Notes from a Butte Bender
Far from normal, everything about Butte looms larger than life, magnified, exaggerated, like some gross caricature of itself. Butte’s villains are more villainous, its heroes more heroic, its wealth more extravagant, its poverty more grinding. Butte’s triumphs are the stuff of legends. Butte’s tragedies are almost too painful to bear. And yet, in this caricature we see somehow more clearly — the essence standing out in stark relief.
Michael Punke, Fire and Brimstone
Back in June, I sounded a conch on Twitter and asked for recommendations on quintessential books featuring or inspired by Butte, Montana. Thanks largely to a kind and timely retweet from the handle of Richest Hill, Montana Public Radio’s new (and pretty great) podcast about the Mining City, I got a long list of nominations. The enthusiastic response from the Butte stans was unsurprising. People who are passionate about Butte are forthcoming about it, albeit in a plain-stated way. That is, people in Montana and beyond who feel a sense of conviction that “Butte’s a big damn deal” won’t ever talk about it like they’re trying to sell you something. But there are a lot of reasons why Butte is, in fact, a big damn deal.
In the concrete vein: no Montana town has ever been as populous as Butte was in its heyday. In fact, with 100,000 residents by 1917 (an anomalous figure for a then-young ranching-focused state), Butte was the largest city in a vast stretch of the interior U.S. between Chicago and San Francisco. By that time, the Mining City had already been the world’s largest copper producer, and the copper barons at the helm of it all were some of the wealthiest people in the world. At the height of early 20th century copper production, Butte was also so cosmopolitan that “no smoking” signs in the underground mines were printed in 14 languages. Butte famously had one of the largest red-light districts in the country, and at one point had the largest occupancy theater east of Chicago. And though this detail isn’t a superlative, it’s telling: in its glory days, many Butte bars didn’t have locks on the doors. They never had to because many never closed. Thirsty workers emerged from underground at all times of day because mines operated around the clock.
In short, no complete telling of the concurrent veneration and exploitation of land and people that has come to define the narrative of the American West can overlook the mammoth influence of Butte. And yet, it’s always been Butte’s unquantifiable qualities that have seized our imagination most forcefully. The irony feels like a metaphor for Butte itself: we’re obsessed with the mysterious alchemical properties of a town that rose on the worth of its chemical properties.
I didn’t hear about Butte history in school. I drifted into it gradually, through independent research in my adult life. But during my teenage years, I traveled to Butte often for tournaments, many times for consecutive weekends. In fact, most of those tournaments took place at a facility next to a headframe marking the site of what was once the Belmont mine, according to a map from the Montana Historical Society. I have to confess I get pretty sucked into old maps of places I’m familiar with, and one Easter egg I turned up in my comparison of this map to present day Butte is that the public high school is in the heart of what was Butte’s red-light district.
This kind of bizarre shit feeds Butte’s magnetism for me. And that magnetism has always upstaged its inauspicious physical appearance (I believe “eyesore” is the term used most often). The abandoned headframe from the Belmont mine is one of dozens still integrated into the layout of Butte today, and there are thousands of miles of tunnels out of sight beneath the town. It looks like a place that’s been in decay for some decades now, but it’s never felt empty to me. I’ve since come to suspect that the odd sense of presence in Butte derives from its surplus of ghosts and stories above and below ground. You can find some of those stories in books, including the three I read for this bender in question. But many of the stories are lost forever.
Sadly, much of Butte’s history has been razed or papered over. In Dick Gibson’s 2012 book, Lost Butte Montana, the historian does a hell of a job illustrating the historic tension between preservation and progress in Butte — a tension in which the former has historically lost out. And though the town itself is now part of one of the largest historic landmark districts in the country, many touchstones connecting us to Butte’s rich and colorful history are long gone. For whatever history we’ve recorded or been able to recoup, there will always be a lot of blind spots and unsolved mysteries in Butte. I have a peculiar attraction to ambiguity that I won’t attempt to defend. But because of that twisted predilection, it’s precisely Butte’s elusive qualities that have a bizarre hold on me. And you can quote me on this if you don’t already believe it yourself: Butte trivia never disappoints. My obsession with it ebbs and flows like the flair-ups of a chronic disease, and when I felt the fever returning recently, I figured it was a golden opportunity to use my next reading bender to hash it out.
