1. The Milltown Dam Opening slide. Notes:
Start the Milltown Dam Time Line Activity.
See Appendix I to Lesson Plan 1, Milltown Dam Time Line Activity.
The Milltown Dam
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

2. Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed
Questions:
What do you know about the history of the Milltown Dam?
Notes:
In this PowerPoint presentation, we will discuss the history of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers confluence area (both part of the Clark Fork River Watershed), and its role in Western Montana’s industrial development.
But first, what is a watershed?
A watershed is an area of land that funnels all its water through a network of streams that eventually drain into a larger body of water. Wherever you are standing on the earth, you are in a watershed. Watersheds are not just water, they are the land, too.
The boundaries between watersheds are called divides. Divides represent lines along the highest points in an area. When rain falls or snow melts, a divide determines the direction of water flow.
See Lesson Plan 1, Appendix II: Watershed Funnel; also see Trunks activity, Watershed Line-up
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

3. Once upon a time…
Question:
Why do you think the confluence area was important to American Indians?
How did European settlement change American Indian use of the area?
Notes:
Centuries before European settlement of the region, the area where the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers meet (called a confluence) was an important fishing ground, cultural area, and passage way for the region’s American Indian tribes.
The Salish, Kootenai, Pend d’Oreille and Kalispell tribes used the area for fishing. In fact, the Salish called it the place of big bull trout, attesting to the fact that bull trout was Montana’s most abundant large trout species at the time.
Even after the settlement of European peoples, there are visual accounts of “2,000 to 3,000” Indians who would gather at the confluence. These gatherings ended once tribes were forced by the federal government to “stay put” on their respective reservations and once the industrialization of the area was fully underway with completion of the Mullan Road, Copper King Marcus Daly’s sawmill on the Blackfoot and the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883.
Photos: Left: Indian “dip-netting” in the Columbia basin. Right: Indian spearing salmon in the Columbia basin. Top-right: Bull trout, the large native species of the char family once abundant in the entire Columbia river drainage, including the Clark Fork.
See Lesson Plan 1, Appendix III: American Indian History of the Confluence Area
The area where the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers met (the confluence) was called the “place of big bull trout” by local tribes.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

4. Western Civilization Comes to the Confluence
Notes:
From the 1850s to 1883, European settlement began to significantly change the region.
Trappers and explorers had been through this area as early as the 1830s. However, settlement of this remote area of Montana would not become significant until the 1850s. At that time, the future governor of Washington, Isaac Stevens, and his group which included Lt. John Mullan, was commissioned by the U.S. government to survey the area for a transcontinental railroad to be built between Ft. Walla Walla in Washington and Fort Benton, Montana.
Originally commissioned to be a railroad and later a military road, the Mullan Road in its entirety was completed late in 1860 in Fort Benton and was unofficially designated Montana’s first interstate highway.
The road was important for freight and travelers passing through the territory between mining camps, agriculture centers and other settlements.
Photos: This sketch shows what the historic confluence of the Blackfoot (on the left) and the Clark Fork (on the right) looked like in 1860 at the time Lt. John Mullan (pictured) and his crew were building the Mullan Road.
Lt. John Mullan
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

5. Early Development in Western Montana
ANIMATION
Questions:
Do you recognize these gentlemen?
Why talk about these gentlemen when talking about Milltown?
Notes:
(first click) This is Marcus Daly and William Clark, two of Butte’s Copper Kings. They both were highly influential in the early development of the area and in shaping of the events that took place in Milltown.
Clark started developing Butte’s mineral resources in the early 1870’s, and Daly started the Anaconda Mining Company in the late 1870’s.
Resources in the Milltown and Missoula area were critical for the successful expansion of their operations in Butte and Anaconda.
Marcus Daly
William Clark
Two of Butte’s Copper Kings
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

6. Early Development in Western Montana
Question:
What types of resources were plentiful in Milltown and Missoula that were no longer plentiful in Butte and Anaconda?
Notes:
Answer: timber!
Daly’s story. Daly started a timber mill in Milltown in the late 1870’s. Once completed, the Northern Pacific Railroad was the link between Missoula’s rich timber industry and Butte and Anaconda’s mining operations.
Pictured is Daly’s Big Blackfoot Milling Company (later called the Stimson Dam) at Bonner on the Blackfoot River.
The Stimson Dam was removed in the fall of 2006 as part of the Milltown remediation and restoration activities.
Clark’s story. In 1905 Clark began development of the Milltown Dam (lower right photo), the first hydroelectric project on the Clark Fork, and a new adjacent lumber mill. Construction of the dam was complete in 1908.
Milltown Dam generated electricity to supply Bonner, Milltown (then called Riverside) and Missoula, including Clark’s electrified street car system.
Daly and Clark’s projects and interests in this area resulted in the industrial and economic development of Missoula.
See Lesson Plan 1, Appendix IV: The Milltown-Butte Connection
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

