TIMOTHY JAMES LECAIN
A deposit of copper ore possesses a certain type of power. We humans often use this power to generate other forms of physical and social power. Instinctually narcissistic, we just as often then ignore or deny the material origins of our own power. History books reserve their active verbs for the humans who “discovered” and “mined” mineral deposits; the copper ore itself is rarely granted any real agency. Copper is, to use the curtly dismissive English phrase, a mere “natural resource.” Recently, however, developments in a variety of scholarly disciplines have begun to converge in ways that suggest we must rethink the agency and power of a mineral deposit. After several decades of intellectual neglect, matter—in the sense of that nonhuman material world somewhere “out there”—has begun to find its way back into our understanding of the past and present.
In this essay, I draw on and extend some of this new materialist thinking to analyze one of the worst cases of mining-related pollution in the history of twentieth-century North America. In 1902, the American copper corporation Anaconda erected an immense smelter in the Deer Lodge Valley of southwestern Montana. Because of the nature of the copper ores and the technologies used, the smelting process generated large amounts of sulfur dioxide and arsenic that harmed the valley’s wild grasses, crops, and livestock. Ranchers and farmers fought to force the Anaconda to sharply reduce or eliminate the smelter pollution, in what was called the Montana Smoke War. An earlier generation of historians typically framed this and similar environmental battles primarily in political and economic terms, focusing on legislative and judicial arenas where the human power of individuals, states, or the corporation are most evident. More recently, historians of environment and technology have also revealed the complex ecological story of mining pollutants moving through various organisms and systems. Here, I attempt to bring the two together to argue that the ultimate source of human social power was a multifaceted material force that inhered in “things” such as cattle, copper, arsenic, and sulfur. Human power struggles like those at Anaconda, I argue, were the product of more fundamental collisions between the original material sources of power in the environment. Social history thus must be understood as intimately and inextricably connected with environmental history. Further, I suggest that the material power of Longhorns, sulfide copper, arsenic, and other types of matter drove the history of the Deer Lodge Valley as much as, if not more than, humans did acting on their own. My goal is thus to understand not only what humans make of matter but also what matter makes of us.
To make this argument, I begin with a brief overview of some recent materialist thinking. Then I turn to a more empirical analysis of cattle ranching and copper mining and smelting to suggest some of the ways these forms of matter created social power for humans. Finally, I illustrate how the material power generated by copper mining and smelting conflicted with that of cattle ranching and farming, a contest with disastrous results for the latter.
Materialist thinking is hardly new. Most famously, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels turned Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s Geist-haunted idealism on its head to argue that social infrastructure was a product of material substructures. But while still useful, Marx and Engels’s conception of matter is much narrower and more anthropocentric than that embraced by most new materialist thinkers.1 Fernand Braudel and the so-called Annales School also opened up a once-popular vein of materialist thinking, arguing that in the longue durée material forces of geography and climate shaped the broad outlines of human history.2 Despite the school’s prominence in the historiography, however, relatively few historians followed in Braudel’s steps.3 Likewise, as with Marx and Engels, the Annalistes’ concept of nature as a largely static and separate background influence on humanity differs sharply from newer materialist ideas of nature as a dynamic force deeply intermixed with the human and the cultural. More recently, a wing within World System Theory has also given considerable weight to the material as a driver of history, particularly in its emphasis on the role of peripheral states in providing raw materials to fuel the power of the core. Immanuel Wallerstein has noted the importance of considering the material biophysical world as a central aspect of world systems. Other World System theorists, such as Jason Moore and Alf Hornborg, have begun to develop promising new ways of integrating environmental influences into the theory.4
Many scholars in the history of technology and environmental history have also had close, if not always cordial, relationships with matter. Both fields began with an unusual focus on the material world, whether that world was predominantly a natural or a technological one.5 Many environmental historians have long embraced a stubborn materialism, insisting that some form of nonhuman nature is an active force in history.6 One of the most important spurs to the current new materialist thinking, however, came from scholars interested primarily in human creations. In the 1980s, John Law, Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and other sociologists of science and technology developed their influential Actor Network Theory (ANT). In particular, as articulated in the imaginative work of Latour, ANT included all manner of potential nonhuman “actants” in its complex webs of networks. Agency was distributive and emerged from the interactions of actors, opening up an entirely new space for a type of materialist thinking.7 These ideas also found confirmation in the influential work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose ontological theories viewed the properties of all matter as continually emergent and fluid rather than static and fixed.8
As the geographers Owain Jones and Paul Cloke recently pointed out, however, ANT strikes many scholars of the environment as an inadequate means of dealing with the independent nonhuman agency of organic systems. Since agency in ANT emerges only from the interactions within a network, the theory tends to obscure what power might inhere in material things themselves, particularly organic things.9 Further, the two geographers rightly note that many ANT scholars have been primarily interested in technological rather than organic systems, “a manoeuvre which somehow makes it easier to deny the specific non-human contribution to hybrid agency.”10
Some scholars of a new materialist bent are now attempting to move beyond the limitations of ANT by suggesting that a type of discrete “thing power” inheres in all matter. The influential political theorist Jane Bennett argues that even seemingly inert and inorganic matter may possess such potential power. Under the banner of what she calls “vital materialism,” Bennett strives to strip away both anthropocentrism and biocentrism in order to arrive at a concept of a matter that is much more than a merely passive or sometimes recalcitrant object of human action. Further, she argues that this dynamic concept of matter must change the way we conceive of human agency and power: “But the case for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants: not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting these powers as evidence of our own constitutions as vital materiality. In other words, human power itself is a kind of thing-power.”11 Drawing on contemporary scientific and technological insights into the nature of organic and inorganic matter, Bennett makes several attempts to illustrate the relationships between human and thing power. She even tries to imagine a “life of metal” using copper as her protagonist. However, as a political theorist, Bennett is primarily interested in exploring questions of ontology and ethics, not in developing a materialist methodology for analyzing the past.
