1903-04 Volume 28 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

372 THE SCROLL.Company. Nobody then suspected the colossal audacity, the restless energy,and the indomitable will which the company had hired for $5 a day.During the year he kept this position young Heinze learned much thathas since made him perhaps the most expert miner in the state. He beganto pick up his intimate knowledge of the thousands of veins and cross-veinsof copper that angle down in the granite of Butte Hill. He saw too thatthe mining claims were in a web of entanglement as regards ownership,owing in part to the defective mining laws of the early period. It was generallybelieved there was no room for a new man without means to acquiregreat wealth in the Butte field, but young Heinze thought otherwise. Hereturned to the east and spent two years in Germany studying mineralogy.A relative dying about this time left Augustus Heinze and his brotherArthur $50,000 each. The two brothers formed the Montana Ore PurchasingCompany and built at Butte a small single stack smelter.Gradually Heinze picked up properties here and there. He locatedvaluable fragments of claims that had been overlooked. He leased,bought part interests, and acquired whole properties with the money he wassteadily making. There are men who say that Heinze is a better engineerin the courts than underground, but the facts do not bear this out. It isincontrovertible that he is the shrewdest investor in Montana. Time andagain he has leased or bought worthless claims, and within a few weekshas struck rich paying ore. The "Glengarry" is one instance of this, thefamous "Minnie Healy" another. He is either an expert mining engineer orelse he has a touch of Midas.He became involved in many suits with the AmalgamatedCopper Company, growing out of disputes as to the course ordip of ore veins, and in most of these suits he has been successful.The hardest fought suit was over the MinnieHealy" mine. "Nearly everybody in Butte believes thatHeinze fairly is entitled to the 'Minnie Healy,'" says Mr.Raine, who further says:The litigation between Heinze and his opponents became an endlesssource of irritation to the Amalgamated Company. He harassed it byinjunctions, by contempt proceedings, and by a score of ingenious deviceswhich cannot be recapitulated here. A dozen times the great corporationhe is fighting thought it had him beaten financially or legally, but thoughhe has been close to ruia more than once his alert brain and supremeaudacity have always averted the apparently inevitable.About three years ago Mr. Heinze broke into Montana politics in hisfight against the Amalgated. It is an illustration of the man's "force andgeneralship that since that time he has, by holding the balance of power,elected two United States senators, a governor, a congressman, the mayorof Butte, an associate justice of the supreme court and the district judges ofSilver Bow county. Republicanism and Democracy are distinctions scarcelyrecognized in Montana. Every man who is a man is simply for Heinze orfor the Amalgamated.Mr. Raine says: "in his legal and political battles withthe Amalgamated, Heinze and his associates have had verymuch the best of it." He also says: "Heinze has made amore effective resistence to the deadening influence of theStandard Oil Company than any other man could possibly