Marcus Haggin Daly

Marcus Daly on Daly Mansion (Hamilton, Montana) website: "Marcus Daly was born December 5, 1843 in Derrylea, County Caven, Ireland, the youngest of 11 children of an Irish [Catholic] farm family. Derrylea is situated on the Granard road out of Ballyjamesduff and this area like vast parts of Cavan saw a mass exodus of its people circa 1847-1855 (famine). Like most immigrants of the time, Marcus arrived in New York in 1856 with few belongings, very little money and a limited education and job skills. 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 where a sister lived.

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.

By 1871, Daly was at Ophir, Utah, and became a foreman for the Walker Brothers, a banking and mining syndicate, in Salt Lake City. In 1872, while Daly was inspecting a mine at Ophir with a Mr. Evans and his daughter Margaret, the young lady lost her balance on an incline and tumbled into Daly's arms. Later that year they were married in one of the Walker Brothers homes in Salt Lake. Margaret was 18 years old and Marcus was 30. The Daly's first two children, Margaret Augusta (Madge) and Mary (Molly) were born in Ophir, Utah.

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. The Daly's only son, Marcus II (Mark) was born in Butte, as well as their fourth child and third daughter, Harriot (Hattie).

Marcus Daly was not a man to share confidence or talk about himself. He did not leave the details of the history of his life to be recorded. Shortly after the death of Marcus Daly, his personal records from Anaconda were sent to the Bitterroot Stock Farm and burned. Even letters between Marcus and Margaret were destroyed by Margaret. Daly was stocky and had a dark complexion and the usual Irish temperament. His eyes were clear and his voice in conversation was low and mellow. He spoke with brogue, chewed tobacco and loved to have a beer with his fellow miners. Marcus Daly was a fighter. He did not deal in generalities, he was blunt and forthright, and he was a creator. He was always known to be generous to his friends. Marcus Daly died in New York City's Netherlands Hotel, November 12, 1900 of complications of diabetes and a bad heart. He was 58 years old. His death came near the New York Harbor, where as a 15 year old Irish immigrant, Marcus Daly first glimpsed the America of his dreams. His remains were placed in the Daly mausoleum in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York." Burial mass was said at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

Marcus Daly on Ancestry.com DALY FAMILY TREE has birthdate Dec. 5, 1841.

Marcus Daly's spouse & children

• MARGARET PRICE EVANS 1854–1941
• Margaret C "Madge" Daly 1873–1911
• Mary A. "Molly" Daly 1876-
• Marcus H Daly 1882–1930
• Harriot Holmes "Hattie" Daly 1884–1950

Marcus Daly in Wikipedia: Marcus Daly was an Irish-born American businessman known as one of the three "Copper Kings" of Butte, Montana.

Early life. Daly emigrated from County Cavan Ireland to the United States at the age of fifteen, arriving in New York City.

Career. Daly founded his fortune on the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana, which he bought with money from various backers, including George Hearst (father of William Randolph Hearst) in 1880. The Anaconda began as a silver mine, but copper was discovered there and found to be one of the largest deposits known at the time. He built a smelter to handle the ore, and by 1895 had become a millionaire and owner of the Anaconda Copper Mining (ACM) Company. Daly was active in Montana politics throughout the 1890s and also founded the town of Anaconda, near his smelter. In 1894 Daly spearheaded an energetic but unsuccessful campaign to have Anaconda designated as Montana's state capital. Another note in politics was his competition with fellow copper king William A. Clark. He tried to keep him out of office by lavishly supporting Clark's opponents.

Thoroughbred horse racing. Marcus Daly invested some of his money in horse breeding at his Bitterroot Stock Farm located near Hamilton, Montana, and was the owner/breeder of Scottish Chieftain, the only horse bred in Montana to ever win the Belmont Stakes (1897).

In 1891, Daly became the owner of Tammany, said to be one of the world's fastest racehorses in 1893. He owned and stood Inverness, sire of Scottish Chieftain, as well as Hamburg, Ogden, and The Pepper. He also arranged the breeding of the great Sysonby, ranked number 30 in the top 100 U.S. thoroughbred champions of the 20th Century by Blood-Horse magazine. Daly died before the horse was born.

Following his death, a dispersal sale was held on January 31, 1901, at New York's Madison Square Garden for the Bitterroot Stud Thoroughbreds.

Legacy. Daly's house, Riverside, near Hamilton, MT. Daly's legacy was a mixed one for Anaconda. From 1885 to 1980, the smelter was one of the town's largest employers and provided well-paid jobs for generations. When the smelter closed in 1980, during a labor strike, 25% of the town's workforce was put out of work and the town has not recovered. The smelter itself was torn down as part of environmental cleanup efforts in the 1990s, although the smokestack is still visible above the town.

