Butte, America

Authors:Pamela Roberts, Gabriel Byrne, Eugene Corr, Edwin Dobb, Jane Greenberg, Erik Daarstad, Todd Boekelheide, MontanaPBS, KUSM-TV (Television station : Bozeman, Mont), Independent Television Service, Rattlesnake Productions, Inc, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Summary:"[R]ecounts the sometimes glorious, often sorrowful, but always fascinating saga of Butte, Montana, the most lucrative hard rock mining town in U.S. history -- 'the Richest Hill on Earth, ' 'the Gibraltar of Unionism, ' 'the Pittsburgh of the West.' In this copper mining metropolis, the Industrial Revolution collided with the romance of the frontier, corporate capitalism battle organized labor, and the country's ever-increasing appetite for metals laid waste to land and water ... [The film] tells this epic story through the lives of miners and their families, initially immigrants from Ireland and England, but eventually from nations across Europe ... As other once-great American cities see jobs and industries disappear, along with neighborhoods that generations have called home, Butte, America's relevance reaches far beyond the mountains of southwestern Montana."--Container