The Heyday of Working-Class Montana

Like many Western states, the effort to privatize public spaces has been central to the history of Montana, ever since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first reached the state in 1805. White settlers funneled into the state throughout the 1800s, forcing indigenous people from the land and creating private property. The discovery of copper in the late nineteenth century created a large industrial working class that made Montana’s history distinct from its neighboring rural states.

The Anaconda Copper Mining Company mined copper in one of the richest deposits in the world in Butte, Montana. The copper was then smelted in the nearby town of Anaconda and processed in Great Falls. Lumber towns popped up in Northwest Montana to supply wood that was needed to build railroads, feed the copper smelter, and build mine shafts for the thousands of miles of mining tunnels underneath Butte.

By controlling nearly the entire production of copper, the Anaconda Company also controlled state politics in Montana for nearly a century. In a demonstration of its dominance, in 1903, the Anaconda Company shut down all production in the state in order to pressure the Montana legislature to pass a bill favorable to the company. After several weeks, a remarkable 80 percent of Montanans, all dependent on the Anaconda Company, were out of work, and the legislature was forced to pass the bill. The Anaconda Company bought off judges and politicians for decades. It even controlled every major newspaper in the state until 1959. Montana was essentially a corporate colony.

But the Anaconda Company was not the only force in the state with economic leverage: the company’s workers, too, could bring production in Montana to a halt. Montana has a militant labor history, centered especially in Butte, home of the copper mines and the largest city in the state for many years. Tens of thousands of hard-rock miners working in the thousands of miles of underground tunnels beneath Butte developed camaraderie in an environment mostly free from managerial supervision.

Butte workers founded the Western Foundation of Miners, a union known for militant strikes in the West and the primary organization involved in the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1917, Butte copper workers went on strike for months, cutting off the supply of a mineral critical to the World War I effort. Company thugs murdered IWW organizer Frank Little after he spoke to thousands of the striking miners: “I don’t give a damn what your country is fighting for; I am fighting for the solidarity of labor.”

Aboveground, Butte families developed strong bonds in neighborhoods with generations of immigrant families from countries with radical traditions like Ireland and Finland. In 1919, when Éamon de Valera, a leader of the Easter Rising in Ireland, traveled to America to raise funds for the Irish independence movement, he visited three cities: New York City, Chicago, and Butte.

The organized workforce created a base for radical politics. Butte elected a socialist mayor in 1911, becoming one of the largest American cities to be governed by a socialist. Bucking the norm during the Cold War, Butte workers also stayed loyal to the Communist-led Mine Mill union.

Throughout Montana’s history, the Anaconda Company and its workers struggled back and forth for influence over state politics. After World War II, the Anaconda Company loosened its grip on the state, as it began to shift its production and political influence to Latin America (including Chile, where Anaconda would later play a key role opposing the socialist Salvador Allende government in the 1970s). In this new opening for politics in the state, public resentment grew for the large corporation that was preparing to abandon the state that it had polluted and the workers whom it had exploited. Anaconda Company workers went on strike for six months in 1959 and eight months in 1968, in unsuccessful attempts to resist massive job cuts.

In addition to a period of local labor unrest, this was a time of national progressive activism for peace, civil rights, a clean environment, gay rights, and indigenous sovereignty. Under these circumstances, Montanans, led especially by groups like Women Voters and the American Association of University Women, began to organize support to rewrite the 1889 constitution, a document that had long favored large corporations like the Anaconda Company through restrictions on taxation and lax environmental laws.

After a decade of organizing, Montanans in 1970 voted to hold a constitutional convention. Led by a push from organized labor, Montana elected a majority of progressive delegates to write the new state constitution in 1972. The result: the 1972 Montana constitution is a remarkable document that centralized property tax assessment, made politicians more accountable to the public by preventing closed legislative sessions, and recognized “the distinct and unique cultural heritage of the American Indians.”

The constitution also granted the landmark right to “a clean and healthful environment.” It additionally formalized public stream access, stating that “all surface, underground, flood and atmospheric waters within the boundaries of the state are the property of the state for the use of its people.” This distinction proved crucial in the fight for stream access. Even compared to other states with favorable stream access laws, Montana is unique in that the public has access to all streams, not just navigable waters.