The same can be said of what is thus far the most coherent assertion of a new materialist approach, the 2010 collection of essays The New Materialisms. In their introduction, volume editors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost assert that human beings “inhabit an ineluctably material world,” but that this essential materiality has been marginalized in recent decades by “the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis.”12 While observing that this “new materialism” need not be antithetical to constructivist methods, Coole and Frost call for recognizing a more vibrant role for matter in its interaction with humans and their social systems. Like that of Deleuze and Guattari, theirs is a matter that is “active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable,” a matter that “becomes” rather than simply “is.”13 As promising as Coole and Frost’s introduction is, however, the actual essays in the volume often fall short of really engaging the material world. Ironically, matter and “thing power” make far fewer appearances here than one might expect, and human ideas about these issues matter far more.
Fortunately, a number of environmental historians have provided just the sort of empirical micro studies of “thing power” in action needed to inject more materialism into the new materialism. Indeed, several important insights have emerged in the field of mining history, a subject that should inherently lend itself to materialist thinking. Thomas Andrews has convincingly argued that the material nature of coal—the demands it exacted from the men who attempted to mine it—was a key force in fostering solidarity and power among coal workers. Likewise, Andrews illustrates how the countervailing power of coal companies, and even the United States itself, was a product of the solar energy stored in hydrocarbon molecules.14 Similarly, Timothy Mitchell persuasively argues that the material nature of coal deposits forces states to rely on large numbers of workers to extract it. As a result, state power based on coal extraction was more conducive to democratic control than oil, which could be obtained with far fewer workers and thus encouraged more centralized authoritarian regimes.15 The importance of matter’s energy content has also recently found a more general theoretical and methodological statement. Edmund Russell and several colleagues argue that material and social power are intimately linked and that energy power in particular is the first source of the ability of some humans to dominate others. “All power, social as well as physical,” the authors conclude, “derives from energy.”16 Put in Bennett’s new materialist terms, the work of Andrews, Mitchell, and Russell helps us see human power as a type of thing power, which in turn is sometimes a type of energy power.
The work of the environmental historian Andrew Isenberg suggests another form of systemic material power, one that inheres in the ability of environments to absorb destructive forces. In Mining California, Isenberg demonstrates how some humans extracted social power from the material world in the hydraulic mining of gold and silver deposits in California. By this Isenberg means not only the obvious point that the wealth derived from gold and silver could translate into human social power. Rather, his work suggests that gaining wealth and power from mining also came from exploiting the power of the environment to absorb the accompanying pollution and destruction.17 Thus social power may be a product not only of harnessing material energy—as Russell argues—but also of harnessing or managing the material destruction and disorder generated from using that energy. As I argue below, this form of material power can be usefully thought of in terms of entropy.
While this linking of physical energy, entropy, and human social power is a critical step toward a useful new materialist methodology, it is also important to bear in mind that the energetic content of matter is only one of the many ways that matter may possess power. The power of copper, for example, has less to do with its energetic content than with its unique molecular ability to transmit heat and electricity. Unlike the energy content of coal or wheat, this type of material power cannot be easily quantified, yet it can play an equally important role in creating human social power. Likewise, the power of some forms of matter may inhere in both energetic and non-energetic forms. Such was the case with Longhorn cattle in the American West.
Traditional anthropocentric accounts of the Euro-American settlement of the Deer Lodge Valley inevitably stress the story of ranchers and farmers overcoming the challenges of a wild land to create civilization. Yet even these frontier stories often implicitly recognize that the valley itself played some role in the process. As the pioneer rancher Conrad Kohrs later recalled, it was “one of the best, if not the best valleys in Montana, because the bunch grass was long and very nutritious.”18
Indeed, the first Longhorn cattle to arrive in the valley found a ruminant grazer’s paradise. Today, the area is classified as part of the Montana Valley and Foothill Grasslands ecoregion, a narrow patch of river valleys and rolling hills threading through the rugged mountains of southwestern Montana and up into southern Alberta. Compared to the extreme cold and heat of the northern plains of eastern Montana, the Deer Lodge Valley is relatively temperate. Annual rainfall is sparse, rarely much above 12 inches, and significantly less during cyclic droughts. The surrounding high mountain peaks capture much of the winter snow, helping to keep the valley grasses exposed for grazing. Prior to the invasion of cattle, the valley was home to several of their ruminant cousins, such as bison, elk, and deer. Their constant grazing had helped to create the open range that Longhorns and ranchers would later enjoy.19
The cattle arrived in the 1860s, led there by Euro-Americans such as Johnny Grant and Conrad Kohrs who were betting that the same grass that supported bison and deer could support Texas Longhorns. Several different types of hardy fescues and bunchgrass dominated the range. One of the best for cattle was bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata). As the name suggests, bunchgrasses grow in tall scattered clumps rather than forming a dense contiguous mat like Kentucky blue or other lawn grasses. The plants can also develop extraordinarily deep root systems, up to 6 feet or more, that helped them to tap groundwater during the long Montana dry seasons.
To transform the lush bunchgrass into something humans could consume, the Deer Lodge Valley ranchers relied on one of the earliest and most successful animal-human partnerships in history. Domesticated since the early Neolithic, cattle have been critical to the survival and expansion of humans around the globe. Their ability to digest complex fibrous plant material like the cellulose of bunchgrass and turn it into muscle and milk provided humans with a new source of highly concentrated caloric energy. However, Kohrs, Grant, and other ranchers were able to efficiently harness the energy of the Deer Lodge Valley grass only because their Longhorn—and later, Shorthorn and Hereford—cattle were willing to work with them in doing so. The material power of the cattle thus resided not only in the caloric content of their meat but also in their genetic ability to cooperate with humans, which had resulted from domestication.
Most of the cattle that first arrived in Montana’s Deer Lodge Valley were descendants of Texas Longhorns. The Longhorns were relatively lean and long-legged animals whose great sharp horns could stretch as much as 7 feet from tip to tip. Longhorns had descended from Spanish breeds shipped to the New World by the conquistadors of the sixteenth century. The animals thrived in the scrubby woodlands of southeast Texas, where many ran wild. Intelligent, fast breeding, and well armed, the Longhorns could fend off many predators and survive without being fed by humans. In this they resembled the American bison, which were as yet still the most populous large herbivore in North America.