I pulled my three bender selections out of a slate of about 13 contenders (three of which are actually part of a trilogy by the late Montana literary icon, Ivan Doig). My criteria for the three books crystallized pretty organically once I had a list of contenders. Two jumped out after some cursory research because, comparatively, they were older than the other recommendations. That’s because many in the running were historic texts from university presses, and written by contemporary historical writers. I will likely get around to reading many of those books with ravenous abandon (in fact, one by Janet Finn is already in my reading dugout, a shelf where I set my upcoming reading batting order). But besides the age difference, the other distinguishing quality of the two texts that immediately caught my attention was that, in their time, they were both widely read. The styles of the books were also quite disparate.
The first, Mary Maclane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming, is a first person narrative in the confessional tradition with a timeline of just a few months in 1901. The other, Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest, is a straight-ahead hard-boiled detective novel that takes place over the span of a week during the 1920s. I decided the common denominator was the broader cultural influence of these two texts and decided I wanted my final selection to share that quality and ideally represent the 1910s so I could read through three decades in sequence. I also wanted it to be similarly distinct in style from the other two. I actually have Butte-Silver Bow County Commissioner Shawn Frederickson to thank for jumping in with a fantastic recommendation that ended up fitting the bill to a T: Michael Punke’s Fire and Brimstone, a historical reconstruction of the worst mining disaster in American history.
Before the end of June, I had locked in my curated lineup, but I started the bender in mid-July and wrapped up a week ago. My takes on each of the books speak to what I think defines each of them, where the Butte imprint shows up, and some of the cultural touchstones that are significant for appreciating their respective legacies. All I want to flag before I get to it is: 1.) In the spirit of just getting the bias factor out of the way, Fire and Brimstone was my favorite of these texts. And I need to know who has the power to put it on Joel and Ethan Coen’s radar because I think the dimensions of it lend themselves to adaptation as much as Punke’s other bestseller that Alejando Iñárritu brought to the screen in 2015 (The Revenant); and 2.) For anybody who’s curious about the longer list of titles that were considered for the bender, I’ve included those with their respective authors and presses at the end. That way, if you’re coming down with the Butte bug yourselves, you are adequately aware of how you may begin self-medicating. Now, for the main event…
I Await the Devil’s Coming (Melville House, first published in 1902 as The Story of Mary Maclane by Herbert S. Stone & Company), Mary Maclane
I have this running bit where I ask friends to consider this scenario: It’s the Salem witch trials and you’re a suspected witch by virtue of your association with somebody else. Which of your friends has roused this suspicion?
I have strong candidates for different parts of my life. In my adult life, it’s my farmer friend named Megan on account of her dancing (my contention is that she’s synesthetic). But her wanton rejection of grooming habits most women have been socialized to accept as standard would also pad the case against her. Back in the Southwest Montana area where I grew up, my pal most likely to make the hit list would be the mother of one of my oldest friends who’s also become a dear friend of mine over the years. Her name is Karen. In addition to being into all-things history and folk art, Karen has been a purveyor of essential oils since before they were trendy and, hear me out, she’s suspiciously successful at growing herbs and greens in harsh, high-desert conditions. I say all this because Mary Maclane would’ve undoubtedly elicited witch accusations in a different era. And had she had more friends in her Butte girlhood, they probably would’ve been marked as complicit just by association.
Jessa Crispin, who was tasked with writing the intro to the 2013 reissue of I Await, was a little off the mark on a few basic points about Butte and regional identity in general. However, the aptitude of the witch comparison did not escape her. In fact, I think she keyed in on it quite incisively when she wrote in the intro, “[Maclane] was the kind of headstrong, caustic little thing that was branded a witch just a handful of centuries earlier.”
The comparison is a productive frame, especially for thinking with the 19-year-old Mary Maclane, who to a reader in 1902, would’ve come off as radically unconventional. The text, which Maclane consistently refers to as her “Portrayal,”, is comprised of reflections between January and April 1901 with a final entry in October, all recorded in a journal intended for a public audience. Even for me as a contemporary reader, the 19-year-old Maclane exudes an Emily Dickinson energy that I will always dig. And I don’t mean that as just an on-the-nose reference to both Maclane and Dickinson’s cachet as queer trailblazers. That in itself would be a very fucking great claim to fame, but what I’m talking about is broader than that.