Organized labor fought for these rights alongside environmental groups. Union members were the ones subjected to the pollution from the Anaconda Company. And as James Murry, head of the Montana AFL-CIO at the time, explained, union members also needed places to hunt, fish, and play outside of work.

In addition to fighting for these legislative victories, Montana union members have led the effort to protect their right to recreation in a clean environment for the past half-century. In the late 1970s, ranchers in Montana began to harass river users by stretching barbed wire across rivers or entry points in order to prevent access. In 1980, a group of three fishermen formed the Montana Coalition for Stream Access (MCSA) to fight back against these affronts.

Unsurprisingly, the three founders of MCSA were from Butte, and a significant majority of the hundreds of people who would later fight alongside MCSA were from the Butte area. Butte’s culture of union solidarity extended beyond the mines and affected the entire town. At the time in Butte, nearly everyone who worked was either a union member or had many close relationships with union members, creating a strong local culture of solidarity in which the conflict of interests between those who have and those who have not, and the need for the latter to fight against the former, became common sense.

Strong unions also gave ordinary people experience and confidence advocating for themselves and others. Much of Butte’s population understood that the world should belong to everyone, not just the wealthy, and they understood that in order to win such a world, they needed to act collectively.

Defending the Right to Rivers and Streams

In 1984, MCSA won two important lawsuits against ranchers who were blocking public access to rivers running through their property. The first, the Curran case, challenged access restrictions on the Dearborn River, a river that flows through the towering gorges of the Rocky Mountains into the Missouri River. The Curran case ruled that, based on the 1972 Constitution, “any surface waters capable of use for recreational purposes are available for such purposes by the public.”

The second, the Hildreth case, challenged access restrictions on the Beaverhead River, which has some of the best brown trout fishing in the state. Hildreth ruled that any river that could be used for recreation can be used by the public up to the river’s high-water marks.

Shortly after the two legal decisions, the Montana legislature attempted to pass a law clarifying the stream access debate in 1985. The initial bill proposed by the state senate would have undone some of the previous public access victories, so Senator Bill Yellowtail introduced a series of amendments to correct the changes, and a group of activists started a petition to support the amendments. They gathered thousands of petitions in Butte during the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, then hundreds of people decked out in fishing gear crowded into the legislature to present the petition. Each of the amendments passed. The Montana Stream Access Law was enacted.

Convenient stream access helped create a generation of outdoor enthusiasts in Montana. According to a 2022 survey, 65 percent of Montana voters identify themselves as hunters or anglers (a higher proportion than any other Western state), and 37 percent visit public lands at least twenty times each year, nearly double the proportion of any other Western state but Wyoming. These positive experiences outdoors have created a strong appreciation of the environment for many. Bruce Farling, director of Montana Trout Unlimited explains, “It isn’t coincidental: when people have access to rivers for fishing, they are motivated to protect and restore them.”

In the decades following passage of the Montana Stream Access Law, activists (mostly from the Butte area) would trek up to the legislature in Helena each time public access was threatened. Butte public stream activists also supported indigenous Montanans’ efforts for hunting and fishing access. In 1989, Tony Schoonen, one of the original members of MCSA from Butte, broke with conservative environmentalists to support organizing efforts by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to successfully push the Joint Fish and Wildlife Agreement through the state legislature.

In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the challenges to stream access came from local ranchers who saw public access as a nuisance. But as word spread about Montana’s public treasures in the 1990s, millionaires and billionaires saw the potential to make a profit by selling access to private fishing spots.

One of these billionaires was James Cox Kennedy, a media mogul from Georgia and the owner of three thousand acres in Montana, including Crane Meadow Lodge, which advertised private fishing access to its customers. The Ruby River winds below the Tobacco Root Mountains in Southwest Montana and has excellent fishing holes filled with rainbow, cutthroat, and brown trout. Kennedy physically blocked public access to the Ruby by stringing electric fences near roads and bridges the public had used to access the river on his property.

In response, Tony Schoonen organized hundreds of people to float the river through Kennedy’s property in July 2005 to protest. The years-long battle between Kennedy and the public finally resulted in the passage of the ​​2009 Bridge Access Law, which stated that the public must be able to access rivers from public roads and bridges.

