12/3/2023 0 Comments Anaconda montana history![]() In 1990 we bought a house and eleven acres on the right bank of the Clark Fork downstream from Missoula and moved in with our dogs and horses. It’s not a mystery why the state’s motto is oro y plata.Īfter I left the plains for the mountains I figured to be rid of poisoned water forever. In fact, the only reason I’m alive in the world is because my great-grandfather abandoned Ireland to try his luck in the gold fields of Montana. The coal mined along the Sand Coulee was used to power the locomotives of the Great Northern Railroad, which paid me in college to work as a porter in its sleeping cars. Taxes paid by the copper smelter and its workers in town helped make the public schools I went to as a child superior to the ones I would later attend in Dallas and Grand Forks. Montanans have always been compromised by mining. And they began using the ruined creek as a dump. They continued irrigating their lawns and gardens from the creek, staining everything an unwholesome shade of terra cotta. This witch’s brew of toxins was spewed by played-out coal mines upstream that had filled with ground water, which leached acids from the disturbed earth that made their way into the drainage, residential wells, and finally the Missouri River. One May, Sand Coulee Creek began running ribbons the color of rust. And miners were assaulting our streams decades before Montana became a state. The Treasure State’s suicide rate, high for decades, is now the highest in the nation. Neither kind of calamity is rare in Montana. When a fish brushes my foot I whoop with delight.įour years later my mother, Nancy Vaughn, was dead. Frogs and turtles splash from shore to the haven of the water. Pennyroyal and mint perfume the languid air. The stream is cool and lucid as it washes against my legs over white sand that sparkles in the summer sun. ![]() It’s my first coherent memory: Holding my mother’s hand, I’m wading with her in the shallow creek that flows behind our house. There’s no place in the Treasure State that’s safe from its own history. ![]() Part personal history and part reportorial narrative, Opportunity, Montana is a story of progress and its of copper and water, of father and son, and of our attempts to redeem the mistakes of the past. Stalled at the intersection of a fading extractive economy and a fledgling restoration boom, Opportunity’s story is a secret history of the American Dream and a key to understanding the country’s-and increasingly the globe’s-demand for modern convenience.Īs Tyer explores the degradations of the landscape, he also probes the parallel emotional geography of familial estrangement. As Tyer investigates Opportunity’s history, he wrestles with questions of environmental justice and the ethics of burdening one community with an entire region’s waste. ![]() In the twenty-first century, Montana’s draw is no longer metal but the blue-ribbon trout streams and unspoiled wilderness of the nation’s “last best place.” To match reality to the myth, affluent exurbanites and well-meaning environmentalists are trying to restore the Clark Fork River to its “natural state.” In the process, millions of tons of toxic soils are being removed and dumped-once again-in Opportunity. The toxic by-product of those fortunes-what didn’t spill into the river-was dumped in Opportunity. What he found instead was a century’s worth of industrial poison clotting the Clark Fork River, a decades-long engineering project to clean it up, and a forgotten town named Opportunity.Īt the turn of the nineteenth century, Montana exploited the richest copper deposits in the world, fueling the electric growth of twentieth-century America and building some of the nation’s most outlandish fortunes. The son of an engineer who reclaimed wastewater, Tyer was looking for a pristine river to call his own. In 2002, Texas journalist Brad Tyer strapped a canoe on his truck and moved to Montana, a state that has long exerted a mythic pull on America’s imagination as an unspoiled landscape. A memoir-meets-exposé that examines our fraught relationship with the West and our attempts to clean up a toxic environmental legacy ![]()
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