Boisterous Butte

Kinsey Howard

The economic story behind a bad reputation: "The Biggest Mining Camp on Earth" struggles to become a modern city in the face of its despairing dependence upon an unreliable industry.

YOU ROUND THE CORNER OF A HIGHWAY CLINGING TO THE continental divide, and there, suddenly, is Butte: huge, sprawling, chaotic—a very bully of a city, stridently male, blusteringly profane, boisterous and boastful—"the biggest mining camp in the world," "a mile high and a mile deep," "the richest hill on earth."
Butte probably is no longer any of these; certainly it is no longer, in the words of former police chief Walter Shay, "an island of easy money, entirely surrounded by whiskey." Time was when the mine payrolls of Butte averaged $50 monthly for every man, woman and child in the city; when miners made $10, even $20, a day on contract. Now money is not so easily come by, but it is still easily spent: the habit persists.
Butte remains what Joseph Pennell called it in his "Wonders of Work," "the most pictorial place in America.
It is a mile high, even a little more; but it is not a mile deep, the deepest mine is still about 1000 feet short of that. If it is no longer "the richest hill on earth," certainly it was. Above the city, denuded of grass or tree, gray-tan and dirty, stands the mountain of copper which has yielded up metal worth two and a half billion dollars in fifty-six years. Black triangles topped by circles, the gallows frames of the mines rise from this hill to print fantastic futurist designs on the limitless Montana sky; under the city twist 2700 miles of tunnels, and in these dim hot depths thousands of men have labored and fought and died. Thousands of feet in the earth, at the bidding of their masters, they have thrown up barricades, fashioned crude grenades of mine powder, and blown each other to bits while the masters, above ground, fought in the courts for possession of a disputed vein. Bullets have raked the tired streets hung awkwardly on the mountainside as these men have fought one another or have been fought by their bosses; and their battles have helped build vast fortunes—for other men. The miners have risen in wrath and smitten the lords of the hill, and struck, and fought again; they have been betrayed and defeated and driven back into their holes. But sometimes they have won, and wrested a little more of the hill's riches for themselves; then the surface has rocked with Rabelaisian mirth, the drinks have been on the house, the girls on the "line" have bought new dresses, the effigies of the scab have been cut down from telephone poles, and everyone has gone cheerily back to work.
That was Butte!
THIS IS A CITY BORN IN VIOLENCE, BRED IN VIOLENCE, LIVING violently. Back in the boom days the mines killed or injured a man a day; there were sales on crutches in drugstores. Even today there are many cripples, despite vast improvement in mining methods and constant efforts by the employers to elevate safety standards. Rock dust fills miners' lungs, and sulfuric acid, dripping from the walls of a drift (the copper is in a sulfur formation), may burn their clothing, their flesh. In 1916, 42 percent of the 1018 miners who appeared voluntarily for examination by Bureau of Mines experts had "miners' consumption"—silicosis. The intervening years have brought the "wet drill" and vastly improved ventilation; employers claim the silicosis menace is now virtually non-existent. But the miners challenge this, and certainly men continue to contract the disease, and to die of it. Spokesmen for the employers retort that the miners do not use the "wet drill" equipment provided for them; the men answer that they always use it when they can. The equipment, they point out, is large and unwieldy, requires two men to set it up when only one may be available, perhaps cannot be used because the drift is too small or the ore has been broken out in such a way that the big drill cannot be placed in position. The argument has raged through Montana legislative investigations, and been borne to Washington. It cannot be threshed out here; but undoubtedly great progress has been made. That there is room for improvement still, however, may be deduced from the 1938 vital statistics report of the Montana Board of Health, which shows that Butte's county, with one tenth of the state's population, contributed in that year one fourth of its deaths from tuberculosis.
