A proper written introduction is in the works. This town deserves it. In the meantime i’ll state, i love this town. Not much of an intro, but the city of Butte is so damn interesting beyond its fascinating history as an industrial boom town set on the continental divide in Montana. Probably more characters per capita than any place i’ve come across. For the time being i can only say that i love this town.
BUTTE was shot on and off between 1989 and 1998. This was the time after the mines had closed and before any sort of turnaround had occurred.
I ran across Butte while working a job in Monatana in 1989. It soon became my defacto home, while I was out of Brooklyn, an easy transition, since the town was like Brooklyn or Johnstown PA, but on the Continental Divide.
Copper Camp is the best introduction to this town, Although written in the Depression as one of the regional WPA writers’ projects, it holds up beautifully, in its accuracy, and in its way of depicting the town by its characters, their stories. Of course, the just the rise of Butte as a world leader in copper mining alone is great urban history, but Butte’s mineral-rich luck happened in a peculiar place for an ethnic industrial city. More eastern in character, than western, it was a boom city in boom times, in the middle of nowhere, on the Continental Divide of the Northern Rockies where winters were below zero affairs.
Like “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” Copper Camp captures the heart and soul of Butte, its defining character, that, in value, rivaled the “richest hill on earth” it sat on.
Into the nineties people still lived amongst the so-called ruins of Butte and the places slowly stopped fading, the hopeless tore out, and the rest saved. Now the hill and neighborhoods are getting greener, if not the timber covered highlands they once were.
The mines stripped the land for lumber for miles around, and the mining and smelting operations killed off the rest of the vegetation.
Still alive with people in a dead land of industry, it’s one of these giant one-industry cities, perched in splendid isolation in the Rocky Mountains of Montana. That’s what it was like after the mines closed.
It’s easy to imagine the place when it was humming with mines, because they still exist although closed, from when it. was a boom city, not town.. Not a flash in the pan, like most mining towns or many one-industry cities, Butte grew to be the largest city between Chicago and Seattle when it had five times as many people living there.
And the industry that basically employed the whole growing city, was entirely underground.
“Men worked underground as partners, some paired over a lifetime. They looked after each other’s health and safety. This created a great bond between them and also expanded to fellow miners. This common bond continued on the surface – leading to a “classless Butte society.’’
But that didn’t hide its presence one bit, as each mine yard and headframe were surrounded by residential neighborhoods. Even the city center, its downtown, called Uptown, had some mine headframes erected along with the office buildings and stores. Each headframe could represent thousands of employees, who often lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the mine yards – Walkerville, Dublin Gulch, Finn Town, Meaderville, McQueen Addition, Chinatown…
There was constant drilling and blasting underneath the city. Entire forests surrounding Butte were cut down and the timber hauled in and used as mine supports. Imagine the noise as tons of ore, giant rocks, were elevated to the surface, dumped in railroad cars, and sent out to Anaconda, 26 miles away for stamping, smelting and refining.
Anaconda, the smelter town had a 585 foot smokestack that puffed arsenic and lead-laden smoke from 1919 until 1980 when the entire smelting operation was shutdown. Like Butte, Anaconda’s history is rich in sensible contradictions. For instance Anaconda’s big stack was preserved from demolition, and even became a state park, but one that allows no visitors, as piles of toxic material, and smelter waste surround the stack for miles.
Later, in the fifties, when open pit mining surged, no problem. The Berkley Pit was dug right into the hill, literally gobbling up neighborhoods and delving into the business district.
After the mines closed in 1982, the Pit began to fill with toxic run-off, and the entire city itself became the largest of America’s superfund sites.
I had the same reaction to Butte that Frank Loyd Wright had when he laid eyes on the South Dakota Badlands for the first time. The Flamboyant One declared the badlands, “A revelation.”
And for someone raised industrially, and had already been documenting industrial towns and cities for a long time, driving into Butte for the first time, was, A Revelation
Few places rate so high for the WCA, but, also, the BCH – Johnstown, PA, old North Brooklyn, many sections of Cleveland. That’s quite a group to belong to, made more valuable since the milieus are gone. Butte probably had more characters and character per square inch than any town in America.
And Butte was never too shy to tell you.
I don’t have time for a proper introduction that might do justice to this place, and, if i got started, it might be pretty long, but, in closing, when it comes to Butte, an introduction with only four words should suffice. I love this town. Please check the slidshow.