Even these semiferal Longhorns, however, still carried the genetic markers of their earlier coevolutionary history with humans.20 When horseback-mounted men took a renewed interest in them in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Longhorns were not so skittish or aggressive that they saw the men as mortal threats to be attacked or resisted at all costs. By manipulating the Longhorns’ social instincts, cowboys could usually (though not always) get the animals to cooperate and move as an orderly herd. Some were eventually herded up into sheltered northern areas like the Deer Lodge Valley. Here Kohrs and other ranchers continued to depend on a delicate balance between the Longhorns’ hardy independence and their willingness to tolerate human direction. In Montana, a mother cow had to be aggressive enough to protect her calf from danger—primarily wolves and coyotes—but not so aggressive that she attacked any human who came near.
In the late nineteenth century, American ranchers also began looking to fatter and gentler cattle breeds to stock their ranges. British Shorthorns and Scottish Herefords were the most popular breeds, as well as a Longhorn-Shorthorn hybrid that was larger and meatier than the original Texas Longhorn yet better able to survive disease and harsh conditions than a purebred Shorthorn.21 Conrad Kohrs was among the first to introduce Shorthorns to Montana in 1872, and two decades later, he also imported the first registered Herefords. Careful breeding helped the animals to adapt to their new environment even more effectively, maximizing their ability to make grass into meat without destroying their ability to survive with minimal human care.22
Just how much social power the Longhorns and other cattle breeds in the Deer Lodge Valley created for humans is difficult to precisely delineate. Nick Bielenberg, Conrad Kohrs’s half-brother and sometime partner, estimated that by the early twentieth century he had raised more than 100,000 head of cattle.23 Kohrs himself reported he had raised some 200,000 head since he arrived in the valley in 1864, and he eventually came to own nearly a million acres of land scattered around four states and two Canadian provinces. Both men became very wealthy. Bielenberg preferred to remain in the Deer Lodge Valley actively running his ranching operations, but Kohrs invested his cattle wealth in other businesses and used it to pursue a successful political career.24 Kohrs was among the original “Cattle Kings” who dominated the early politics of many western plains states. He became a territorial and later a state senator, was a delegate to the Montana constitutional convention, and served as president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association.25 However, in contrast to Wyoming, where the Cheyenne ranching interests dominated the state, in Montana, Kohrs and other ranchers had to compete for political power with timber, farming, and especially mining interests.26
Obviously, the social power of Kohrs and other successful ranchers was a product of the wealth generated from their cattle. When Kohrs built a fine new mansion in Helena, the Montana state capital, it might have seemed irrelevant whether the dollars that paid for it came from cattle raising, mining, or even betting on horse races. One of the key characteristics of capitalism is its ability to reduce everything to the same unit of measurement, an abstract price that obscures the original source of value. A materialist energy flow analysis should remind us that Kohrs’s mansion was, in part, a reformulation of the energy first captured in the bunchgrass of the Deer Lodge Valley and subsequently concentrated into the muscles of Longhorn cattle.
The energy content of Longhorn meat, however, constituted only part of the material power of cattle. Equally important was their ability to survive largely on their own, yet also cooperate with humans when asked. This type of material power can be thought of, in part, in terms of another closely related concept borrowed from physics: entropy. In physics, entropy is typically understood as a measure of the disorder in a moving or energy-using system. In a steam engine, for example, fuel is burned to generate heat that creates high-energy pressurized steam that is initially concentrated in a compressed cylinder, resulting in a relatively high-order or low-entropy state. When the steam expands and thus does useful work in moving the cylinder, the system loses order and entropy goes up as the useful organized energy of the steam is dissipated through a loss of pressure and heat. Thus as entropy or disorder of a system increases, the system contains less useful energy available for doing work.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, all closed systems will either remain stable or increase in entropy; like the steam engine, once all the coal or other energy source in the system is used up, it simply stops working. However, the input of new energy from outside the system (as when we add coal to the steam engine, or the sun adds energy to the earth) can again increase order and decrease entropy. Likewise, humans and other animals can use their bodily energy and cognitive abilities to increase the order of a system. For example, humans might gather coal dispersed over a large mine into one concentrated area where its chemical energy content can be used to continually fuel a steam engine.
Viewed in this sense, the behavioral abilities of Longhorn cattle helped ranchers like Kohrs to decrease the entropy of the Deer Lodge Valley. First, by grazing widely using their own intelligence and skills, the cattle concentrated the solar energy dispersed over a wide area into their relatively compact and portable bodies. Second, thanks to their long coevolutionary history with humans, the Longhorns had brains and nervous systems that allowed ranchers and their cowboys to gather them efficiently in one spot during a roundup. Entropy thus decreased as dispersed cattle concentrated in one area, such as a corral or feedlot, simultaneously increasing their potential to do further useful work for humans as a ready source of the caloric energy we call food.27
In sum, the social power of Deer Lodge Valley ranchers such as Kohrs derived from a surprisingly complex system for energy conversion and concentration that depended on the unique physical and behavioral powers of the Longhorn cattle themselves. In this sense, what is typically seen as solely the human intelligence behind successful open-range cattle ranching is better understood as a type of distributed intelligence, one in which human and animal abilities merge almost seamlessly.28 Order emerged from relative disorder, and usable energy replaced entropy. Ultimately, the energy that had been so efficiently concentrated in the muscles of the cattle would feed thousands of humans, most of them well beyond the boundaries of the Deer Lodge Valley.
The human intersection with another form of matter in the region, however, functioned very differently. For mining and processing the copper ores buried under the neighboring city of Butte, humans had no efficient and cooperative organisms that could consume the copper for them, concentrate it in their own bodies, and efficiently carry it to a central location. To the contrary, in mining, the energetic and entropic patterns were largely reversed from those in ranching.
