- "In fact, I dare
not tell the whole truth, because I know the story would be read
and regarded as the emanation of a heated brain." --
from an 1865 letter
from Joe Bowers describing Butte to the readers of the Virginia
City Montana Post newspaper.
More than a century ago, Butte
was built on a hill higher than a mile, and gravity has been
taking its toll ever since. While many of Butte's economic muscles
have moved to the valley below, the heart remains Uptown. Yet,
despite a century of freeze and thaw, a resonant spirit and healthy
sense of humor remain intact.
 Today, Butte is renowned for
its historic architectural excellence in the residences and public
buildings that remain from the building booms of the turn of
the century. A walk along any Uptown street and on the town's
West Side will take you past Neo-Classical, Italianate, and Queen
Anne style homes built for Butte's millionaires and well-to-dos
in the last century.
 Butte spreads out below Big
Butte, the pyramid-shaped hill that is the town's namesake, where
the bells of the white stucco Immaculate Conception Church echo
in the thin cold air down to the sprawl of the valley below called
locally by the simple name -- The Flats.
Uptown Butte resonates with history, its horizon still dotted
with black skeletal gallows frames that once lowered miners,
horses, and equipment in narrow cages to the underground mine
shafts that bore down as deep as a mile in some places on the
Hill.
But some things have changed. For one thing, Butte is much quieter
today. When more than 80 mines on the Hill were in full production,
and not idled by strikes, there was a constant din of daily commerce
as thousands of miners made their way to or from one of the three
shifts as mining continued around the clock.
The racket was a mix of sounds. Shrill mine whistles screeched
so regularly that people preferred them to clocks for keeping
time. There was the clatter of ore spilled from hoist buckets
into waiting ore cars and the click and clack of constant ore
trains on narrow gauge rails. The Hill hummed with the vibration
of the drilling and explosions underground. Above ground, the
streets were a bustle and throb from businesses that thrived
on the mining economy.
Another big difference is that, by 1900, there were more smokestacks
on the Hill than there were trees. The scarcity of trees was
due to the need for timber for the underground mines and to provide
fuel for the smelting of ore which spewed arsenic and sulfur
into the open air.
Today, reclamation work and tree planting are "greening
up" the Hill. Even without the help of reclamation efforts,
the Continental Divide erupts each spring with the lime green
of unfurling leaves on quaking aspen trees as the season slowly
works its way up the west slope of the Continental Divide. The
same leaves turn golden as the crisp chill of autumn sweeps back
down to the valley floor.
When the air over the Hill was thick with sulfurous smoke, it
was difficult to see the soft afternoon light bathing the west
side of buildings as the sun disappeared behind the mountains
of the Pintlar Range. Now, visitors and residents alike can marvel
at the variety and intensity of colorful sunsets and the frequent
double rainbows that follow summer rain storms.
On the other hand, at the risk of inviting eager approval from
those who would disparage old Butte, some of the best views of
the city are to be had at night. On winter nights you may see
the Northern Lights flutter over Moulton Reservoir, or driving
down late from Elk Park, Homestake, or Pipestone Pass, you may
encounter the sight remarked upon by so many: the soft floating
light of streetlights on the valley floor, sparkling in the thin
air of high altitude, like jewels on a black pillow, or fireflies
in a dark field. You would swear that a light burns for every
soul who has ever lived here.
Colors
of Another Sort
Butte, however, was first settled
by sojourners looking for colors of another sort. Butte City
first became a place where people staked their claims in the
late 1860s when a gold rush brought up to 500 miners with pans
and sluice boxes into Montana Territory looking for the glitter
and color of gold in the sands of Silver Bow Creek. Miners turned
to underground mining when the surface gold played out but Butte's
complex geology soon took the shine off the gold boom. It was
just too expensive and difficult to remove the gold from the
ore without mills and smelters.
It remained for hard rock miners with more experience, capital,
and the latest technology coming from the Comstock Lode in Nevada
and mines in Colorado and California to realize the Hill's full
potential. By the end of the 1880s, legendary "Copper Kings"
Marcus Daly and William Andrews Clark had developed Butte's complex
quartz lodes to turn the Hill into one of the world's richest
sources for copper, extracting $ 30,000,000 worth of metals in
1890. In one year, 1897, the Anaconda mine on Butte's Hill sold
131,471,127 pounds of copper.
