Black Eagle

Many of the smelter's early workers were Italians, Croatians, Greeks and Scandinavians who had lived first in Milwaukee, Chicago or Minneapolis, and two of the hamlets the panel names carry those cities' names. Little Milwaukee, begun about 1890, was the earliest; in 1903 the company moved its houses off ground it wanted for expansion. Little Chicago grew to the north and west as the Burlingame Addition. Oral histories recorded in 1986 remember a Croatian family's Chicago Mercantile, the Ranieri store and boardinghouse of 1909 to 1918, and the Italian fraternal lodges.

What the plaque says

Black Eagle The uppermost falls of the Great Falls of the Missouri bears west of this point. In June 1805, Meriwether Lewis spotted an eagle's nest in a cottonwood tree on an island in the river -"a more inaccessable spot I believe she could not have found; for neither man nor beast dare pass those gulphs which separate her little domain from the shores." Eighty-six years later, in 1891, the Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company constructed a massive smelter complex on the hill overlooking the site of the nest. The smelter processed copper from Butte until 1918 when the Anaconda Company converted it into an electrolytic copper and zinc refinery. Three communities, Little Chicago, Little Milwaukee, and North Great Falls, developed in the shadow of the 506-foot smokestack at the top of Smelter Hill. Men from all over North America and Europe came to work in the complex at Black Eagle, as it was known by 1916. A truly cosmopolitan community, all worked together in the plant, maintained their ethnic diversity and rubbed elbows in the vibrant business district along Smelter Avenue. Although the refinery shut down in 1980 and the stack razed two years later, Black Eagle remains a working class community proud of its rich history.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C. M. Russell Museum — 1.5 mi
  The cowboy artist's house and log studio, and the story of Nancy Russell, who turned his bar-tab paintings into a career.
• Giant Springs State Park — 1.5 mi
  The spring William Clark called the largest he ever saw, and the 201-foot river a fifth-grade class got into the record books.

More markers nearby

• Malmstrom Air Force Base — 2.4 mi
• Lewis & Clark Portage Route — 2.4 mi
• Twenty-Eight Mile Station — 3.4 mi
• Coal Mines and Railroads — 7.5 mi