Last weekend I did a show at the Daly Mansion in Hamilton. It was a 2 day event and I did very well. We were allowed to take pictures of the outside of the mansion, but not of the inside....it is considered a museum. I was set up in the sunroom...and if I do the show again next year, I would definately request that space again. The Daly Mansion has over 56 rooms, with 25 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, and 7 fireplaces-5 of which have imported Italian marble. The three-story, 24,000-square-foot mansion is situated on 50 tree-planted acres in the heart of the Bitterroot Valley. For more outside pictures.....go to our main site and then "photos of our Montana". Anyway....here's a little history lesson. Marcus Daly was pretty much the founding father of Hamilton.....and was one of the richest men alive. He made his millions in the copper mining industry. He was born to a poor Irish farming family and immigrated to the US in 1856. He was only 15 years old at the time. He did odd jobs for the first 5 years until he had saved enough money to buy passage to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama and then overland up the coast to California.
His first experience with mining was in California, where he teamed up with another young Irishman named Thomas Murphy. Daly learned quickly and found employment in one of the silver mines of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. It was here that Daly met George Hearst who became one of Daly's financial backers in years to come.
In 1874 Marcus Daly became a citizen of the United States. The Walker Brothers sent Daly to the Montana Territory in 1876 to find and invest in a silver mine. Daly bought the Alice mine for the company and retained a one fifth interest for himself. In 1881, Daly sold his interest in the Alice mine and purchased the Anaconda claim, with the backing of George Hearst and his associates, James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis. The Anaconda was mainly a silver mine until they hit the copper vein 300 feet deep and 100 feet wide.
Copper was just coming into use for telegraph wire and electricity. Thomas Edison had just completed the world's first electric light power plant in New York City. Copper was selling for between eighteen and twenty-three cents a pound in the early 1880's but smelting costs were high because the ore had to be shipped to smelters in Swansea, Wales. Daly realized that there could be a profit in copper if smelting costs could be reduced. Again with the backing of Hearst, Haggin, and Tevis, Daly built a smelter on a site twenty-eighty miles west of Butte. Daly built the town of Anaconda to support his smelter. By 1890, the copper mines of Butte were producing over seventeen million dollars worth of copper a year, and Marcus Daly, although a junior partner in the Anaconda venture, had become a very rich man.
He was so successful that Anaconda became almost a household word in the United States. Daly purchased coal mines to fuel his finances, bought forests to supply his timber and built power plants to supply the mines. He also established a number of banks, and a newspaper, the influential Anaconda Standard.
He bought land in Bitter Root Valley, Montana and built a mansion in the heart of the valley just outside the town of Hamilton, Montana. By 1889 he had a 22,000 acre ranch on which he had developed a huge agricultural enterprise. Daly in particular was very interested in horses and one of his most prized racehorses was Tommany, one of the most famous in America’s racing history.
Marcus Daly died in New York City aged 58 in 1900. When he died he was one of the major figures in American industry and was known as the copper king. More than any other man he built the Montana mining industry, he was a true son of Ireland, which he never forgot and helped.
