It was not only the hazards of mining and the grim environment of Butte that propelled men and women to frenzied gaiety, but also the thought that here were arenas of self-expression denied them elsewhere in a city ringed by the 'copper collar'.

[24] The "copper collar" symbolized different things to different people but "the Anaconda Company used the tactics of an authoritarian state to quash a legitimate labor movement within its corporate fiefdom.

That the press, an elemental part of democracy, was used in the assault marks a black period in the history of American journalism.

"[25] In Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America, John B. Wright writes that for decades, the Anaconda Company: mined and smelted metal, leveled forests, owned the newspapers, bribed the legislature, set the wages, murdered union organizers, exported the earnings, and finally shut down, leaving Butte and Anaconda the poorest cities in the states and the largest EPA Superfund site in the country.

In the Semiotic Square for the "copper collar" (see illustration), Marcus Daly is considered the assertion and Miners is the negation in the first binary pair.