In contrast to bunchgrass or cattle, the material power of copper has relatively little to do with its chemical energy content, but instead lies in its unique atomic structure. Like gold and silver, with which its shares a column on the Periodic Table of Elements, copper’s outer orbit is occupied by only one electron, which is only weakly bonded to the nucleus. As a result, when electrical current or heat is applied to a wire made up of copper atoms, this single outer electron is easily stripped away and can efficiently conduct electricity or heat. This is why copper is the human metal of choice for many electrical applications as well as for use in pans, radiators, air conditioners, and other heat-transfer technologies.29
The way in which the atoms of copper pack together at room temperature is also critical to its material power. When properly treated, a piece of pure copper takes on an internal crystalline structure known as a face-centered cube in which a copper molecule occupies every corner of a cube as well as the center of each face. Since each unit is made up entirely of triangles, this crystalline lattice of atoms should be extremely strong and resistant to deformation—far too strong for humans to easily bend or hammer it into new shapes. However, copper’s seemingly uniform crystalline structure is actually riddled with imperfections called “dislocations”—areas where the lattice pattern of copper crystals is not precisely aligned and connected. The presence of millions of these small dislocations allow what would otherwise be perfectly rigid cubes to slide past each other, making it possible to easily shape the metal without having to heat it, as is generally necessary with harder and more brittle metals like iron. Usefully, this ductility also rapidly decreases as the copper metal continues to be bent or hammered and these dislocations begin to pile up, rather like a log jam. As a result, soft copper metal can be substantially hardened simply by pounding it with a rock or a hammer, a property that many humans have found useful when making copper knives or arrowheads.30
The copper mined in Butte, Montana, occurred mainly in two forms: chalcocite, an ore consisting of two atoms of copper bonded with one atom of sulfur (Cu2S), and enargite, which had three atoms of copper, four of sulfur, and one of arsenic (Cu3AsS4). Thus the same solitary outer electron that made the copper atom so ductile and useful in conducting heat and electricity also means that it is often accompanied by atoms of sulfur and arsenic, elemental substances that have their own types of material power. Humans who wanted Butte’s copper would also have to deal with its less desirable colleagues.
An Irish-born mining entrepreneur named Marcus Daly discovered the rich copper deposits under the town of Butte in 1882 while mining for silver in the Anaconda shaft. Daly was able to convince his old friend George Hearst and several others to invest heavily in developing the large-scale copper mining and smelting business that became the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Mining eventually revealed an immense area of copper mineralization between 300 and 1,000 feet beneath the earth, one of the largest such deposits in the world. Daly and his partners invested in the latest mining technologies to remove the valuable ore. Deep underground mining was an energy-hungry enterprise, so the Anaconda operated its own coal mines elsewhere in the region to fuel the steam engines that drove the ore lifts, compressors, rock drills, and other mining machinery.31
In 1883, Daly and the Anaconda erected a smelter some twenty-six miles to the west of Butte in the Deer Lodge Valley. The smelter was nestled in the narrow ravine of Warm Springs Creek, which limited the spread of the resulting smoke to the wider valley. The company transported the ore from Butte via a dedicated steam (and later electric) rail line. By 1900, however, ore production from the mines had increased rapidly, and Daly determined the company needed an even bigger smelter. The new smelter, called the Washoe, was constructed on a slope that faced directly out onto the wide Deer Lodge Valley. When the workers smelted the first charge of copper ore in early 1902, the clouds of smoke and mist could now easily sweep down onto the valley’s ranches and farms.
Even the richest ore in Butte was only 4 or 5 percent copper. The remaining quartz, iron, silica, and other less valuable material had to be removed by crushing, concentrating, and smelting. In essence, the Washoe smelter operated by reversing some of the geochemical processes that had created the Butte copper ore deposits in the first place, though the source of heat was now wood and coal instead of geothermal energy. Relatively low-temperature roasting of the concentrated copper ore provided enough energy to drive much of the sulfur off and into the atmosphere. This roasted ore was subsequently superheated to around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, which pushed more sulfur and arsenic into the air and permitted the now–relatively pure copper to be separated from any remaining iron, silica, and other substances, which were poured off as waste slag.32
Once released into the sky, the liberated atoms of sulfur and arsenic became powerful historical agents in their own right. The sulfur immediately bonded with atmospheric oxygen to form sulfur dioxide, which in turn could interact with water in the atmosphere to form a highly corrosive sulfuric acid. The arsenic also bonded with oxygen to form arsenic di- and trioxides, both of which can be highly toxic to animal life. By the autumn of 1902, the smoke began to cause devastating crop and livestock losses for big ranchers like Kohrs and Bielenberg, as well as many smaller ranchers and farmers. Bielenberg alone lost more than a thousand head of cattle, eight hundred sheep, and twenty horses in the course of just a few weeks.33
Ranching in the valley had relied on the ability of cattle to intelligently concentrate solar energy and reduce the entropic disorder of the valley. In contrast, copper smelting depended on the large-scale application of energy, mostly from hydrocarbons, which had the effect of increasing the overall disorder and entropy of the system. The Anaconda first used energy to break up the highly stable geological structure of the underground copper deposit, to transport it for smelting, to crush and concentrate the ore, and finally to smelt it. At every stage, the industrial system used large amounts of energy to concentrate and purify the copper. But this decrease in entropy gained from isolating the small amount of copper from the massive amounts of waste simultaneously resulted in a large increase in entropic disorder for the system as whole. One result was that the molecules of sulfur and arsenic that had previously been concentrated in a small area of stable subsurface rock were now broken up and randomly dispersed into the atmosphere. Indeed, had the Anaconda been unable to disperse the smoke pollution from the immediate area around the smelter, the levels of arsenic and sulfur would have quickly become deadly to humans.
The Anaconda’s success and its attendant social power thus derived from at least three material sources. First, the copper itself had unique material properties that permitted humans to develop electrical and heat transfer technologies. Second, the stored solar energy extracted from the company coal mines and lumber operations. And third, the ability of the surrounding environment to absorb the entropy created by the application of this energy in mining and smelting—particularly the random dispersal of arsenic and sulfur compounds that would otherwise have been immediately toxic to human life.
The extent of the resulting social power was apparent. By 1909, the Anaconda had produced 590 million pounds of copper, which supplied about 10 percent of the entire world demand and as much as 20 percent of the U.S. demand.34 The Anaconda paid about 30 percent of the total tax revenues of the city of Butte. Over just the previous seven years, it had also spent more than $7 million for labor, $4 million for coal, $4 million for coke, and more than $1 million for machinery.35 Indeed, the Anaconda exercised so much economic might that in 1899 the Rockefellers’ infamous Standard Oil trust purchased it in a failed attempt to establish monopoly control over the world copper industry.36 Although Daly and most of the other executives who ran the company did not personally seek political office, there was little need for them to do so anyway, as the Anaconda kept a tight “copper collar” on the state of Montana. The company was by far the largest single employer and economic presence, and it also controlled most of the major newspapers in the state, giving it considerable power to pick cooperative candidates for state and federal offices.37
As with the power of Kohrs, Bielenberg, and other ranchers in the Deer Lodge Valley, the power of the Anaconda can all too easily be reduced to the abstraction of money or capital. Yet we must make a conscious effort to recognize that the company’s economic influence and social power also ultimately derived from the material power of copper, the energy of coal, and the ability of the environment to absorb entropic disorder. Most important, when the entropy-generating system of mining and smelting collided with the entropy-reducing system of ranching, both human power and material power clashed.