It’s true that Maclane and Butte share a radical lack of conventionality, but that’s not all. Maclane’s “Portrayal” has qualities that, though not explicitly attributed to Butte by the author, do reflect the town she grew up in. And even though Maclane consistently expresses disaffection with Butte, often using “sand and barrenness” as a substitute for referring to it by name, she and the Mining City have a lot in common.
What’s striking about Maclane in I Await is her remarkable self-awareness (especially with her less flattering qualities), her intense will to define her own terms, and her sometimes catastrophic sensitivity to isolation. Maclane often falls back on describing herself as a peripatetic philosopher and a genius, and makes much ado of her “admirable young-woman’s body.” Through repeated mention, Maclane positions these qualities as the ones that matter, particularly in as unforgiving a climate, landscape, and state of mind as the American West. The effect is a wholesale rejection of society’s terms for virtuous young women at the turn of the 20th century. She understands herself as apart from society, even unfit for it, and seems like she wouldn’t have it any different most of the time. However, sometimes it clearly rams against her genuine desire for connection. This tension bears out in a late February passage in I Await:
I want the love and sympathy of human beings, and I repel human beings.
Yes, I repel human beings.
There is something about me that faintly and finely and unmistakably repels.
And then again in early March:
I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where there is nothing in touch with it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door is closed — every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head.
We do know that Maclane eventually got out of Butte. In fact, it was the successful sales of I Await, first published in 1902 and selling 100,000 copies in the first month, that enabled her to move East. Maclane escaped the isolation of the West and never returned to it, as she ended up dying mysteriously in a Chicago hotel room in 1929. Nonetheless the particular brand of isolation that Maclane captured as a 19-year-old in writing I Await is emblematic of the complicated relationship a self-described loner or outcast can have to isolation. On one hand, the Mary Maclanes of the world don’t want to be boxed in by society’s reductive standards and rigid definitions of worth and success. But the latent longing for human connection can often prove too painful to keep up an existence on the outs.
I identify with Maclane’s sense of outsiderness with almost painful depth. So many times I’ve convinced myself that I’m clearly a destined and consummate loner only to run headlong into the sympathy and contact conundrum that I guess just comes with the damn territory of being human. But I do think there is some cautionary humor yet in the way this tension played out for Maclane. That’s because, by all appearances, Maclane was as fond of her steak and green onions as anything else in this mean world. An entire January entry of I Await is just Maclane waxing poetic about the combo (and she even calls back to it in a March entry). From this, I take heed: if you don’t find something or someone of consequence to wax poetic about, you will be Mary Maclane doing it over steak and onions. No disrespect to either substance, but I hope things never quite come to that for anybody (although, full-disclosure: I’ve been known to wax poetic myself about cheese and my home state, and, yeah, even Butte sometimes, and I’m not above making a habit of it).
Fire and Brimstone (Hachette), Michael Punke
I already mentioned that Punke’s reconstruction of a 1917 mining disaster was my overall favorite leg of this bender. It’s not because it struck as personal of a chord for me as I Await, but I think that makes sense. Maclane’s narrative is intimate in nature, and therefore lends to more personal reflection. Punke’s book, on the other hand, deals in the constraints of the historical record and ultimately, it excels at evoking the neglected weight and significance of a story that has fallen into obscurity.
Even as a child of Southwest Montana, the story of the Granite Mountain and Speculator mine fires had never been on my radar. By extension, the significance of the disaster for the once-bustling metropolis of Butte was, also, never on my radar. And what I think is Punke’s great achievement in Fire and Brimstone is that he connects the dots. He’s able to tease out this tragic and intriguing, but otherwise seemingly innocuous historical event, and make us appreciate what it meant — for Butte, yes, but also for the national flow-down effects it had for labor rights, trust busting, and what became the New Deal in the years that followed the accident.
Because Punke’s text is based on history, I trust that curious readers can go their own way in researching the events represented in it. But in the vein of hard and fast lessons to take away from the North Butte mining disaster, one piece of wisdom stands out. That is, if you ever find yourself more than 2,000 feet below ground when a fire breaks out and somebody tells you to follow them and construct a bulkhead, you actually have nothing to lose by going along with it. I know it will seem like a lot of trouble in the moment. And yes, you will probably be suffering below ground for several days as the air quality behind that bulkhead only worsens gradually. But you will make out a lot better than the people who try to battle the carbon monoxide and heaven knows what other gases spreading outside of the bulkhead. And by “make out a lot better,” I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to survive and make a full recovery once rescuers are able to break your ass out of that shaft. I’m just saying you’ll have a fighting chance, and if you’re interested in that sort of thing (so, like, if you have a family or a dog back home waiting on you), the bulkhead is your best bet. And most importantly, you don’t even need to know what a bulkhead is to listen to the guy who does.