Butte's dead are speedily carted to one of its six cemeteries and added to their 42,000 census; for this city, only seventy-three years old, has nearly as many dead as alive: its population today, including all of the "metropolitan area," is about 50,000. In the carriage days there were races back from the cemetery to the bars, and the miners downed "boilermakers"—beer or ale and whiskey, mixed-in memory of their departed comrade. Some still observe the traditional ceremony.
Violence. . . . See that vacant lot? A hardware warehouse once occupied that lot; at ten o'clock one night in 1895 it caught fire, and Butte's fire department responded to the call. Ladders against the building, firemen on the ladders; the chief and another on the roof. Blasting powder stored inside exploded, annihilated the Butte fire department save for one or two men, busy with hoses at some distance from the burning building. Paralyzed for an instant with horror as fragments of the firemen's bodies flew about them, the watching miners then broke ranks, surged heroically toward the building in the hope of saving a few of the victims. Another blast, and a third. Fifty-seven men were blown to pieces that night.
Down on that street was the miners' union hall. Butte was Local No. 1 of the Western Federation of Miners, roughest union in America in the nineties and early years of the twentieth century, the union of Big Bill Haywood. It is still Local No. 1 of the W.F.M.'s successor, CIO-affiliated International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. In 1914 the I.W.W. sought control of the W.F.M., and in the process it destroyed the Butte union's hall. Martial law followed (there was a strike in progress, too) and Butte's socialist anti-war mayor, elected by the miners, was driven from office. The judge who signed the order for his impeachment is now, despite the hatred of Butte's miners, the New Deal Democratic governor of Montana. In December of 1914 the miners strike was broken; and the miners' union did not come back until NRA.
There atop the hill, almost in the center, is the Granite Mountain mine; on the other side of the mountain is the Speculator shaft leading into the same workings. On the night of June 8, 1917, the flame of a carbide miner's lamp ignited the uncovered and frayed insulation of a temporary power cable near the 2400-foot level. The timbers caught, the roaring draft down the shaft pushed smoke and gas throughout the workings, and within an hour 163 men had perished, all but two of them from suffocation-for only two men were actually burned—and 247 escaped.
That narrow little street winding up the hill is Anaconda Road, traversing Dublin Gulch. One day a close-packed mass of striking miners started up that road to picket a mine at the top, and were met by murderous fire from the guns of deputies and company guards. There were numerous casualties; but what the hell? That was Butte!
THUS IT CAN BE SEEN THAT BUTTE HAS A HISTORY, A BACKGROUND as colorful and dramatic as any city in America.
But it is not Butte's exciting past, or even its notorious present, with which this study seeks to deal. They are important, nevertheless, because few if any American communities are so enslaved by their own tradition.
Butte is not "the biggest mining camp on earth"; it is not a camp at all, but a northwestern metropolis, industrial center of its state and region, metropolitan in aspect and influence. And it is, among all the "colonial" cities of the American West, the outstanding example of exploitation by that peculiarly American imperialist capitalism which has stripped the resources of its own frontiers in half a century. Withal, Butte thinks like a mining camp, acts like one, and was built like one; and this must go on, inevitably, as long as every man, woman and children in it is dependent in greater or lesser degree upon its only industry of importance—the mines.
Thus Butte affords unequaled opportunity for scrutiny of the major economic movement of our era-the reversal of the frontiers. The men came west; but more and more the product of their toil with the resources of their earth have gone east, and due to recurring market crises, technological advancement and just plain wage cuts, less and less comes back.
The ideals of laissez-faire capitalism are committing suicide in Butte. Individualism is here making its last stand, and the compulsions of an industry caught in the disorganization of capitalist markets are destroying in Butte that individual initiative which capitalism has always preached. Copper miners have always been individualists; as such they have left their stamp upon Butte. They may be-and are—loyal and militant unionists; but they would rather work "on their own" by contracting with the company on a piecework basis than work for the union minimum scale. These men are no slaves of an assembly line: despite the great advance of metal mines technology since the war, their job is still personal and integrated; the contract miner still "breaks" (blasts), shovels the ore into the cars, and timbers the drift—a unified task, complete. His is still a man's work, a man's contest with Nature jealous of her riches, a struggle against dust and heat and fire and gas and death.