In 1905, a front-page article in the Butte Inter Mountain celebrated Anaconda’s three-year-old Washoe smelter with the headline, “It Is the Largest in the World.”38 Just a month later, the Anaconda Standard reported on the “Monster Beef Cattle” from a neighboring valley that were on their way to Chicago via the Anaconda Stockyards: “There are 450 head in the herd and some of the largest will weigh more than 1,700 pounds, while there is one monster that is estimated at close to 2,000 pounds.”39 These two articles suggest the material and political nature of the escalating conflict in the Deer Lodge Valley. Both the Anaconda and the ranchers were using energy and other forms of material power to maximize the size of their output, but they were doing so in fundamentally incompatible ways.
By 1905, the Washoe smelter was generating about 2 billion cubic feet of smoke every day that carried some 48,100 pounds of arsenic and immense volumes of sulfur gas.40 Nick Bielenberg estimated that the poisonous smoke subsequently spread over an area approximately 30 miles long and 12 to 14 miles wide.41 Residents described it as a “white mist” or having a “a bluish color.”42 Some days, the smoke settled in low-lying areas and shifted with the surface winds. As the rancher Angus D. Smith noted, some mornings the cloud of smoke would be so thick on his property that he could not see more than two or three hundred feet.43 But the ranchers and farmers noticed that the behavior of the smoke varied depending on atmospheric conditions. William T. Stephens reported, “Sometimes it comes in a stream across, and other times it settles and spreads out more, and sometimes it goes clear over head.”44 Regardless of their personal experience, many of the ranchers and farmers agreed that “the smoke from the stack is charged with large quantities of sulphur dioxide, arsenic, antimony, copper and other noxious and poisonous substances, which are deposited upon the farms of the valley, burning and dwarfing the crops, poisoning the soil and causing large numbers of horses, sheep, cattle and other livestock to sicken and die.”45
The sulfur and arsenic in the smoke stream attacked the material basis of the ranchers’ power in at least three fundamental ways, each with its own dynamics. First, the sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid undermined the energetic basis of ranching by killing or limiting the growth of the valley grasses—both the wild bunchgrasses and the cultivated grasses such as hay, oats, alfalfa, and other feed crops. Sulfur compounds were once a significant part of the earth’s atmosphere, and volcanic activity can still occasionally discharge large amounts of sulfur into the air. But like copper, sulfur is highly reactive and easily bonds with many other elements, including iron and copper. Over millions of years, much of the previous atmospheric load of sulfur was bound up in rocks in the lithosphere or absorbed by the oceans.46 During the ages when most of the chlorophyll-based plant life of today evolved, atmospheric levels of sulfur compounds were low in most areas. When the Anaconda smelted the Butte sulfide ores, it reversed this primordial biogeochemical cycle and shifted lithospheric sulfur back into the atmosphere at levels that harm most modern plants.
Sulfur dioxide damages grasses and other plants by directly interfering first with their ability to generate and then to store and use energy from sunshine. The sulfur dioxide dispersed by the Washoe smelter entered plants through the small holes, or stomata, that penetrate the protective waxy cuticle of leaves and can open and close in response to environmental conditions.47 Once sulfur dioxide gas enters the stomata, it spreads through the intercellular spaces in the leaf, where most of it dissolves in water to form sulfuric acid and sulfite ions. These sulfur compounds attack the plant’s chlorophyll-filled chloroplasts, destroying their ability to transform solar energy into the sugars that can be consumed for energy. The sulfite also interferes with the plant’s mitochondria, the cells that subsequently consume these sugars and generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the molecule that provides usable energy to cells in both plant and animal life.48
High concentrations of sulfur dioxide can cause almost immediate death of plant leaves, while lower concentrations slow growth and reduce yields.49 While any terrestrial plant can be harmed or killed by sulfur dioxide gas, sensitivity varies. Effects within a region are also highly variable depending on topography, soil conditions, wind directions, and other factors. For example, trees and other plants on mountainsides might be damaged at a greater distance from the pollution source than flat areas closer to the source.50
The farmers and ranchers observed all these effects. Several noticed that the smoke was particularly harmful to the quaking aspen trees that grew wild in moist areas of the valley.51 One farmer reported that the smoke only sporadically affected plants in his kitchen garden: “Some things will stand a pretty good siege, while other garden truck will not recover from its effects.” Bielenberg recalled that the smoke “once cut a path right through my grain crop, leaving about 200 yards [on each side] it did not touch.”52 The very complexity of the interactions between the sulfur and the plants made it extremely difficult to prove definitively that the Washoe smelter was responsible. The company-owned Anaconda Standard argued that since some ranches seemed to be untouched by smoke damage, ranchers like Bielenberg who complained must have been “unthrifty” farmers who failed to properly care for their land.53
By killing or reducing the nutrient value of wild grasses and cultivated crops, the sulfur smoke reduced the supply of energy available to the valley’s ranching industry. Prior to the Washoe, hay yields were typically around a ton per acre.54 Chronic low-level smoke exposure appears to have cut yields by at least two-thirds.55 Acute exposure could kill an entire crop in just the course of a few days or even hours.56 What hay and other feed crops did survive might still be “smoked,” a consequence of arsenic and other poisons deposited on their surface. Even if hay from some areas of the valley may have actually been arsenic free, many potential buyers believed it to be poisonous, driving down prices or making it impossible to sell at all.57
The second way the smoke attacked the material basis of the ranchers’ power occurred when arsenical compounds undermined the ability of the Longhorns and other cattle to efficiently transform plant energy into meat, milk, and baby Longhorns. Released by the Washoe as a gas or mist, the arsenic trioxide (As2O3) molecules, when cooled, formed a fine white powder that settled unevenly over the valley. Ranchers and farmers quickly recognized that the white powder was toxic to humans. Many reported that it caused blisters on the mouth and nose. One woman noted, “I would become so dizzy that I could not walk across the room without staggering. My daughter was worse than myself, very much worse.”58 The rancher Nicholas A. Liffring recalled being poisoned: “Why there was a white dust on the straw, and, while baling it it made me sick; I broke out in boils around the hat band and sores upon the body.”59
To some degree, ranchers and farmers could limit their internal exposure to arsenic dust through careful cleaning of garden crops and staying away from the smoke stream as much as possible. But avoiding the dust was more difficult for cattle and other stock animals in the valley that consumed the wild and cultivated grasses. Longhorns possessed formidable defensive skills, but were ill prepared to deal with a danger like arsenic. The Anaconda’s power emerged in part from the ability of the surrounding environment to dilute and absorb the Washoe arsenic, but the cattle’s energetic and entropic basis drove them to do just the opposite. Because wild grasses are relatively low in caloric content, cattle must spend most of their waking hours grazing over a wide area just to consume enough to stay alive. Typically, a steer or cow must eat every day about 2 percent of its body weight in grass (excluding the water content), which for a large animal might be as much as 70 pounds of actual forage. What had previously been the valuable ability of cattle to concentrate the dispersed solar energy of the valley’s grass into muscle now had the damaging effect of reconcentrating the dispersed arsenic to poisonous levels. Further, since the sulfur dioxide was simultaneously reducing the size and caloric content of the valley grass, the cattle had to eat more grass over an even wider area, further increasing their uptake of poisonous arsenic.