Another hundred-millionaire who has attempted to block public stream access on his property is Greg Gianforte, who filed a lawsuit to block access to the Gallatin River through his property in 2009. Greg Gianforte was elected as governor of Montana in 2020. Due to the popularity of public lands in Montana, Gianforte has had to nominally support public lands during his electoral campaigns. But away from public scrutiny, Gianforte’s “charitable” family trust has donated significant funds to a handful of conservative think tanks that oppose public lands and public access. Elsewhere, a longtime Republican lawmaker has started publicly campaigning for Montanans to vote yes during the next scheduled vote on holding a new constitutional convention in 2030 to write a constitution that favors the rich.

The next attack on public access is coming, but Montana no longer has the strength of organized labor to lead the defense.

Montana’s industrial workforce long politically differentiated the state from its rural neighbors, who have similarly beautiful rivers but weaker stream access laws. But today, Montana’s union membership rate has declined to 11.2 percent compared to an estimated 37.4 percent in 1964.

Butte has declined too. The Anaconda Company sold its holdings to Arco in 1977, and Arco closed the mines and smelters in the early 1980s, leaving thousands of workers without jobs. A culture of solidarity still lingers in Butte even with the loss of its union jobs; you can see it in the ongoing efforts of public-access activists. But values need organizations that give people experience turning their values into action. The working-class heroes from the early days of MCSA have begun to pass away, and Mine Mill, the radical Montana union, is a distant memory. Many Montanans today have never gone on strike or supported a picket line.

A New Coalition to Keep Rivers for Everyone

Where can we go from here? Where can we find catalysts for the reorganization of the working class in Montana into a force able to fight against wealthy landowners and win a clean and healthy environment accessible to all? How can we push Montanans, a majority of whom support public lands and organized labor, into action?

Indigenous activists have taken the most militant climate action in Montana in the last decade, mobilizing to protest pipelines in Montana and the Dakotas, including the successful halting of the Keystone pipeline. Such activists have led the fight against rich landowners for a healthy environment for centuries.

Labor unions can still politicize disengaged workers, despite their decline in the state, and even win fights outside the workplace. The workforce in Montana looks very different than it did fifty years ago. Like many other states, education and health care are the largest industries in many Montana cities.

Although teachers and nurses seem different from the striking miners and warehouse workers of the past, these industries have been sites of labor radicalism across the country in the last decade as these professions have been proletarianized by increasingly poor working conditions and pay. Montana teachers have not struck in decades, but as Republicans who support private schools and oppose funding educational services consolidate power, teachers may eventually be forced to take direct action. Nurses, radicalized by the pandemic, have also been organizing in Montana. Nurses in Kalispell won a first contract after striking last summer, and nurses in Dillon voted to unionize this April.

Blue-collar workers are also taking action. The United Parcel Service (UPS) contract expires next summer, and newly elected Teamster union leadership has indicated a willingness to strike to win new contract demands. A UPS strike would be the largest American strike in decades, and picket lines in Montana cities could give thousands of people experience participating in direct action.

Young people radicalized around issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, climate change, and other issues are also putting their energy into organizing their workplaces. The Starbucks union drive, with more than 250 stores filing for union recognition, exemplifies this development. The first and only Starbucks to file for union recognition so far in Montana is located, of course, in Butte.

Ultrawealthy politicians like Greg Gianforte want ordinary people to feel politically disengaged and powerless. Participating in collective action can combat this apathy. This coalition of outdoor enthusiasts, indigenous activists, and organized workers can provide a base from which to take action and win a healthy environment that is accessible to all.

I made one of my favorite memories with my dad the first time I caught a fish on a fly rod. We parked near a bridge on the Blackfoot River and clambered down the shore of the river to find the right fishing hole. He sat below the high-water mark reading a book, occasionally looking up to give me pointers as I cast without luck for hours. Finally, I got a bite. He jumped up and guided me until I reeled the fish in. The rainbow trout was tiny, but I remember feeling so proud.

Some wealthy landowners envision Montana as a place where these types of moments are restricted to those who can afford them. But Montana — and the rest of the country — can be places where these moments are accessible to everyone.