7. Upstream Industrialization: The Richest Hill on Earth
Notes:
The Headwaters Boom in Butte. The industrialization that the Bonner and Missoula area experienced was great. However, it was a direct result of the exponentially larger development going on upstream in Butte and Anaconda.
With the advent of electricity and its related technology (telephone, telegraph, etc.), Butte was quickly established as the largest city between Minneapolis and San Francisco by the turn of the 20th century.
The mining operations of Clark, Daly and others churned furiously 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, taking copper ore out of the ground and putting it to use as the industrial revolution’s most high tech commodity: the transmission of electricity. Butte and Anaconda were producing more copper than any one place on the planet, accounting for more than 1/3 of the United States supply when demand was at its peak.
Question:
How did all these activities affect Montanans’ daily lives?
Positive impacts of Mining. Butte was not just the largest city in Montana. Its mines’ profits brought money to Montana from investors worldwide, resulting in:
Architecture: Opulent mansions and some of the tallest, state-of-the-art buildings of the era, all drawing from a variety of traditional and contemporary styles;
Cultural Diversity: The huge labor demands of the mines drew workers from all over the world to the area;
Prosperity: Butte’s miners and smeltermen were the highest-paid blue collar workers in the country.
Western Montana’s rural and urban communities (Anaconda, Butte, Deer Lodge and Missoula) enjoyed electrification decades before the rest of the U.S.’s similar-sized communities. The first electrified railroads were also located in this area of Montana.
Photos (clockwise from top left): Columbia Gardens, built by Clark, world class amusement park and botanical gardens; Uptown Butte bustling urban landscape and the electric trolley system (both Anaconda and Missoula had this too); massive mansions of the wealthy mine owners and investors, such as this one built by Clark’s son; Daly’s horseracing track south of the mining district.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

8. Mining: Environmental impacts
Mining causes intense land and water disturbance, resulting in significant amounts of waste rock (acid rock drainage).
In order to concentrate valuable metals, ore is milled and processed (crushed) resulting in the undesirable byproduct called tailings.
Smelting, an additional step in separating valuable metals from the rock, causes airborne contamination and impaired air quality.
Question:
What negative impacts do you think might have resulted from mining?
Notes:
Although the social and economic impacts were outstandingly positive, the ecological impacts were devastating, which was directly related to how copper is mined and processed. There are three general steps to extracting copper:
Mining: For every shovel of rock mined, a tiny bit of copper is removed. Lots of waste rock is also removed (rock that does not contain copper) along with the ore (the rock that contains the most copper). All of this granitic rock contains pyrite.
Milling and Processing: The copper ore goes to the stamp mills where they crush the ore into powder to increase surface area. Chemicals are added to concentrate the metals. The fine-grained sandy leftover waste is called tailings, because it is the tail-end of the process.
Smelting: Smelting is the final step in the process where copper concentrate from milling and processing is roasted into pure copper. Airborne byproducts of smelting include arsenic and acidic sulfur fumes. These fumes greatly affected public health; in the worst cases, people experienced bloody noses and vomiting, and sometimes, death. In the winter months, the Butte death rates were higher than in New York and Chicago. For instance, in 1902, the Anaconda Stack released 60,000 pounds of arsenic trioxide per day into the air and 300,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

9. Acid rock drainage Pyrite + water + air = rust + acid Acid rock stream
Notes:
Butte is a sulfide ore body, an area where metals in the ground are primarily bound to sulfur as minerals. The most abundant of these is iron sulfide, commonly called pyrite, or fool’s gold.
Pyrite is a beautiful mineral when it is in a rock collection and is not harmful to the environment when it is beneath the ground. However, when exposed to air and water, pyrite oxidizes in a phenomenon known as acid rock drainage (ARD; a.k.a. acid mine drainage), where it reacts to produce sulfuric acid.
As sulfuric acid is produced, the water draining from the waste dissolves metals-rich minerals (copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, arsenic) into the streams – bad stuff!
All of the wastes associated with the mining done in Butte were laden with pyrite, creating a continual source of ARD of unprecedented scale.
Left photo: Iron pyrite or fools gold.
Right photo: ARD stream. Iron deposited on rocks and visible in water creates orange color.
Pyrite or “fools gold”
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

