The City That Ate Itself focuses on Butte, Montana, birthplace of the Anaconda Mining Company and a city synonymous with the negative consequences of extractive industry. Part environmental history, part labor history, and part story of urban decline, this book describes just how much environmental contamination and social disruption one extractive community would accept in order to preserve the industry that gave it life.
Leech begins his narrative with the arrival of silver mining in Butte. Copper was discovered under Butte Hill at the end of the nineteenth century and silver followed soon after. The Anaconda Company was founded in 1881 and the city of Butte was founded to house the growing population. Anaconda expanded its operations, creating a rabbit warren of tunnels that stretched beneath the entire city. On the surface, ramshackle structures housed a colorful array of ethnic neighborhoods populated by immigrant communities from Ireland, southern and eastern...
