Historian Michael P. Malone called 1900-09 "the gateway decade." With the Anaconda Company on the rise, it was a time when the state entered a new corporate era, and agriculture replaced mining as the state's leading industry.

The most dramatic events of the decade were the climax of the War of the Copper Kings and the cranking up of homesteading, said Malone, who is president of Montana State University - Bozeman.

Indeed, agriculture became the state's No. 1 industry in that decade, a position it has kept for the entire century, said Harry Fritz, University of Montana history professor. Still, he noted, the "Treasure State" moniker prevailed - and for good reason.

Since the late 1800s, mining barons had been spending millions of dollars to outmaneuver each other in the search for gold, then silver, then copper. Butte's "richest hill on earth" was the center of the action, while smelters and smokestacks sprouted at Anaconda and Great Falls. According to Fritz, 20 percent of the state's population was living at Butte at that time.

The intense power struggle became known as "The War of the Copper Kings" and the battleground was littered with scandals. At the turn of the century, Helena was characterized in the press as "a city hysterical with guilt and greed" where the morning greeting was "What's the price of votes today?"

Copper baron, William A. Clark was responsible for much of the bad press because of his attempts to buy his way to a seat in the U.S. Senate. At that time, Montana's congressional delegation was elected by the state Legislature, so that body was the target of Clark's influence.

But tales of bribery and corruption predated Clark's dealings under Helena's Capital dome. During the fight to locate the state capital in the 1890s, competing copper king Marcus Daly spent $2.5 million in a failed attempt to locate the seat of state government in his own town of Anaconda. Clark spent at least $400,000 in his successful promotion of Helena as the state capital.

With only 52,000 votes cast in the 1894 capital selection, votes cost $56 apiece, according to Malone.

The feud between Daly and Clark only intensified with the addition of F. Augustus Heinze to the fray, but politics made strange partnerships in those days, as it does now. Clark and Heinze combined forces -(top)

"This time they got enough Democrats elected to the Legislature that Clark didn't have to bribe anyone in 1901 to get elected to the Senate," Fritz said.

At 59, Daly died a week after the 1900 election that made his archrival, Clark, a shoo-in for the Senate seat that Daly had fought so long to deny him.

The death of the Irish-born Daly was significant, according to Malone, who wrote that it meant "the Anaconda Co., now completely under the control of Standard Oil-Amalgamated Copper, would no longer be subject to the policies of a loyal Montanan; it was now a "foreign corporation."

Although Daly's death began the downward spiral of the Copper War, it wasn't until February 14th, 1906 that the Tribune's banner headline screamed, "The Copper War at an End." The end of the was followed the sellout of Heinze, who was later described by author and historian Joseph Kinsey Howard as "the most adept pirate in the history of American privateering up to his time." Howard wrote that Heinze's use and abuse of mining laws and the courts were accomplishments in piracy that were never equalled - at least not by 1943, when Howard's "Montana High, Wide and Handsome" was published. Engineers for Daly's company estimated that Heinze got away with $1 million worth of its ore by angling into his neighbors' claims.

While Clark and Heinze waged their battles with Amalgamated Copper - later to become known as the Anaconda Co. - in court rooms, political organizations and state assemblies, the copper warfare degenerated into physical combat below ground in tunnels of the mines at Butte.

The power struggle heightened in 1903 with Amalgamated's reaction to Judge William Clancy's decision in favor of Heinze. Complaining there was no use

trying to do business in Montana while "the courts were so manifestly averse to the Company," Amalgamated shut down all of its mines and smelters in Montana - in one stroke putting 15,000 men out of work, and not only in the copper industry.

The Tribune reported, "The effects of the shutdown will be felt in all parts of Montana, as there is hardly a county that the Anaconda company does not operate in, in one way or another. Wood choppers and lumbermen will be idle; coal miners will be out of work in a half-dozen counties." Fritz, a former legislator, said the shut down was "corporate blackmail to force the Legislature to convene and do the Company's bidding."- (top)

And it worked. Three weeks later, Gov. Joseph K. Toole called a special session of the Legislature to pass the Fair Trials bill.

In Great Falls, the news of the governor's decision was met with "wild rejoicing," the Tribune reported. It was "like a reprieve to a condemned man."

Malone wrote, "Observers around the nation watched in awe as a 'sovereign state' was held up by a corporation.

The Idaho State Tribune observed: "It took the Amalgamated Copper Co. just three weeks to coerce Montana into falling on her knees with promises of anything that big corporations might want."

UM economics professor Thomas Powers was reluctant to analyze the economic impact of shut down, citing the lack of statistics.

"Economists need statistics," he said. In general, he noted, the state didn't start to shake off the dominance of the Company until the 1960s. The final shut down of Anaconda's copper mining and smelter operation came in the 1980s.

Althoug he decried the heavy-handed tactic, Fritz said the shut down led to the consolidation of mining at Butte, a move that was necessary if the industry was to continue to make money. By 1910, he said, the holdings of Daly, Clark, Heinze and others were consolidated under the Anaconda Co. and by 1915, the Amalgamated name disappeared.

Although it began in the first decade of the 20th century, the rise of agriculture in Montana was really the big story of the second decade of the century, according to Fritz. Homesteading began in the first decade but it boomed after the 1909 liberalized Homestead Act doubled the amount of land that could be claimed. With the prospect of 320 acres of free land, the state's population mushroomed in the next decade.

"That's when the big rains started too," Fritz said.

Wheat and cattle became new treasures of the state.

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