The contract system is the bane of the miners' union. About 80 percent of the miners, according to union leaders, work on contract: they agree to a certain price per cubic foot of ore produced. This is an individual contract between miner and employer, and the union has no control over this price except that, on contract or not, the miner must receive the union's minimum wage, currently (November 1938) $5.25 a day. Consequently the contract price can be, and has been, cut at will; and as the miners strive to maintain their wage standards there results, according to the union's complaint; a speedup similar in its effect though differing in practice to the speeded assembly lines in an automobile factory.
The most recent development, however, did not originate wholly with the company. On the effective date of the wage and hour act, the company cut the miners' work week from forty-eight hours to forty-four hours more than necessary and establishing immediately the federal objective for 1940. This was done, the company told the union, to avoid burdensome bookkeeping during the period which was supposed to intervene between establishment of the forty-four-hour week and the forty-hour week.
The practical effect of this move has been a drastic wage cut for Butte's miners, contract and union-scale alike; and some union leaders look to it hopefully as the death warrant of the hated contract system. The contract miner, they argue, may find that with eight hours' less time, the returns of his "free enterprise" bargain with his boss may not be sufficiently greater than the union minimum to be worth the extra exertion. Then, they think, he will become a good deal more interested in the union minimum wage than he has been hitherto. Individual initiative, so dear to the heart of the operator and until recently just as dear to the miner, will be dead; but so will the speed-up.
Recently the company proposed to the miners that they sign a new two-year contract (although their old one had not yet expired), under which they would work forty-eight hours a week, with time-and-a-half for the four hours exceeding the law's standard forty-four. The miners, viewing this as an attack on the principle of the Fair Labor Standards Act, an attempt to bind them for a long period to terms they regarded as unfavorable, and sure to result in layoff of one out of every five men, turned it down.
The company, which insists that the contract system rewards the best worker-which, in all fairness, it usually does, although the miner cannot choose his own drift and may be assigned to an unproductive working-could save Butte's tottering faith in individualism by boosting the contract price. But private initiative is after all only an abstract ideal. . . . And boosting the contract price costs money.
Layoffs and Wide Open Joints—and Hard Times
BEFORE ONE SEERS TO DETERMINE HOW BUTTE'S RECKLESS habit of thought affects its daily life, how its haphazard, unplanned development hampers today's administrators one must get at the fundamentals of its economy.
In the early autumn of 1937, the Butte copper mines of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—were employing about 7800 men. By the spring of 1938 this number had plunged to 2800; and in midsummer it had reached 800. Thus, in a little over six months, 7000 Butte wage earners had lost their jobs. WPA certifications sky-rocketed from 1870 to a peak of 6736; direct relief from 1230 cases to 2405.
Butte business collapsed. By spring, retail trade was off 5 to 30 percent; by midsummer, down in some cases 50 percent. Every community activity, from the banks and biggest stores to the prostitutes in Butte's unashamed restricted district, was affected, though not as severely as in other slumps (before government relief and work projects had come to cushion the plunge), and in varying degree. "I have seen worse than this," said a banker. "Butte will be up again; it goes down first, comes up last." Of all the cities which claim the unique and unhappy distinction of being the first to feel the effects of recession and the last to recover, Butte's claim is better than most; the metal mines industry usually follows, seldom if ever leads, others into large scale production.
Butte's business men accept their dependence upon the mines as a matter of course. They are tolerant of the big gambling establishments, catering to men and tourists; but most of them are bitter against the "keeno" parlors, the majority of whose customers are women, gambling away their housekeeping money at a dime a game.
There are eight gambling establishments in downtown Butte, all of them frankly open to all comers. Five are miscellaneous establishments specializing in cards or race books, three are keeno enterprises. Biggest is the Arcade, with bookmaking, Chinese lottery, dice, roulette, stud poker, panguingue.
