Three miners from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, wearing their headlamps, photographed in 1942.
Our Lady captured at the beginning of sunset one evening in 2017 by photographer Doug Zwick.
Photo by: Doug Zwick/Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0
How did a 90-foot-tall likeness of the Virgin Mary come to rest on a mountaintop overlooking Butte, Montana? To answer that requires telling two stories. The first stretches back to ancient times, when women first came to be associated with mining—its dangers, and its riches. The second begins in the late 19th century, when Catholic immigrants arrived in Butte to work in the copper mines, and ends in the 1980s, when Butte’s mining industry collapsed, sending the region’s economy into a tailspin and leading the community to search for both divine and economic interventions. [1]
Humans began digging in the earth in search of minerals like ochre, flint, gold, silver, copper and iron as many as 40,000 years ago, though mining as we would recognize it today dates to the Bronze Age (approximately 3500 BCE). [2] Around this time the people of Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, built a shrine to a goddess of fertility and sexuality called the Great Mother; when the Greeks arrived in Cyprus, they called her Aphrodite. Great Mother and Aphrodite were female representations of the earth and nature, and their worshipers believed they were the origin or seed of everything that sustained human life. For example, to enter a cave and extract mineral ores was thought to be like entering the body of the earth, the Great Mother’s womb, and taking some of its fruits. Aphrodite in particular came to be associated with the island’s copper mines, and shrines were often located near copper workshops—Cypriots believed Aphrodite extended her divine protection over the mining and smelting of copper. With the transition to Christianity during the reign of the Roman Empire, worship of the Virgin Mary came to replace the worship of Aphrodite. By the time Catholic miners arrived in Butte, it was Mary that miners turned to when they sought divine intervention in the (feminine) natural world. [3]
Gold, silver and copper ores were discovered on the ancestral lands of the Salish in the 1860s, and the mining camp of Butte sprouted up around 1864. [4] However, the real mining boom in Butte took off in the 1870s, when the Lexington, Original, Colusa, Mountain Chief, Gambetta, Travona, Alice, Centennial and Anaconda mines all opened. By 1879, when Butte City incorporated, the population had grown to 3,363 people (from only 1,000 in 1876). [5]
Many of Butte’s newly arrived miners were immigrants to the United States. They came from Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, Wales, Scotland, Lebanon, China and the Austro-Hungarian empire, and they turned Butte into a cosmopolitan city, especially considering its remote location in Montana Territory. Butte’s new residents spoke many languages and practiced many religions, but it was Irish Catholicism that became central to Butte’s social life and politics. [6] In 1890 there were 2,300 Irish immigrants in Silver Bow County, many of whom had been copper miners in Ireland's County Cork. When that industry declined in the 1850s and 1860, miners left Ireland and found work in Butte’s new copper mines, beginning a chain migration that created the neighborhood of Dublin Gulch (in the area of town that eventually became the Anaconda Mining Company’s Berkeley Pit). [7]
Three miners from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, wearing their headlamps, photographed in 1942.
Of the many mines in and around Butte, the Anaconda Mine—with its deep veins of copper—dominated. A prospector discovered silver and copper on Anaconda Hill, east of Butte, in 1866, but didn’t have the money to develop a major mining operation. In 1880 an experienced group of miners and financiers bought the Anaconda claim, and by 1884 they were operating an active mine and smelter. [8] In 1887, 50 million pounds of copper were carried out of the Anaconda mine; just a few years later, the Anaconda operation employed 3,000 people and was smelting 3,000 tons of ore per day. [9] When the Anaconda Mining Company formally incorporated in 1891, it had a valuation of $12.5 million, which quickly doubled to $25 million (approximately $710 million in 2020 dollars). Just four years later, when the company reorganized again and added “Copper” to its name, its value had grown by another $5 million. [10]
The Anaconda Copper Mining Company continued to grow and expand, acquiring copper mines in Chile as well as other assets, and by the end of the 1920s it was the United States’ eighth-largest industrial company. [11] In 1955, Anaconda bought up properties in Butte’s eastside neighborhoods, including Dublin Gulch, and began mining the Berkeley Pit. Open-pit mining was less dangerous than tunneling deep underground, but it also required fewer workers (a cost savings for the company). These savings were not enough, however, to make up for the loss of Anaconda’s Chilean mines when President Salvador Allende nationalized the country’s copper industry 1971. Anaconda laid off thousands of its Montana workers to try and save the company, but the writing was on the wall. In 1977 the oil company ARCO bought what was left of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Although ARCO tried to breathe new life into the dying industry, in 1983 it shut down operations in Butte—leaving the city’s residents and economy, in the words of scholar Pat Munday, “battered, disillusioned, and in need of a protector.” [12]
Initially, Our Lady of the Rockies was not envisioned as Butte’s protector. Miner Bob O’Bill’s wife was very sick during the late fall of 1979 and his friend, a fellow Catholic, urged him to pray to the Virgin of Guadeloupe (an apparition of the Virgin Mary who appeared to a native Mexican man, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, in 1531 and became an important symbol for Mexican Catholics). O’Bill prayed for his wife’s recovery and vowed that if she recovered he would build a statue of Mary in the mountains overlooking Butte. [13]
O’Bill’s wife did survive—however, within a year, many Butte miners watched their profession erode away as ARCO’s Berkeley Pit shut down. When the grieving community learned of O’Bill’s plan to erect a statue of the Virgin Mary, they embraced it as a symbol for the preservation of the city, and many former mine workers volunteered their time and expertise to help with its construction. “The network of operations and actors required for the statue’s construction were, on the one hand, a testament to Butte’s community solidarity and refusal to cede decline,” notes professor of religion Brennan Keegan, “and on the other, only made possible by mine closure.” [14] The statue was completed in December 1985, after six years of hard work.
Although O’Bill and many others saw the statue as a shrine and symbol of divine intervention, officially Our Lady of the Rockies is a nondenominational monument honoring women and mothers. Munday argues that Butte’s embrace of Our Lady of the Rockies is the continuation of “thousands of years of Western culture’s association of mining with Earth Mother goddesses … a way for mining cultures to cope with the many troubles stemming from mining—including physical dangers such as cave-ins, health hazards such as arsenic poisoning, environmental pollution, and economic downturns.” [15] Anthropologist Janet Finn, who studied the Anaconda mining communities in Butte and Chile, argues that Mary’s protections were believed to extend further, making her “the ultimate guardian of community moral and social order.” Just as Butte’s social and economic life started to unravel, the construction of Our Lady of the Rockies “created a community of men once again bound by the intimacy of doing,” and “in this predominantly Catholic community, a key symbol of Catholicism and womanhood became the focus of men’s dreams, desires, and craftmanship.” [16]
Every year approximately 10,000 visitors take one of the twice-daily tours (June–October) up to the base of Our Lady of the Rockies, where they can visit the small chapel and enjoy a stunning view of Butte. [17]
ARCO’s Berkeley Pit mine as it appeared in the late 1970s.
One of the homes destroyed in the late 1970s to make way for the expansion of the Berkeley Pit mine. This was in a neighborhood called Finn Town.
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