A reader writes:
It would also be interesting to post the view from the statue. You would be looking down on the Berkeley Pit, a gigantic open pit copper mine that swallowed much of uptown Butte, including the town that my grandmother grew up in, Meaderville, and the locally famous Columbia Gardens. They closed the mine a couple of decades ago and it subsequently turned into a large toxic lake. They need to keep hazing birds away from this environmental nightmare because coming into contact with the water kills them.
The pit is the US government's most costly hazardous waste clean-up project.