When consumed in relatively small doses, arsenic trioxide can actually be a mild stimulant. One sheepherder reported that his animals deliberately ate one another’s arsenic-contaminated wool because they were addicted to its effects.60 But in higher amounts, arsenic trioxide is devastating to the basic biological functions of most animals. The biochemical toxicity of arsenic oxides comes in part from their molecular structures, which are very similar to that of phosphate (a phosphorous atom bonded with four oxygen atoms, PO4), an essential cellular building block of all currently known organic life. Indeed, arsenic is immediately beneath phosphorous on the Periodic Table of Elements, and it can easily bond with oxygen to form arsenate (AsO4), a molecule structurally almost identical to phosphate. In a normally functioning cell, phosphate is used in the mitochondria, the cellular “power plants” where the caloric energy of sugars from food is broken down to make the ATP (adenosine triphosphate) to power cellular metabolism. Because of arsenate’s structural (though not functional) similarity to phosphate, some of the cell’s mitochondria bind with it instead, destroying their ability to generate ATP. Literally starved of energy, the cell begins to die, which in turn causes internal lesions and bleeding, organ failure, coma, and death. Cattle, horses, sheep, and humans all shared this biochemical vulnerability to the energy-robbing effects of arsenic.61
Although they could not have known the complex biochemical causes, ranchers clearly observed the acute and chronic effects of arsenic in their cattle and other animals. Morgan Evans, a seventy-two-year-old rancher whose property was about two and a half miles from the Washoe stack, noted that the smoke “turned my place into a graveyard. I lost from 75 to 80 head of cattle in 90 days.” As mentioned earlier, big ranchers like Kohrs and Bielenberg lost thousands of head of cattle, horses, and sheep. Postmortem autopsies revealed the internal signs of arsenic poisoning: “lesions affecting the stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys, spleen, heart, respiratory organs, and membranes of the brain.”62 The death rate was so high that the Anaconda dug mass graves to quietly bury the thousands of dead animals that, in an implicit recognition of their responsibility, managers initially agreed to buy from ranchers.63
However, the effect of chronic arsenic exposure on the overall vitality and energetic capacity of stock animals could be harder to prove, though the anecdotal evidence seemed clear. Morgan Evans, for example, reported, “The horses have sore noses now and seem to be weak. They cannot stand the work they formerly stood.” Another small rancher, George Parrott, said, “[The horses] are not nearly so good as they used to be, and they are soft, and sweat easy if you go to driving them, and they don’t seem to have strength and cannot stand work like they used to.”64 Since the biological muscle power of these draft horses was as critical to successful ranching as the chemical power of coal was to mining and smelting, the Anaconda’s arsenic was sharply reducing the energy available to ranchers for transporting supplies, hay, and other materials.
Even more critical, the arsenic interfered with the beef cattle’s key task: to transform low-energy forage into high-energy meat and milk. Jerry Ryan, a small-holder rancher, noted, “I have 40 head of cattle and all they do is stand up and eat without seeming to derive any benefit from it. They are sickly and weak.” George Parrott observed that his cattle “seem to eat hearty enough and a good deal of it, but it did not seem to do them any good.”65 Although Ryan and Parrott did not know that the arsenic was interfering with ATP production in their cattle’s mitochondria, they did recognize that the poison was somehow robbing the animals of the essential life-giving energy that made profitable meat. What meat cattle did manage to put on often had little fat, and the slaughtered animals looked suspicious to local butchers. Ryan noted that he tried to conceal the effects of the smoke on one beef cow: “Took him up and sold him to Mr. Wegner; and had to take some fat off his stomach and put it over his kidney to make it look respectable.”66
The arsenic also affected the valley’s dairy cows, reducing or eliminating their ability to give milk. Acute arsenic poisoning in the dairy cows typically began with loose bowels followed by constipation. The cows then stopped eating, and as dairy farmer Angus D. Smith testified, “the hair turned on them and they would not lick themselves, and their noses got dry, which is unnatural for a healthy cow [. . . and] it would take two or three months and sometimes weeks and then they would die.”67 As with smoked hay, former customers in the valley were suspicious of milk that came from smoked cows. Indeed, valley residents were wise to be concerned, as scientists now know that dairy cows can concentrate arsenic in their milk.68 Some dairy farmers reported that the milk from smoked cows had a strong “garlicky” smell, which is characteristic of arsenic content.69 As Kenneth Smith noted, the drop in consumer demand for milk was matched by a drop in supply, as his dairy cows soon stopped giving milk and he was forced to abandon his milk wagon business.70
Much of the material power of ranching derived from cattle’s (particularly the independent Longhorn’s) ability to reproduce without assistance, thus transforming the energy of plants not only into more meat but also into more cattle. But as rancher Eli Dehourdi noted, the smoke pollution also interfered with calving. Dehourdi had previously found that 75 to 80 percent of his heifers would bear a live calf each year. After the Washoe opened, the rate dropped to 50 percent, either because the cows were unable to conceive or because they miscarried their fetuses.71 Others found that as many as 40 percent of mares miscarried their colts.72 George Parrott had previously kept a purebred (probably Shorthorn) bull to breed with his cows, but he had since castrated the animal. “In the winter time,” Parrott noted, “the cows were throwing [miscarrying] so many dead calves that I saw it was no use in trying to breed.”73 William T. Stephens testified that even if calves did survive to term, they “are weak and puny when they come [and] some of them die, and some of them never do well afterwards, a great many of them.”74 Just as it could poison children, the arsenic-contaminated milk could also poison calves, since the poisonous dose of arsenic is much lower for both small cows and small humans.75
