merchant, and manufacturing sectors. The banks grew in reputation and stature as the region developed, but remained single-unit, family-based enterprises. But Conrad's expanded across the international border into Alberta through the Conrad Circle Cattle Company. Banking in Montana was a high risk business, as the 1920s demonstrated. Between 1921 and 1925 half of the state's 428 banks closed. There was an excessive number of small, weak banks in the grain-growing areas of Eastern Montana where the postwar slump wiped out land values and related loans. Montana's history was heavily dominated by its "Copper Kings". Marcus Daly (1841–1900), an Irish immigrant, left a legacy of physical structures throughout Montana. Starting with his development of the Alice mine in Butte, he then founded the community of Anaconda where he built a smelter. Butte, with its mixture of poor miners' shacks, richly ornamented homes, mines, and mills, symbolized industrial mining. At Anaconda, the company town, the great Washoe Stack smelted the ore from Butte, bringing immense wealth to the region but also spewed pollutants that left the landscape downwind of the smelter wasted and barren. Daly's lumber mill at Bonner dominated the town. In the agricultural community of Hamilton, Daly built the Bitterroot Stock Farm with its, complete with racetrack and mansion. His archrival, W.A. Clark, invested heavily in the Butte mines and parlayed his influence into the political arena, engineering the selection of Helena over Anaconda as the state capitol. He later was elected as Montana's U.S. Senator under circumstances of such corruption that his antics provided one of the incentives for the Constitutional amendment allowing direct election of senators. Simon Pepin (1840–1914), was born in Quebec in 1840, emigrated to Montana in 1863, and became a contractor furnishing supplies for the construction of forts Custer, Assiniboine, and Maginnis. Pepin purchased ranch lands near Fort Assiniboine. When James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railway across northern Montana, Pepin convinced him to build his locomotive shops at Havre, on property owned by Pepin. In the ensuing years, Pepin was a major contributor to Havre's economic growth through his cattle, real estate, and banking enterprises. Failures mixed with successes in Montana business history. The closure in 1964 of the Missoula Brewing Company exemplified the difficulties small businesses faced when competing with large producers. Opened in 1900, the brewery closed during Prohibition but resumed production of its Highlander brand in 1933. Government regulation and