Biohazard Cleanup Near Mining District Butte, MT

Butte is a consolidated city-county in southwestern Montana, governed since 1977 as the single entity of Butte-Silver Bow, and it serves as the county seat of Silver Bow County.

The city was established in 1864 as a mining camp high in the Rocky Mountains on the Continental Divide, at an elevation of about 5,824 feet.

The 2020 census counted 34,494 residents in Butte-Silver Bow, making it Montana's fifth-largest city.

The 2020 census recorded 14,605 households in Butte-Silver Bow.

Butte earned the nickname "The Richest Hill on Earth" because its mines produced more than $48 billion worth of ore over the course of its history.

In its heyday, Butte was one of the largest copper boom towns in the American West, dominated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company yet never a company town, and fought over by the rival "Copper Kings" William A. Clark, Marcus Daly, and F. Augustus Heinze.

Butte was the site of the 1917 Granite Mountain–Speculator Mine disaster, which claimed 168 lives and remains the largest hard-rock mining disaster in history.

As of 2017, Butte had the largest population of Irish Americans per capita of any city in the United States, a legacy of the immigrants its mines attracted.

Butte is home to the Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine, and the headwaters of the upper Clark Fork River at Butte form the largest Superfund site in the nation.

Butte's Uptown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the United States, with nearly 6,000 contributing properties.