The third and final way in which the smoke damaged the material basis of the ranchers’ power came from the way the sulfur and arsenic undermined the unique coevolutionary bonds between humans and cattle that had made the previously lucrative “open range” possible.76 Prior to the opening of the Washoe smelter, many big ranchers in the valley such as Bielenberg and Kohrs still provided little or no hay or other feed crops to many of their cattle, even in winter. They depended instead on the ability of their Longhorns and hybrid Longhorn-Shorthorn breeds to graze widely over vast areas of range largely on their own.77 But the pollutants from the Washoe made such free-ranging behavior nearly impossible. In 1905, the Montana state veterinarian advised the Deer Lodge Valley ranchers to stop allowing their cattle or horses to range on open pastures and to instead corral them in smaller pens where they would need to be fed uncontaminated hay or other fodder daily.78 William Stephens, who had previously let his cattle run in the pastures, was now “keeping them shut up in corrals and barns and feeding some of them bran and hay and oats.”79
The Anaconda sulfur and arsenic thus attacked the practice of open-range grazing in the valley, and hence affected the cowboys and roundups that had already become the mythic stuff of the American popular imagination. By forcing ranchers to confine and feed even their hardy Longhorns and hybrid Shorthorns, the arsenic undermined the material power that ranchers had previously derived from the ancient evolutionary bonds between humans and cattle. The Longhorns’ ability to survive on their own, find the best forage, and fend off predators could no longer contribute to ranchers’ human power. What the cattle had once done for themselves the Deer Lodge Valley ranchers were now forced to do for them.
In the years following the Washoe’s opening, the ranchers and farmers of the valley fought a long battle to limit or eliminate the smoke pollution. In 1905, many joined together to sue the Anaconda, asking for more than a million dollars in damages and the closing of the smelter. The resulting trial stretched on for many months, and both sides presented convincing expert testimony supporting contradictory positions. When the judge finally issued his ruling in 1909, however, he declined to comment in much detail on whether or how the smoke was harming the valley’s animals and crops. Instead, he decided to rule for the company, primarily on the grounds that the copper produced was economically essential to the valley, state, and nation. Eventually, the threat of further litigation from the federal government pushed the company to develop or adopt more powerful pollution-control technologies. However, increased production rates worked to minimize the effectiveness of even these measures, and many ranchers and farmers finally had little choice but to abandon ranching and sell their properties to the company.80 In the end, the material power of copper and its miners defeated the material power of Longhorns and the ranchers who depended on them.
Can a copper deposit make history? Not on its own, perhaps. But the same might well be said of the humans who have developed so many novel ways of using the material world to survive and create their variegated cultures. To emphasize the centrality of nonhuman matter in the history of the Deer Lodge Valley Smoke War is not to assert some sort of primitive environmental determinism. Rather, it is an attempt to resist the powerful human tendency to see the world solely as a reflection of ourselves, to suggest instead that we do not use matter so much as cooperate with it in ways that form and define us. Copper, Longhorns, sulfur, and arsenic did not dictate the course of events in the Deer Lodge Valley, but neither did humans, precisely because these “things” were much more than mere natural resources that could be bent freely to human will. The matter contained a type of power, a material power that was a fundamental—though not the only—basis for human social power. This material power took many forms, some of them identifiable with physical concepts like energy and entropy, others more subtle, like the distributed intelligence created by the interactions between Longhorns and ranchers. But when the material power of copper collided with that of cattle, the humans whose social power derived from them also became entwined in the conflict. The humans involved could, of course, have handled their own social power conflicts in any number of fascinating ways, all of them well worth the attention of historians. Yet, in our inevitable fascination with ourselves, we should also take care to remember that we are not so far removed from the world of matter as we like to think. Matter makes us as much as we make it.
I wish to thank the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, for a generous fellowship year during which the conceptualization for and writing of this essay was completed. Also, much of the archival research was done with the support of a National Science Foundation grant (Award No. 0646644) in collaboration with my colleague Brett Walker. Robert Gardner and Constance Staudohar provided invaluable research assistance.
1. Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29; J.R. McNeill, José Augusto Pádua, and Mahesh Rangarajan, eds., Environmental History: As If Nature Existed (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4.
2. The seminal text being Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Colin, 1949).
3. See McNeill, Pádua, and Rangarajan, Environmental History, 5.
4. Immanuel Wallerstein, “What Are We Bounding, and Whom, When We Bound Social Research?” Social Research 62 (1995): 839–56. Jason Moore, for example, notes the roots of historical capitalism in exploiting and undermining complex socio-ecological webs in early Peruvian silver mining. Jason Moore, “‘This lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world’: Potosi and the Political Ecology of Underdevelopment, 1545–1800,” Journal of Philosophical Economics 4:1 (2010). See also Alf Hornborg and Carole L. Crumley, The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007); Alf Hornborg, J.R. McNeill, and Juan Martínez Alier, Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007); and Jason Moore, “The Modern World System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism,” Theory and Society 32:3 (2003).
5. Indeed, when the two are fused into the hybrid called enviro-tech, they gain entirely new analytical purchase. See the insightful introduction in Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
6. For a good review, see Richard C. Foltz, “Does Nature Have Historical Agency? World History, Environmental History, and How Historians Can Help to Save the Planet,” History Teacher 37 (2003): 9–28.