Within the city limits (excluding Meaderville) Butte has 122 bars, or roughly one for every 327 persons; only 14 of these are exclusively beer bars, not licensed to sell liquor.
The operators of the games and the bars, both in Butte and in notorious Meaderville, insist that a very large share of their business comes from visitors. Some confirmation for this may be found in the bitter observations of Former Police Chief Shay, and from my own check of "foreign licenses" on parked cars on Meaderville's main street one Saturday night. Said Chief Shay: "We have to police not only Butte but the five adjoining counties. . . . There's many a man will live like a respectable gopher in Deer Lodge all week so he can get drunk and raise hell in Butte on Saturday night!"
THEY TREAT SPORTING PEOPLE VERY WELL IN BUTTE, SAID a girl. "After we go out of the alley we're just like anybody else. We've got a good bunch of girls; most of them are between twenty-three and thirty-five. It's a good 'line'—better than working for a landlord. Here we pay $2.50 a night for the crib and what we make over that is ours. In good times the take would run to $100 a week for some of the younger and prettier ones; of course, we've got the looks and we're fresher and competition is pretty tough. Oh, the mine shutdowns have cut it more than half; probably average $30 to $40 a week now."
Butte's restricted district is located in a narrow alley just two and a half blocks from its new modern high school, and on the same street. When the high school was built, there was talk of closing the line. But the line had been there for many years; it was accepted; it was, Butte decided, necessary. So a compromise was reached, and the three entrances were closed off with fences built somewhat like a maze, painted green and bearing these words: "Men Under 21 Keep Out." Further to protect the morals of Butte's youth, the girls were ordered to abandon the "day shift'? and not to appear on the line before five o'clock. A few weeks ago when the county attorney closed the line the mayor accused him of playing politics. Butte did not expect the shutdown to last long.
Growing Up as a Community
THE VERY FIRST THING WE SHOULD DO, SAID THE ENERGETIC mayor, Charles A. Hauswirth, "is to refrain absolutely from boosting Butte as a mining camp (we can still give due recognition to the industry) and prepare to advertise it in every conceivable way as an up and coming city."
Thus Butte began, in the face of industrial collapse, to tackle its unique problem, to break with paralyzing tradition and the powerful forces which maintained that tradition, to clean up, to rebuild.
Few cities have confronted a bigger job. Butte had behind it three quarters of a century of haphazard, mining camp development, decades of mismanagement in city affairs, a community psychology born of mining camp tradition-generous, but heedless.
Nevertheless, there were forces in Butte which meant to take advantage of the city's opportunities in time of industrial distress. Heading this group was the mayor, now nearing the end of his second two-year term, elected three and a half years ago over the bitter opposition of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. He is the son of Simon Hauswirth who established Butte's first hotel, the "Hotel de Mineral," in 1875, seven years before the discovery of copper.
Some of the problems which confronted Butte's new administration, pledged to reform, sound almost incredible. In 1935 the city was bankrupt and the mill levy was 43.9. Forty percent of the direct levy went to pay off indebtedness and interest charges. In 1936 the mill levy had been cut to 42.5; in 1937 to 41.5; and in 1938 to 39 mills, including a special 5-mill levy for relief. Butte's net indebtedness has been cut a half million dollars; its interest charges from $186,000 a year to $57,000; the city is solvent again and its credit is good. In about a year and a half the city has bought $90,000 worth of machinery for use on city-sponsored WPA projects.
For the last year 2000 men, most of them skilled miners, have been working sixty-six hours a month on these projects. They have built eighteen miles of sewers, improved 298 blocks or about twenty miles of Butte's streets. The city airport, served by two major lines, has been improved. Playground projects are under way; Clark Park, a dingy neglected sports field formerly owned by the Anaconda Company, is being developed as a recreational center; vacant lots are being landscaped; unsightly mine dumps are being removed or cleaned up and planted to grass.
