Copper King Marcus Daly scores the bronze Friday in Anaconda as new statue unveiled

Renowned sculptor Fred Boyer, an Anaconda native, crafted the grand tribute to Daly by a demanding, multi-stage process requiring months.

On a misty evening just shy of drizzling, Boyer and Ken Maynard of the Anaconda Restoration Association unveiled the Daly statue.

The bronze, life-sized Copper King gestures congenially with a hat and stands next to a lamppost and a bench that features a likeness of Daly’s beloved thoroughbred, Tammany.  

As the concealing drapes came off, the crowd responded with enthusiastic applause and the quick-draw deployment of cellphone cameras.

Boyer spoke to the crowd before the unveiling about the commission received from the Anaconda Restoration Association.

“It was a great honor for these people to ask me to do this piece because I’m an Anaconda boy, and I’ve heard about Marcus Daly all my life,” he said. “He made this state, he made this city, this building, the building across the street (referencing the Marcus Daly & Company Bank at one corner of Main and Park streets).”

Two blocks away, following Main Street’s slightly uphill slope past the Washoe Theatre, stands a statue of Phoebe Hearst unveiled June 13. Kevin Curtis of Butte was the sculptor.

Historians, including Brenda Wahler, say that Phoebe, the wife of Daly investor George Hearst, was not a Marcus Daly fan.

“Daly should truly be sent to the state prison for all his rascality,” Phoebe Hearst wrote in correspondence in 1896. “We may give him some trouble one of these days.”

Ironically, some 130 years later, there was conflict between the Anaconda Restoration Association and the Anaconda Historic Resources Board about which entity would commission the statue of Daly.

In the end, the Historic Resources Board proceeded with the statute of Hearst, who had donated the Hearst Free Library to Anaconda. The library's doors opened June 1, 1898.  

Boyer is known best for his wildlife sculptures but has completed numerous statues of the human figure, including a statue of a smokejumper — a role Boyer embraced as a young man.  

He once sculpted a bust of Daly, but it was lost in the February 1985 fire that razed the historic Durston Block.

Boyer said Sunday it was challenging to find likenesses of Daly. He said the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center was helpful, as was Wahler, author of the recently published “Marcus Daly’s Montana Empires.”

He said Jim Dolan, a regional lawyer and board member for Copper Village Museum and Arts Center, had a physical build similar to Daly's and served as a model at times. 

Bob Mehrens of the Ancient Order of Hibernians attended Friday’s unveiling. AOH, with the help of the Irish Studies Program at the University of Montana, donated $5,000 to help pay for the statue of Marcus Daly.

Anaconda resident Bobbie Frank’s raffle ticket won a small-scale version, known as a maquette, of Boyer’s Daly statue.

Historians say Daly, an Irish immigrant, embodied the American Dream, rising from poverty to great wealth. Like many powerful businessmen of his era, he relied on capitalism to both enrich and exploit.

Part of his darker legacy lives on in the region’s vast mining and smelting pollution that will require cleanup and monitoring for generations.

Daly built smelters in Anaconda for the copper ore his company mined in Butte. The sites at the south end of the Deer Lodge valley offered ready access to the water and timber needed to run the smelters. He intended originally to call the new settlement “Copperopolis,” but learned the name was taken.

He founded Anaconda in 1883.

“For many Montanans, the name Anaconda is a symbol of the state’s raucous history of copper smelting, labor strife, environmental struggles and political upheaval,” wrote Mark Spero and Rick Graetz in “Anaconda — A Montana Gem.”   

In Butte, a sculpture of Marcus Daly stands atop a pedestal at the entrance to Montana Technological University. That statue, the work of world-famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, another Irish immigrant, was unveiled in September 1907 just outside the Federal Building on North Main Street and later moved.

Marcus Daly died on Nov. 12, 1900. He was 58 years old.

The city he founded struggled mightily after its lifeblood copper smelter closed in 1980. Public art like the two statues recently unveiled, as well as colorful murals on commercial buildings and Boyer’s previously installed mule deer, likely suggest that at least a few economic corners have been turned.