The Butte Weekly Miner Archive

The Butte Miner began as a tri-weekly on June 1, 1876, under the guidance of James H. Mills Harry Kessler, and Horace T. Brown.  A Civil War veteran, Mills arrived in Montana in 1866 and soon became Secretary of the Territory, Adjutant General, and the father of the Montana Press Association.  Kessler owned the Clear Grit Mine in Butte and had spent nine years as a lithographer in Philadelphia prior to immigrating to Montana.  Horace Brown, an Ohio newspaperman, moved to Virginia City, Montana, in 1867, and one year later came to work on the Helena Herald.

The Miner was an eight-page, six-column Republican newspaper. The publishers declared in the first issue the paper’s purpose: to promote Butte and Montana’s rich mineral resources.  They also heralded the installation of a sophisticated press and the use of high quality newsprint.  The imminent arrival of the telegraph was reflected in subsequent issues of the Miner, with a regular column featuring U.S. and foreign telegrams.  In 1882, the Miner Publishing Company began to issue the Miner as a semiweekly. Beginning in 1885, it also published the Daily Miner.

In 1889, Butte Copper King, William A. Clark, purchased the Miner to aid him in his political battle with industrialist Marcus Daly.  In 1890, the paper was renamed the Butte Weekly Miner.  Over time, theMiner joined the Anaconda Company’s gallery of daily Montana newspapers, acquired to promote the economic and