Butte's sewage is dumped into Silver Bow Creek, a meager stream which flows through the city with only a 4 percent grade, and the city's next objective is construction of a joint sewage disposal system for Butte and its suburbs.
THE HANDICAPS UNDER WHICH BUTTE HAS HAD TO PROGRESS are worth special consideration. This "most pictorial city" of Joseph Pennell earned that artist's attention, he wrote, because its mountain "is crowned not with trees but with chimneys. Low black villages of miners' houses straggle toward the foot of the mountain. The barren plain is covered with gray, slimy masses of refuse which crawl down to it-glaciers of work-from the hills. The plain is seared and scored and cracked with tiny canyons, all their lines leading to the mountain. . . ."
The Butte which Pennell saw "just grew" without benefit of planning. The city limits dodge nearly all of the mines: the boundary line will run straight as a die to a mine fence, then swerve neatly around it, leaving the mine property happily exempt from city taxation.
This condition does not seem particularly strange to Butte, and even its most ambitious planners despair of remedying it. Montana law requires that before a city may annex a district, 51 percent of the property owners of that district must consent. The property owners in these "islands" are principally giant industrial concerns whose voluntary consent to additional taxation seems improbable.
The prospectors and, later, the industrialists who ruled Butte stripped the Rocky Mountains of their forests within a radius of fifty miles of the city. After copper was discovered came the horror of open hearth smelting-the reduction of copper on giant wood and charcoal fires around the city, an operation which blanketed Butte with a perpetual pall of filthy yellow sulfurous smoke, hastened .the demise of citizens unfortunate enough to catch influenza or come down with pulmonary disorders, and denuded the magnificent hills of vegetation. Open hearth smelting ended in the nineties when the smelter was built at nearby Anaconda ("beautiful," said Pennell, "with the beauty of death!"), but the damage had been done. Now Butte and Nature—1938 was an unusually wet year in Montana—are trying to repair the damage. It's a long job.
DEPRESSION OR NO DEPRESSION, BUTTE HAS BEEN HAVING MORE babies. Twenty more were born in the July-August-September quarter of 1938 than in the same quarter of 1937. The WPA and the Montana Public Welfare Department (the latter spurred to greater efforts by Butte labor) have saved the underprivileged from the gaunt horror of pre-Roosevelt slumps.
Dr. J. L. Mondloch, the county physician, delivered a good many of Butte's 1938 babies. The night before one of my visits to his office he had attended five child-births. He is the only physician and surgeon whose services are available free to the direct relief clients, unable to pay, and throughout the slump he has been responsible for the monthly care of approximately 5000 persons. Dr. Mondloch had 1360 office calls in March. Throughout the recession he performed twelve to fifteen major operations a month and uncounted scores of minor surgical jobs-fractures, tonsillectomies, eye and ear correctives.
But Butte, thinks burdened Dr. Mondloch, is as healthy or healthier than it has been for many years. He has not noted an increase in disease attributable to the recession, nor have conditions of malnutrition become noticeably worse.
The Good Life Has a Chance
HOW ABOUT BUTTE'S CULTURE? IN MEADERVILEE, FOX TROTS blare from the "Rocky Mountain," the "Copper Club," and the "Golden Fan." Out on the "flats" hundreds squeeze into a 15 x 20 room, down their nickel beer, and clamber onto the splintered floor to push and sway and sweat to swing music from a phonograph.
Sunday, the men and their wives and their children may picnic at Columbia Gardens, for once one of the masters decided the city should have a park and created one, lonely and isolated. Here are free rides for the children, and brick stoves where their mother, who has cooked in a miner's hut all week, can cook again after her husband has built a fire.
