Word: copper
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...years later, a little man, almost buried in a great shock of hair and beard, came up from Colorado and began to deepen the Butte pits. William A. Clark learned his trade in a quartz mine and lost his savings in a gold mine. In Butte, he dug for copper. Gold miners, seeing his wagons start out on their 400-mile trek to the nearest railroad at Corinne, Utah, laughed aloud. "There go Clark's rocks," they jeered. And they were 98.37% right. Only 1.63% of the gray copper ore can be reduced to valuable metal...
Miner Clark was the first to discover the Butte copper veins. The first to develop them on a large scale was blatant, uncouth Marcus Daly. In 1879, a reduction plant was erected near Butte, saving the 400-mile overland haul. The next year, Irishman Daly began to make Butte roar. His men probed the earth night and day. Smoke poured out from 100 furnaces. Lumberjacks hacked down whole forests for timber to hold up excavations and tunnels...
Anaconda. Miner Clark's triumph over Miner Daly did not end the copper wars. Bitter and prolonged was the battle over titles between Miner Fritz Augustus Heinze, onetime friend of Miner Clark, and the Amalgamated Copper Co., predecessor of Anaconda. A great tactical advantage passed to Anaconda when it bought the Heinze properties. Gradually, Anaconda became master of Butte, a power in all Montana...
With Anaconda rose another mighty copperman, John D. Ryan. Copperman Ryan had been store clerk, drummer, oilman. He did business with Marcus Daly, and when Daly died, young Ryan took over his interests. Then Rockefeller-partner Henry H. Rogers invited him to take charge of Amalgamated Copper in Montana, then in the midst of the dispute with Heinze. In 1908, Rogers died and Ryan became president of Amalgamated. In 1910, it merged with Anaconda...
...Chairman of the Board of Anaconda, Copperman Ryan directs the affairs of the largest copper company in the world. Its assets total over $500,000,000, its working capital over $77,000,000. While Montana now yields first place to Arizona as a copper-producing state, the copper camp at Butte has disgorged one-sixth of all the copper mined in the world. And in 1922, Anaconda bought both the "biggest" American Brass Co. and, from the Guggenheim family, controlling interest in the Chile Copper...