blackfoot-valley

The agricultural disaster spread throughout the economy and toppled countless other businesses. As just one example, during the 1920-1925 pe- riod, half of the state’s banks failed. The writer’s father had been running a small-town bank for three years at Pompey’s Pillar east of Billings. In the spring of 1919 he observed the situation, concluded the place didn’t have a future, and sold out his interest in the bank. Sadly, the town no longer exits. A partial recovery began by the mid-1920s when adequate rainfall re- turned, but the rebound didn’t last very long. The 1929 stock-market crash and more than a decade of depression that followed hit Montana even harder than it did most of the rest of the country. World wheat prices again plum- meted with cutbacks in buying. Worse, another drought set in and com- pounded the economic dislocations. It began in 1929 and lasted longer than the earlier dry period. Despite a partial alleviation in 1932 and 1933, the drought worsened again in the mid-1930s, bringing more crop failures and blowing away more of the parched and disturbed soil in great dust storms. Again there was an exodus of destitute farmers, and again the hard times were not confined to them. A worldwide depression brought with it a drop in copper prices from 18 cents per pound in 1929 to 5 cents a pound in 1933, and Montana’s main heavy industry was flattened. Anaconda was forced to cut its copper production at Butte by ninety percent between 1929 and 1933, and many thousands were thrown out of work in Butte and at the other smelting and refining centers at Helena and Great Falls. The domino-like ef- fect afflicted virtually all other industries and businesses in the state. Ups and Downs since World War II Real recovery had to wait until 1941 when World War II revived both industry and agriculture, ushering in a prosperity that continued well into the 1950s. During the later 1950s and 1960s Montana’s economy fluctuated between periods of growth and decline, and boomed again in the 1970s when other industries - lumbering, oil, and coal - played a major role in the state’s economy. But the biggest single money producer, The Anaconda Company, was heading into trouble. Starting in 1971 with the Chilean seizure of its impor- tant copper mines in that country, Anaconda began cutting back one Montana operation after another, terminating its less efficient mining and smelting 90