Well, Butte doesn't go in much for culture, on a community scale, though in hundreds of mean homes and obscure and dingy bars there live the music and color and legend of a dozen peoples. The city administration, hastening to house Butte adequately, clean it up and beautify it, has not yet got around to cultivating its mind. Such cultural efforts as have been made, seem to have come from the upper levels of Butte society, for Butte has an elite, it even has a Blue Book. This impressive volume, compiled in 1901 by one John Boyle O'Reilly, set out, as do all Blue Books, to list for hostesses those of their fellow citizens whom they might bid to their functions without fear of embarrassment. "But," warned O'Reilly frankly and wisely indeed, "the lines have not been too closely drawn." Despite this liberal definition of the limits of Butte's haut monde, the 1901 effort seems to have been the last; the Butte public library has no other Blue Book.
Butte's only cultural development of much importance in recent years was the creation of the Junior League. Eager maidens, not unaware of Butte's artistic possibilities and ashamed of its cultural lag, conceived the idea of a municipal art center and with commendable vigor went forth to establish it. The art center was opened last April on one floor of a downtown school administration building. Their task of promotion done, the Junior League girls turned the project over to a non-profit community organization known as the Butte Art Association. Its modern establishment contains two galleries, one for local or Montana work and one for traveling Federal Art Project exhibits. Its permanent staff includes several gallery attendants paid by WPA and seven teachers paid by the Federal Art Project, whose free classes in September 1938 included 965 persons. In that month 3600 persons visited the galleries.
Butte has a concert association similar to that in many cities of the hinterland, providing four or five musical evenings a year, with prominent concert and radio artists as performers. Its most recent road show attraction was a girl revue which stranded in Butte; the girls were fed by donations from sympathetic stagehands until the Public Welfare Department was induced to charter a bus to take them all back to Salt Lake City.
Butte, despite its unequaled opportunity to present graphically the story of the Montana frontier (the Vigilantes buried their road-agent victims only fifty miles from the city), and the story of mining, has no museum except a mineral display in the State School of Mines. Its public library, housed in a decrepit old building, has been improved considerably in the last few years. The city has forty-two churches, nineteen public and eleven parochial schools Depressions and recessions have had little or no effect upon the school census. Butte has as yet no recreation association to provide supervised play in its new playgrounds.
Booms in the Newspapers Only
THE YOUNG HITCH-HIKER I PICKED UP, AS I MOTORED TO BUTTE in November 1938, said he thought he'd stop off in Butte a week or so on his way to the west coast, get a job and earn some money. He had heard in Minnesota, he said, that Butte was "booming" again.
In the office of Butte Miners' Union No. 1 on a busy downtown corner, I found the secretary ready with figures to refute the "boom" talk, but cynically convinced that no statistics he could produce could counteract the publicity given to the gradual resumption of operations in Butte mines and check the influx of surplus labor.
As a matter of fact, his records showed that only about 3500 of the 7800 miners employed in September 1937 had regained their jobs on November 2, 1938. From the standpoint of employment in the mines the city therefore was less than halfway back to the relatively prosperous early autumn of 1937 (though even in that cheery time, it must be remembered, Butte had 1870 WPA cases, about 1000 on direct relief). And there were other factors which complicated this 1938 upturn and made the re-employment index unreliable to gauge the actual economic health of Butte.
Chief of these unfavorable elements was the sudden imposition of the forty-hour week, after the miners had renewed their last year's contract without seeking an increase in wage minima. Another, closely connected with this wage factor, was the price of copper. Still another was the basic economic fallacy-for Butte-inherent in the contract system of mining. The fourth, probably in the long run the most menacing of all threats to Butte's future unless the city shakes off its one-industry dependence, was technological advance.
Thus, though direct relief had declined from a peak of 2405 cases in June 1938, to 1230, although WPA rolls were down from 6736 to 5478, Butte was far from being "out of the woods." About half of the mines which had been working before the recession were back in production and others were expected to resume operations soon; about half of the miners on WPA had gone back to the shafts. But . . .
