Montana Mining, From the Richest Hill on Earth to America’s Only Platinum Mines

Montana’s license plates say Treasure State, and the treasure was never a metaphor. One hill above Butte carried so much metal that it electrified a young nation, and a band of rock in the Beartooth foothills holds the only platinum and palladium mines in America. This is our living master report on Montana mining, updated as Season 1 of Hunting Hidden Treasures heads for the state.

The hill that wired America

Butte started as a gold placer camp in 1864 and nearly died twice before it found its destiny. Silver carried the town through the 1870s, and then electricity changed everything: the world suddenly needed copper wire, and Butte sat on one of the greatest copper deposits ever found. By the early 1900s the Richest Hill on Earth was one of the largest copper producers in the world, and the fights between its Copper Kings, William Clark, Marcus Daly, and Fritz Heinze, reached all the way into the US Senate.

The Anaconda Copper Mining Company came to dominate the hill, the smelter city it built next door, and for a while much of Montana itself. In 1955 mining moved from shafts to the open Berkeley Pit, which ran until the early 1980s and remains one of the most visible reminders in America that mining history includes its cleanup chapters too.

Montana today

Mining never left Butte. Montana Resources works the Continental Pit today, producing copper and molybdenum from the same mineralized system the Copper Kings fought over. South of Columbus, Sibanye-Stillwater operates the Stillwater and East Boulder mines along the Stillwater Complex, the only primary platinum and palladium producers in the United States and one of the highest-grade PGM deposits on Earth: metals every catalytic converter still depends on. In the Cabinet Mountains of northwest Montana, development-stage copper-silver projects like Rock Creek and Montanore hold some of the largest undeveloped reserves in the country.

Who matters in Montana

• Montana Resources, mining copper and molybdenum at Butte’s Continental Pit, the working continuation of the Richest Hill on Earth.
• Sibanye-Stillwater, operating America’s only platinum and palladium mines along the Stillwater Complex.
• Hecla Mining, advancing the Rock Creek and Montanore copper-silver projects in northwest Montana.

We add companies to this report as work in the state moves, whether or not they are tour partners.

On the Season 1 tour

Episode 11 of Hunting Hidden Treasures closes the season in Butte, where headframes still stand over the neighborhoods and the story of American electrification starts underground: the finale before the convoy rolls home.