Their value is given as follows:
| Copper, at $16.75 per cwt | $40,941,905.74 |
| Silver (coinage value) | 21,786,834.52 |
| Gold | 4,819,156.95 |
| Lead at $4.75 per cwt | 909,410.33 |
| Total | $68,457,307.54 |
The gain is more than 33-1/3 per cent in the value of the production over 1898. There was an increase of nearly 28,500,000 pounds in the production of copper, and this means a gain of $15,000,000 in this metal alone.
Copper is the paramount feature of the mining industry in Montana. More than 80 per cent of the total values won in the state during 1899 came from the mines at Butte in the shape of gold, silver and copper.
Like the story of the “Mustard seed,” is the story of the mines of Montana. From the prospector’s hole on Gold creek, in 1862, only a few miles away “now” is Butte City, which is today the greatest mining camp on earth, its population being between forty-five and fifty thousand. Though the ore is principally copper, yet as can be seen, it carries much gold and silver and is separated in the refineries at Butte, Anaconda and Great Falls. A writer in the Anaconda Standard, January, 1899, gives an interesting account, in a manner, so that the reader can comprehend the magnitude of this great camp. He says:
“Ten miles of mining shafts have been operating in Butte during the past year. This does not include the old and abandoned shafts on which work has been stopped, but of shafts on which work has been actually done during the year. It includes work done on mines which have been leased or are worked by small owners and not by the companies. The total depth of shafts operated by the regular mining companies amounts to 49,075 feet. Adding to this the depth of mines operated by leasers and operated by small owners, and the total will exceed 52,800 feet, or ten miles of shaft depth.
“More than a mile and a half of shaft depth has been sunk the past year. This is the largest amount of depth ever added to the mining development in the history of Butte. The total depth for the mining companies is 8,512 feet, and the returns from the small mines will increase this total. The development of the past year exceeds anything else in the history of this camp. The total number of men reported employed is 7,548. This includes the big companies only. Individual owners of mines and leasers employ 800 more, which would make the total numbers of miners employed in the camp 8,350.
“Ten miles of shafts—add to that the length of drifts and stopes that lead in all directions beneath the city of Butte, and the figures would be enormous. These drifts form the streets and by-ways of another city underground. Along these subterranean highways there moves, day and night, a procession of toilers that reproduce beneath the surface the busy scenes that are enacted upon the streets of the surface city and her suburbs. Night and morning the actors in these busy scenes change places. Those from the surface take their turn in the activity under ground and those whose toil has been in the dimly lighted thoroughfares of the city where the sunlight never enters are relieved.
“The visitor in Butte marvels at the bustle and stir that he witnesses upon her streets. Were he to pause and consider that hundreds of feet below him are thousands of men, moving back and forth, repeating down there beneath the very spot upon which he stands the activity that he sees before him, his amazement would be even greater.
“Ten miles of shafts—hundreds of miles of drifts and workings—in these passage ways of the nether city there is life and stir and busy movement that would cause a boom in many a city whose name is in large letters upon the map and yet there is no mention of this underground city upon any chart; its existence is noted in no atlas. Along the dark streets of this city there daily move 8,300 men in the performance of their duty. Here they labor day after day, creating the wealth that gives Butte her proud rank in the sisterhood of cities.