Gold brought the first miners in 1864, during the placer rush that swept through Montana. But Butte's true wealth lay deeper - silver first, then copper as electricity created unprecedented demand for wire. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company became one of the world's largest corporations, and Butte became the supplier to an industrializing nation.

At its peak in the early 20th century, Butte claimed nearly 100,000 residents and a cosmopolitan character unusual for the American West. Irish, Cornish, Serbian, Finnish, Chinese - workers arrived from around the world to work the mines. The city sprouted hundreds of saloons and a famous red-light district. Fortunes were made and lost, and the hill gave up its wealth until the underground mines could no longer compete with open-pit operations.

The Berkeley Pit opened in 1955, an open-pit copper mine that eventually consumed entire neighborhoods as it expanded. Mining ceased in 1982, and the pumps that had kept groundwater from flooding the tunnels shut off. Water began to fill the pit - not clean water, but acidic runoff laden with heavy metals, so toxic that a flock of snow geese that landed on its surface in 1995 died within days.

Today visitors pay to view the pit from an observation platform, an experience that evokes awe and horror in equal measure. The water has risen over 900 feet and continues to climb. Treatment systems prevent it from contaminating the local water table. It's a monument to extraction's consequences, impossible to ignore and impossible to fix, the price that Butte paid for its wealth.

Butte's Irish heritage persists in its cuisine - particularly the pasty, a meat and vegetable pie enclosed in crimped pastry that Cornish and Irish miners carried into the tunnels. The crimped edge served as a handle, allowing workers to eat with dirty hands and discard the crust they'd touched. Local restaurants still serve pasties smothered in brown gravy, a working-class meal elevated to regional specialty.

Our Lady of the Rockies watches over the city from the ridge above - a 90-foot statue visible from miles away, completed in 1985 through community effort. The World Museum of Mining preserves the history of the industry that built the city. The Granite Mountain Memorial honors the 168 miners killed in a 1917 fire, one of the worst hard-rock mining disasters in American history.

Butte has dwindled from its peak but refuses to forget what it was. The uptown district preserves late 19th-century architecture, much of it built during the copper boom. The St. Patrick's Day parade draws crowds that rival cities many times Butte's size. The stories told in bars still feature the Anaconda Company, the union battles, the characters who made fortunes or lost everything.

The surrounding landscape offers its own attractions - the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest provides trails for hiking and biking, and seven city parks offer ice skating in winter. But Butte's identity remains tied to its mining past, to the tunnels that honeycomb the hill beneath the streets, to the pit that fills slowly with poisoned water, to the wealth that was extracted and the community that remains.