Equal opportunity employer
Anaconda Co. was a good place to work, according to Allick, who moved to Great Falls from North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation to take a job.
“If they hadn’t shut the place down, I would have worked there until I turned 65,” he said.
“The company was good about hiring college students and farmers,” Allick said.
Anaconda Co. also was good about hiring minorities, he said. “A lot of us came out from Turtle Mountain Reservation to try it.”
It wasn’t the place for everyone, though. Many other Native Americans who tried jobs on Smelter Hill quit, he said.
LaMere said he worked with a number of other Native Americans. “They’re all dead now, though,” he said.
Art Nelson, a former personnel manager at the plant, said he occasionally was reprimanded for having too few Native Americans on staff. He recalled one year when 100 Indians were hired. “By the end of the year, only six were left. They just didn’t like it,” he said.
Women were hired for work all over the plant during World War II and again in the late ’70s, said Bill Wojtala, who retired after 36 years. “I think it was pretty hard work for them, though — so physical and so dirty,” he said.
Sometimes, Nelson said, a woman’s presence could be disruptive too. “Occasionally men would leave their posts to help them with heavy work. They wanted to make points with them, I guess,” he said.
Ann Kuntz, whose husband, Gabe, worked at the plant from 1939 until the early ’70s, said he told her “one for the books.” It seems a worker on the hill took sick and was taken to the infirmary, only to be fired when the hospital staff discovered that the worker was a woman in man’s clothing.
Before the war, Kuntz explained, only men were hired for the heavy work.
Wojtala was one of 20 or so who accepted a transfer to Tonopah, Nev., in the early ’80s to work as a supervisor at a new ARCO molybdenum mine.
“A lot of people turned down transfers, but I had tried other jobs and the company turned out to be a good place for me,” he said.
Unfortunately, the molybdenum mine closed after a few years, too, so Wojtala took a job with the company in Gillette, Wyo. When layoffs started there, after he was there only eight months, he retired.
There used to be five towns here
Five separate communities dotted the confluence of the Sun and Missouri rivers in the smelter's early days. Johnstown, on the west side of the Missouri River, Little Chicago, which became Black Eagle in 1917, Great Falls on the east bank of the Missouri, Little Milwaukee and North Great Falls. The latter two were forced to move by growth at the plant. Many homes ended up in Black Eagle.