In August and September 1937, Butte's miners were working six eight-hour days weekly. Domestic copper sold for 14 cents a pound in August; 14 and 13 1/2 cents in September. Wage minima in the Butte union's contract are established on a sliding scale based upon the price of copper as averaged, over a thirty-day period. On the September market price, Butte's miners were making at least $5.75 a day, six days a week—a weekly paycheck, if they worked full time, of $34.50. In November 1938, copper was selling at 11 1/4 cents a pound and the miner's daily wage minimum was $5.25 a day, five days a week—for a full time pay envelope containing $26.25.
These figures do not pretend to be accurate indices of the Butte miners' wages taken as a whole, nor could they even be taken as dependable averages, because of the prevalence of the contract system. But given a statistically ideal condition in which the human elements followed the established contract standards, this would be the effect of the forty-hour week coupled with a weaker copper market.
The essential fallacy of Butte's living standards rests upon the difference between the minimum wage, rising or falling with the price of copper and fixed by union contract, and the contract price per cubic foot of ore mined, fixed at will by the employer.
In every Montana city where the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's operations are a major industrial fixture—and that means most of them—there is complaint that prices rise with copper. The workers, however, may not be benefited at all by a rising market because the contract price, fixed by the company, does not advance with the minimum scale; most of the miners already are making more than that minimum.
In other words, Butte's miners are already living above what Butte thinks is their income. They have to, to keep up with Butte's inflated economy. Butte craft union wages are extremely high. Butte is among the nation's highest living-cost cities. All utilities, even water, are privately owned.
Aspirations-and the Future
WRITING ON "HARD CORE UNEMPLOYMENT: THE CHALLENGE of Permanently Depressed Areas," [Survey Graphic, June 1938] Pierce Williams said of Butte: "(It) is the outstanding example of community vulnerability to economic forces in the mining industry." The objective of this study has been to show the extent of that vulnerability; but it has sought to point out, too, that there are forces at work which would remove that city from Mr. Williams' "permanently depressed" classification.
Today more than 200 men employed by WPA under city sponsorship are conducting a social survey of Butte, the first exhaustive study the "biggest mining camp" has ever had. Thirteen years ago a Bureau of Mines review of safety and health conditions in Butte said: "It is usual in American mining districts for towns to begin as camps and progress into cities. Butte has reached the latter stage, and if there remain reminders of the old days . . . it is a matter which local public pride may be expected to correct year by year."
The pride, the public spirit, are there, boisterous and good humored; they need but to be harnessed. . . . Still, it is not mass movements which stick in one's memory as most closely associated with Butte, outpost of American individualism; it is rather the stories of heroic, foolhardy, pathetic persons whose exploits have built mining camp legend and are still building it.
Hero, clown and fool: these are the men who have made Butte, these and that ordinary miner whom we left, several pages back, picnicking with his family at Columbia Gardens. After the picnic supper they will herd aboard a bus—until recently it would have been one of the world's noisiest street cars, but they are gone now—and ride through the clamorous night of their city up some precipitous street to their dreary, overcrowded, dingy home.
The girls on the line have drawn their painted rockers to the windows, the bars and the gambling houses and the streets are beginning to fill up: for the mines are working again and it's an all night city in good times, or even in half-good times, such as they are now. But if the mines were closed by a strike uneasy peace would settle over the avenues, picket lines would begin forming at the mine gates, and the company's guards would inspect their weapons. . . . A drunken driver may hurtle into Park from the Meaderville road, maiming a pedestrian or killing himself. . . . The police will get him, but it will be hard to convince the jury; life is still cheap here!
It's nearly dawn, and the darkness grows less black about the edges of the encircling peaks. In strike time the pickets leave in relays for coffee and the guards loosen their grip on their guns; the searchlights go out. But now the mines are running: a few men sidle out of the green gateway to the line, turn up their coat collars, clump off to cheerless rooms; a few drunks are ejected from bars; janitors are busy cleaning up in Curley Darragh's Arcade. ("If he isn't at the Arcade, he isn't in Butte.") At last Butte sleeps. . . .