10. What happened in 1908? ANIMATION Flood in Nebraska (1908) Question:
Notes:
(first click) The largest flood on record in Western Montana, as well as in the Pacific Northwest. This photo shows the flood which occurred in June of 1908 at the Milltown Dam, just months after construction of the dam was completed. The rains during this time affected many other watersheds as far east as Nebraska.
How did this flood affect the Milltown Dam?
(second click) “If you’re going to dance, you’ve got to pay the fiddler.”
The flood threatened to destroy the Milltown Dam’s powerhouse and its expensive generators, even though it was thought to be indestructible.
“…when the last piece of timber is added to the dam, it will be in such condition that the highest waters ever known in this vicinity will not affect it in the least. No expense was spared in making the dam one of strongest of its kind…” Plant Superintendent George Slack on the Milltown’s construction (from Missoula’s newspaper, 1908).
This statement was somewhat misleading because the timber crib technology used at Milltown was not the most advanced. There were new and better dam building technologies available that primarily used concrete and steel. Other dam projects of this time in Montana used these newer technologies.
Water topped the dam and began filling the powerhouse at an alarming rate. When the flood’s threat to the powerhouse became evident, Clark sent a crew of his miners, experts in explosives, to the site to dynamite out the south end of the dam to relieve pressure and save the rest of the structure.
Flood in Nebraska (1908)
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

11. Reconstruction of the Milltown Dam
ANIMATION
Notes:
In this photo, looking upstream at the dam, we can see the topping of the water over the spillway and the water level reaching above the bottom of the powerhouse windows.
Photo 1 (first click): Dam reconstruction efforts took the rest of the year and lasted into 1909.
Question:
Besides timber, what do you notice being used in the dam’s reconstruction?
The reconstruction focused on rebuilding the spillway, this time tying it into the bedrock wall using steel and concrete.
Photo 2 (second click): Also, the size of the rock, or rip-rap, used to fill the timber cribs was increased dramatically in an effort to strengthen the dam.
Photo 3 (third click): A finished look at the reconstructed dam in April Another massive flood, although not as big as the one in 1908, came in 1909 and the dam and powerhouse held. The spillway required numerous improvements and maintenance over the years, including application of a concrete veneer in the 1970s.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

12. How did the 1908 flood affect the rest of the Upper Clark Fork?
Silver Bow Creek at confluence with Brown’s Gulch
ANIMATION
Upper Clark Fork River, Deer Lodge Valley
Question:
What do you think happened in some of these heavily-mined areas of Butte and Anaconda ?
How did the flooding of Butte and Anaconda affect the rest of the watershed?
Notes:
Butte, Anaconda and the rest of the Clark Fork watershed were stricken with major environmental damage that has affected the health of our watershed for the last 100 years.
Aside from bridges and railroads washing out, all of the tailings and waste piles (pictured) on the hills and in the floodplains surrounding Butte and Anaconda were picked up and washed downstream. Millions of cubic yards of these contaminated sediments were transported (one cubic yard = ~1 pick-up truckload) down the watershed. So much was washed that the smaller streams could not carry the entire load.
(first click) The areas in Butte and the Silver Bow Creek watershed got hit the worst. Nearly 6 million cubic yards and 1,500 acres of land were trashed by the flood and the tailings it carried downstream. All 22 miles of the Silver Bow Creek floodplain between Butte and Warm Springs is currently being removed and replaced.
(second click) Even the upper Clark Fork between Warm Springs and Garrison was not big enough to carry all the tailings. There are roughly 1,000 acres of bare, tailings-contaminated areas in this section of the Clark Fork; notice the blue-hued areas in the photo. These are called slickens, a name originally used by the Deer Lodge Valley ranchers because of the areas’ lack of vegetation and slick quality when wet and walking across them in cowboy boots.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

13. How have the effects of the 1908 flood impacted us today?
ANIMATION
Question:
How have the effects of the 1908 flood impacted us today?
Notes:
(first click) From 1908 to 1980, there was no concerted effort to clean the contamination. Then in 1980, the Superfund environmental cleanup law was passed and as a result, the entire upper Clark Fork from Butte to Milltown was linked together as the nation’s largest complex of Superfund sites.
What is a Superfund Site?
A federal Superfund site (there are also state Superfund sites) is a contaminated area that is listed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an area that must be cleaned up due to risks to human health and the environment.
Photo: Map of the Clark Fork Basin Superfund Area from Butte to Milltown Dam.
Photo Legend: Yellow = Butte, Silver Bow Creek, Warm Springs and Berkeley Pit Superfund sites; Green = Anaconda Smelter and Old Works Superfund sites; Orange = Upper Clark Fork River and Milltown Dam Superfund sites.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed

14. Questions?
Notes:
At this time, you should be able to complete your Milltown Dam Time Line Activity.
Lecture 1: Milltown Dam, Part I: History of the Watershed