Copper Camp

Copper Camp: The Lusty Story of Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth

Copper Camp is a Montana classic. First published in 1943 and long out of print, Copper Camp is available again, bigger and better than ever with 25 new historical photos chosen specifically for this edition.

Copper Camp contains hundreds of brawling, bawdy, over-the-top, laugh-out-loud stories about Butte during the height of the copper mining in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Each story is told with keen wit, love, and appreciation for the world’s greatest copper camp and the people who lived, loved, played, and worked there.

Writers for the Works Projects Administration compiled the stories. Their aim was to reveal “the wealth of human interest held within the folds of the ‘richest hill on earth.’ Instead of the Copper Kings, here are the kids and characters, ministers, miners, mothers, girls from the line, bankers, and barkeeps. Of such stuff as strikes, parades, politics and people – above all, of rawboned, lively, honest-to-God people – is a mining camp composed; and Butte, in the opinion of many experts, is THE mining camp.

Copper Camp has been described as “a roaring human document that is as strong, and important as the town of Butte, Montana.” If you want to understand Butte, then read this book. If you want to experience the sheer joy of a wonderful book that takes you to a totally different time and place, then Copper Camp is for you, too.

By the Writer's Project of Montana. Softcover, 336 pages.