Tracing the Tale of the Montana Town Copper Smelter Polluted

Pollution in Anaconda, Mont., dates back more than a century, to when a company town was created in Deer Lodge County to process the copper from the giant mine in nearby Butte.

• Smoke from the smelter stack in Anaconda made the air smell and taste of sulfur. Farmers complained their horses and sheep were becoming mysteriously ill. In the decades that followed, the company bought out the farmers and started a nearby town called Opportunity, with a contract clause that it retained the “right to pollute the atmosphere” and the Clark Fork River, which flows north past Anaconda toward Missoula. ...