Daly's legacy was equally mixed for Butte, Montana. The Anaconda Company was bought out by the Amalgamated Copper Company in 1899, and by the 1920s it controlled mining in the city. It continued to be one of the state's largest employers and a mainstay of the state and local economies until the 1970s. In the 1950s, the ACM began open-pit mining in Butte, creating a steadily growing pit east of the main business district. In the mid-1970s, copper prices collapsed and the ACM was bought out by the Atlantic Richfield Company (Arco). Arco ceased mining in Butte in 1982, ending what Daly had begun almost exactly 100 years before. See Berkeley Pit for the lasting impact. Montana Resources now (2007) operates an open pit copper and molybdenum mine in Butte, and also recovers copper from the water in the Berkeley Pit.

A statue of Daly stands at the main entrance to Montana Tech of the University of Montana (formerly the Montana School of Mines) at the west end of Park Street in Butte.

A drawing of Daly by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862–1947) was acquired in 2009 by the American National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Marcus Daly's summer home and stock farm, Riverside, is located in Hamilton, Montana and is open to visitors. See Daly-mansions for details. A video on the mansion appears on YouTube.

"Daly treated his men better than most other employers. He gave preferential treatment to new arrivals looking for work, allowed "the rustling card" (closed shop) to operate, urged new employees to join the union and allowed union officers and society members access to his mines. He made donations to many causes, including Irish nationalism and also for the building of the parish church in his native Crosserlough, Ireland." -- NewWorld Encyclopedia.

"During Daly’s life, 1,200-head of horses were kept on the Bitter Root Stock Farm. He bred some of the best-known racers at the close of the 19th century, including Ogden and Montana. He hired the best trainers, veterinarians and jockeys in North America, and Bitter Root soon became famous across the country as Daly’s horses broke American records at the top racetracks in the east. In 1901, the year after Daly’s death, 369 of his racehorses were sold at a series of auctions in New York City’s Madison Square Garden and San Francisco. Grossing over $700,000, it was considered the greatest horseracing stock sale in America at the time."

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Butte, Montana (and Anaconda) -- Ireland's 5th Province: "Butte, Montana is the city the Irish would have built if the English had said build a city of your own design and consider money to be no object . . . It's not possible to understand Butte without first looking to Ireland. The Irish who built Butte, Montana all shared a longing for a homeland that should have been. The difference from other places in the world was that Irish were allowed to create a city from their dreams of the Ireland they remembered about 5,000 miles from Ireland's shores.

In Butte, absurdly abundant mineral wealth developed and controlled by Irish immigrants allowed those who came from all directions to express that longing for home. In the process, they turned a desolate, inhospitable crest beside the Continental Divide into an industrial metropolis that grew into a city of nearly 100,000 souls.

Here Marcus Daly, born in 1841 and raised near Ballyjamesduff in County Cavan, found in mining Butte's hill for silver and gold that another metal, copper, was far more abundant. He convinced his reluctant backers of the potential wealth below the ground in the red ore in Butte and his persistence paid off when he drilled deep enough to discover a massive vein of copper 50 feet wide that flowed like a river through the middle of his Anaconda mine.

Daly soon found himself an owner of one of the largest copper mines in the world just as the global demand for copper boomed. It was not long before Daly found himself one of the wealthiest men in the West. In the years that followed, he built one of the world's largest ore smelters with a stack that was once the tallest in the world. It remains intact today near Anaconda, the town that Daly founded to be home to the Irish and others he brought from around the world to refine and process his ore.

His interests drove the fortunes of the state of Montana, prodding ventures in timber, newspapers, coal mines, railroads, and agriculture. He built a lavish mansion in the Bitterroot Valley across the mountains and away from the industrial chaos in Butte. When he died in 1900 at the Hotel Netherlands in New York City, among those at his bedside was Father Lavelle, the rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

In all of Daly's endeavors, his preference to hire fellow Irish became widely known. Despite the bitterly cold winters and the location's remoteness, there were jobs waiting for the able and the ambitious and they heeded Daly's call.

When they arrived, they found that Butte had as much in common with West Ireland as did the moon. Butte is situated high in the Northern Rockies beside the Continental Divide, 600 miles from the coast, frozen in winter by sub-zero temperatures and Arctic winds, and baked in summer by withering heat with little rain. It was a hard life in a hard land. But, they found one distinct similarity -- the people they knew back home. Butte was fast filling with relatives from the Beara Peninsula and they made their homes in neighborhoods close to the mines named Corktown and Dublin Gulch.

The frigid weather of Butte was balmy compared to the chilly welcome of the established societies in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans. Butte presented a rare opportunity, a place to start new where work could be easily had at decent wages, too. And the Irish, among the first to arrive, would shape the city's destiny. Many of the new immigrants to Butte had been wandering the country and the world since leaving Ireland and they wasted no time in making the place their own. They would be followed by other immigrants drawn by the promise of work into a patchwork of every conceivable nationality but the Irish came early and they were well settled in strong communities."