Montana Mining Loan and Investment Company Unissued Receipt for 25¢ - 1902 dated Americana

Partial payment receipt for 25 cents for the Montana Mining Loan and Investment Company of Butte, Montana. Very colorful! Small size measures 5 3/4" x 2 1/2".

Before Butte's formal establishment in 1864, the area consisted of a mining camp that had developed in the early 1860s. The city is in the Silver Bow Creek Valley (or Summit Valley), a natural bowl sitting high in the Rockies straddling the Continental Divide, positioned on the southwestern side of a large mass of granite known as the Boulder Batholith, which dates to the Cretaceous era. In 1874, William L. Farlin founded the Asteroid Mine (subsequently known as the Travona), which attracted a significant number of prospectors seeking gold and silver. The mines attracted workers from Cornwall (England), Ireland, Wales, Lebanon, Canada, Finland, Austria, Italy, China, Montenegro, Mexico, and more. In the ethnic neighborhoods, young men formed gangs to protect their territory and socialize into adult life, including the Irish of Dublin Gulch, the Eastern Europeans of the McQueen Addition, and the Italians of Meaderville.

Among the migrants were many Chinese who set up businesses that created a Chinatown in Butte. The Chinese migrations stopped in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. There was anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1870s and onward due to the white settlers' racism, exacerbated by economic depression, and in 1895, the chamber of commerce and labor unions started a boycott of Chinese-owned businesses. The business owners fought back by suing the unions and won. The history of the Chinese migrants in Butte is documented in the Mai Wah Museum. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

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