Climate trial to be held where state first debated toxic smoke
Darrell Ehrlick
(Daily Montanan) When a first-of-its-kind climate change lawsuit kicks off in a state district courtroom in Helena Monday, it will be historic for several reasons.
It will be historic because youth in the state – many of whom have matured into adults since the suit was first filed – are arguing that Montana’s “new” Constitution, drafted and ratified more than 50 years ago – guarantees a “clean and healthful environment” for future generations, a promise they contend the state has shirked.
The case is notable for several reasons, including Montanan’s specific protection for the environment at a time when climate change and catastrophic weather events have become a routine yet existential threat for the state. The trial will also test the state’s commitment to protecting the environment even as the political supermajority tries to boost its ties and reliance upon fossil fuels.
Yet outside the same the courtroom in which this historic trial will take place is a bronze plaque, not unlike the dozens of plaques and markers sprinkled throughout the state’s capital city with many places singled out for their contributions to Treasure State history. The plaque notes that Judge Kathy Seeley’s courtroom was the place of the original Constitutional Convention, held in 1889.
It was inside the courtroom where delegates drafted the original state Constitution. And it was inside those walls, with a packed upper-floor gallery, where copper king and former disgraced U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark made one of the state’s most infamous speeches.
While the youth of the 21st Century argue the state has kowtowed to fossil fuels and industrial business at the expense of the state’s environment, the titans of Montana’s 19th Century argued famously that the heavy smoke, laden with toxic chemicals, made Helena the perfect site for the soon-to-be state’s permanent capital. Clark’s impassioned speech about the benefits of pollution stand as both a reminder of Montana’s mining and industrial past, and the historic struggle to balance natural resources with environmental protection.
Apparently, Helena’s climate, even before statehood, was known throughout the state.
“My intelligent friend from Custer County (Walter A. Burleigh) who is generally right on most of the propositions that have been discussed in this convention when he alluded to a visit he made recently, or sometime in the last year, to the silver city wherein he was troubled a great deal with smoke,” Clark began.
“The gentlemen said that he smelt sulphur over here. He said it was too suggestive of the future. I have no doubt sulphur seems to be suggestive of Sheol and probably the gentlemen from Custer is a little tender upon that subject,” Clark said.
The transcription of the convention noted laughter after that line, something the copper king wasn’t often known for.
“I am reminded to suggest also to this gentleman that I believe he is an admirer of the ladies, and I must say that the ladies are very fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called, because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a beautiful complexion,” he said.
Again laughter broke out.
“Now, talking about this smoke, I believe there are times when there is smoke settling over the city but I would say that it would be a great deal better for other cities in the territory if they had more smoke and less diphtheria and other diseases,” Clark continued. “It has been believed by all the physicians of Butte that the smoke that sometimes prevails there is a disinfectant and destroys the microbes that constitute the germs of disease.”
Clark trusted that Burleigh, a physician, would agree with him, but then continued to promote the benefits of a polluted sky.
“While it is disagreeable, it is an advantage in some respects and it would be a great advantage for other cities, as I have said, to have a little more smoke and business activity and less disease,” Clark said.
Clark’s words, which were taken as a rallying cry for Montana’s rapid “civilization,” would come back to haunt history books as Clark, and his fellow copper kings, took copper and the fortunes from the mines out of state, leaving the citizens to deal with decades of clean-up and still visible scars on the land.
Clark’s germ theory was also discredited, although among the best thinking at the time. Doctors believed the smoke had a certain disinfectant quality because it could kill most anything, including trees, birds and even small animals, who were nearly eradicated from Butte for a time.
And that lovely, pale complexion enjoyed by the women of Butte and Helena?
That was because the arsenic and other heavy metals were disrupting blood flow, leaving them with an anemic, pale or even splotchy sheen.
Yet compared to Clark’s home county of Silver Bow and the belching mines and open-pit smelting that was happening there, Helena’s air was relatively clean.
“The smoke caused some deaths, many illnesses, vomitings and nosebleeds,” said author and historian Michael P. Malone in his book, “Battle for Butte.” “According to the Anaconda Standard, only four trees remained alive in 1890 (in Butte); and local wags reported, perhaps with tongues in cheek, that cats died of licking arsenic from their whiskers.”