7. John Law and John Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After, Sociological Review Monographs (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell/Sociological Review, 1999); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
9. Owain Jones and Paul Cloke, “Non-human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time,” in Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach, ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer, 2008), 79–96, 80.
10. Ibid., 81. See also M. Fitzsimmons and D. Goodman, “Incorporating Nature: Environmental Narratives and the Reproduction of Food,” in Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, ed. Bruce Braun and Noel Castree (London: Routledge, 1998), 194.
11. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
12. Coole and Frost, introduction to New Materialisms, 6.
13. Ibid., 9.
14. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
15. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).
16. Edmund Russell, James Allison, Thomas Finger, John K. Brown, Brian Balogh, and W. Bernard Carlson, “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the History of Technology and Environmental History,” Technology and Culture 52 (2011): 248. David Nye has also suggested the ways Americans used conspicuous consumption of power as a means of creating and demonstrating social power, though he puts much less emphasis on the importance of the physical energy of material power sources. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
17. Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
18. “Washoe and Anaconda Are Good Customers,” Anaconda Standard (18 February 1906).
19. Taylor H. Ricketts et al., Terrestrial Ecoregions of North America: A Conservation Assessment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), 285–87; “Intermountain/Foothill Grassland Ecotype,” in Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, Comprehensive Fish and Wildlife Conservation Strategy (Helena, MT, 2012), 37–42.
20. On coevolution and history, see Edmund P. Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
21. Ibid., 39–40.
22. Paul McGrew, “Conrad Kohrs—Pioneer Cattleman,” Pacific Northwesterner 31 (1987): 8.
23. “Mr. Bielenberg Discusses Smoke,” Anaconda Standard (3 March 1906).
24. “Washoe and Anaconda Are Good Customers.”
25. Progressive Men of the State of Montana (Chicago: A.W. Bowen & Co., 1903); McGrew, “Conrad Kohrs,” 1–10; Conrad Kohrs, Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography (Helena: C.K. Warren, 1977, 1913); Lewis Atherton, The Cattle Kings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 183.
26. Atherton, The Cattle Kings, 67.
27. Of course, the further extraction of that caloric energy from the cattle involved other systems with their own unique energetic and entropic dynamics. Initially, cattle were further concentrated at meatpacking plants, but subsequently, humans used energy to distribute the meat to widely dispersed markets and homes.
28. On the powerful concept of extensive or distributed intelligence, see Andy Clark, “Where Brain, Body and World Collide,” in Knappett and Malafouris, Material Agency, 1–18.
29. Timothy James LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 32–31.
30. C.R. Hammond, “The Elements,” in David R. Lide, ed. in chief, The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 81st ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000); Stephen L. Sass, The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), 44–45.
31. LeCain, Mass Destruction, 41–42.
32. James E. Fells, Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 27–30, 273–74; Donald M. Levy, Modern Copper Smelting (London: Charles Griffin, 1912).
33. Donald MacMillan, “A History of the Struggle to Abate Air Pollution from Copper Smelters of the Far West, 1885–1933” (Ph.D. diss., University of Montana, 1973), 111.
34. Montana Historical Society Archives, “Anaconda Copper Mining Company Records,” Collection 169 (hereafter cited as MHS), Box 21, Bliss v. Washoe, “Brief of Appellees,” 333, 345.
35. MHS, Box 22, Folder 1, Bliss v. Washoe, “Opinion,” 25 January 1909, 212–13.
36. Charles K. Hyde, Copper for America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 94–100.
37. K. Ross Toole, Montana: An Uncommon Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984, 1959); John McNay, “Breaking the Copper Collar: Press Freedom, Professionalization and the History of Montana Journalism,” American Journalism 25:1 (2008): 99–123.
38. “It Is the Largest in the World,” Butte Inter Mountain (19 March 1905).
39. “Monster Beef Cattle,” Anaconda Standard (19 April 1905).
40. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IV, 1218–19.
41. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 114.
42. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3232.
43. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. II, 646.
44. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3232.
45. “Farmers Bring Action,” Anaconda Standard (21 May 1905).
46. M. Pham, J.-F. Muller, G.P. Brasseur, C. Granier, and G. Megie, “A 3D Study of the Global Sulphur Cycle: Contributions of Anthropogenic and Biogenic Sources,” Atmospheric Environment 30 (1996): 1815–22.
47. “Effects of Sulfur Dioxide on Vegetation: Critical Levels,” in WHO Air Quality Guidelines (Copenhagen: World Health Organization, 2000), 6.
48. Wilhelm Knabe, “Effects of Sulfur Dioxide on Terrestrial Vegetation,” Ambio 5–6 (1976): 213–18, 213.
49. “Effects of Sulfur Dioxide on Vegetation,” 1.
50. Knabe, “Effects of Sulfur Dioxide on Terrestrial Vegetation,” 215.
51. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3223.
52. “Nick Bielenberg and His Alfalfa,” Anaconda Standard (6 March 1906).
53. “Green Fields and Fat Herds Down Deer Lodge Valley,” Anaconda Standard (4 June 1905).
54. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 53.
55. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. II, 741.
56. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3295.
57. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 202–4.
58. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IV, 1196–97.
59. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3290.
60. “Abstract of Testimony of Lay Witnesses,” MHS, 84.
61. Brett Walker, The Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 96.
62. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, “Opinion,” 202.
63. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3403.
64. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3179.
65. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3172.
66. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 85.
67. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. II, 648.
68. B.K. Datta et al., “Chronic Arsenicosis in Cattle with Special Reference to Its Metabolism in Arsenic Endemic Village of Nadia District West Bengal India,” Science of the Total Environment, 409 (2010): 284–88.
69. “Jerry Ryan of Smoke Association Goes into Details of the Case,” Anaconda Standard (28 February 1906).
70. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. II, 774.
71. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 44–46.
72. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 114.
73. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3170.
74. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3222.
75. Datta, “Chronic Arsenicosis,” 284–8.
76. David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the American West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), nicely illustrates the way a large California rancher used space and topography to maximize cattle growth, though it is less successful in recognizing the cattle’s own role in the process.
77. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. I, 114.
78. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. VI, 2126.
79. MHS, Bliss v. Washoe, vol. IX, 3228.
80. LeCain, Mass Destruction, 72–73.