The mines made a lucrative profit from the gold and silver that
was extracted from the ore in the process of smelting. In fact,
the presence of gold and silver helped make Montana's mines competitive
in the world market, offsetting the disadvantages of remote location
and high freight costs.
Thereafter, those who came sought the colors of another sort,
captivated by the glimmer of gold, silver, and copper that could
be converted into the green of currency if it could be removed
and transported from the Hill.
Only in
Butte
Butte is a town around which legends
have grown, and most of them are true.
In 1943, writers working for the Work Projects Administration
titled their introduction to Copper Camp "Butte the Bizarre."
Even today an enduring preface to many stories about the town
is "Only in Butte."
Only in Butte would you find a shoe store with the unlikely name
of The Shoetorium that, like other shoe stores Uptown, drew customers
off the street with live monkeys in the storefront window. Only
in Butte will you still find a butcher shop with the delicious
appellation of "Terminal Meats."
Until only a few years ago, one uptown motel, the Capri, featured
a live palm tree growing in its motor court with fronds fluttering
in the breeze while temperatures dropped into the double digits
below zero.
You have to appreciate how a town takes an epigram like "Justice
is Blind" and puts it into practice by electing five local
magistrates and judges in a short span of time who were literally
and completely blind.
 It is hard to imagine
any other Montana city that would build and display on their
streets a wooden elk large enough to drive streetcars between
its legs.
In 1916, members of the Elks Lodge wanted their annual July convention
to be a memorable one, especially since it coincided with Butte's
favorite holiday, the 4th of July. For $4,000 they hired a local
theatrical technician named Edmund Carns to build an elk of epic
dimensions and place it on the corners of Broadway and Main Streets.
When Carns got done, his elk stood 62 feet tall and 44 feet long
with 24-foot high legs. The eyes made from 10-inch lightbulbs
were lit each night. Motorists could look up and see the flank
branded with the fraternal greeting "Hello Bill" in
big white letters.
Home of
Working Class Heroes
The real source of Butte's riches,
its everlasting wealth has always been its people, the characters
who came from nearly every country on earth from every strata
of society to live and work on the Hill.
The truly fascinating content of Butte's historical heritage
is not so much in its enduring buildings as it is in the people
who lived and worked in them.
In a region of sparsely populated, ephemeral towns and villages
built of clapboard or sod roofs, Butte was an anomaly - a teeming
city of high-rise brick buildings and nearly 100,000 souls struggling
against the elements to achieve prosperity.
The democratic nature of Butte's social milieu confounded many
visitors to the city, especially those from the more stratified
societies back East. Millionaires and copper kings could be seen
freely mingling with every level of society, rubbing elbows at
the theater, joining in parades, or gambling in public with miners
of all stripes, vagrants, and prostitutes.
When immigrants came to the United States from around the world
to seek opportunities, many of them found jobs in Butte's mines.
As a result, one of Butte's great strengths is its diverse ethnic
heritage. Butte became home to Cornish, Italians, Finns, Swiss,
Lebanese, Indians, French, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Austrians,
Serbs, Croats, Slavs, Germans, and, more than any others, Irish.
Irish names such as Dolan, Harrington, Sullivan, O'Brien, Murphy,
Shannon, and Joyce are prevalent still today and, understandably,
the Irish population surges on St. Patrick's Day when the whole
town turns out to celebrate its shamrock roots.
The result of this heritage of ethnic diversity is a Whitmanesque
hoe down of epic dimensions. A festive parade of humanity in
all its shades and variations continues even today on a smaller
but no less grander scale in the tenacity  and
obdurate spirit of those who continue to stake their claims in
Butte.
Marcus Daly was admired because he had great skills as a hard
rock miner but also because he could "see farther beneath
the ground than anyone else."
This ability, no doubt, was equally valued among people when
they turned their gaze to their fellow citizens - the ability
to see the treasure buried beneath the surface in people is a
trait that is still admired in Butte today.
The nature of the ore itself is a metaphor for the people who
would follow to extract it from the Hill. The geology of the
Hill long prevented any single metal from dominating the lode.
The complex mingling of metals that made smelting so difficult
also offered a lesson in how difficult it is to remain separate
from the rest of the world and how simple it is to be exploited
if you do.
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