With that, shout-out to any living descendants of bulkhead ringleaders Manus Duggan and J.D. Moore, for you come from a stock that saved a handful of lives against pitiful odds. The suspense around the survival of the bulkhead cohabitants is what drives the first half of Punke’s book, and it’s compelling stuff. Insofar as what drives the second half, I have a bit of an axe to grind, but it has nothing to do with the book itself. I’m just indignant that my Montana education taught me to take pride in our tradition of storied statespeople like Jeanette Rankin and Mike Mansfield, but totally omitted any mention of Burton K. Wheeler.
I suggest you all read Punke’s book to get the full rundown on Wheeler’s legacy, but I’ll try to do it some justice in summary. Wheeler essentially took lessons from his experience with big corporations as a federal DA at the time of the North Butte mining disaster, and applied them to his 24-year career as a U.S. Senator. In so doing, he steered the country clear of a lot of horseshit and earned the trust and admiration of one Franklin Roosevelt, who asked him to be his running mate in the 1944 election. Wheeler had no interest in the vice presidency and declined the nomination. Vice President Truman took over the presidency when Roosevelt died in office in 1945. So, yeah, that’s the closest a dude from Montana has ever been to the presidency (though, we should say there’s a new one that’s trying to get in on that). From his post in the Senate, Wheeler led a famous investigation of the corrupt attorney general, Harry Daugherty. The events inspired a script, originally titled The Man from Montana, that ultimately got produced in 1939 as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
To me, the most Butte aspect of Wheeler’s legacy is the low-key, uncredited badassery, the likes of which only gets cited in the footnotes of history. And here’s the thing: I don’t think Butte or Wheeler mind that. If it was name recognition Wheeler had been after, he would’ve taken a gig in the FDR White House. It’s the same with Butte. Like I said earlier, Butte has an odd self-security. It doesn’t assert itself, but it’s never in doubt about its significance. In many ways, Butte’s accessibility and lack of pretense downplays its Shakespearean dimensions. Punke has a way of bringing that into focus through the characters in Fire and Brimstone, first with the heroes who died in the mining disaster, then with the survivors, like Burton Wheeler, who carried the legacy of disaster with them.
Red Harvest (Vintage Books, first published in 1929 by Alfred A. Knopf), Dashiell Hammett
Alright, this is where things get weird.
Prior to Red Harvest, I don’t think I’ve read anything on the magnitude of a hard-boiled detective novel. And yet, I am pretty out about my affection for the films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. For those who don’t know, a lot of what we call “hard-boiled detective novels” were adapted for the screen pre-1960. And not only were those adaptations commercially successful, they combined to make the noir genre that’s now taught as canon. What’s more, because of the success of this very identifiable, specific form on the screen, its influence spread. You’d actually be hard-pressed to find a film released during the 1940s without seeing some conventions from the noir playbook. I say all this because I consciously try not to differentiate between high- and low-brow in art. I personally operate on the Tarantino philosophy that high-brow and low-brow are all just brow, and worthy influences can be found on both ends of the spectrum. And yet, I admit that I’ve definitely internalized a sense of genre prejudice against (imagine me using air quotes here) detective novels. And that’s worth addressing because that is Dashiell Hammett’s wheelhouse.
If I had to guess at the origins of this inherited prejudice, I really wonder if it’s just a case of sour grapes. In general, pretentious people love nothing more than to shit on that which gets commercial success, or a big audience, or both. I myself am not blameless in this regard. The reality is that art for commerce versus art for art’s sake is always going to be a tough tension, and this conflict is as germane to writing as it is to any other art form. Detective novels were massively popular in the early 20th century. Incidentally, I think they’ve unfairly been relegated to bottom-rung literature status. And I’ve probably had just enough formal writing instruction to get grandfathered into this legacy tastemaking that has consistently excluded the tradition that a book like Red Harvest is operating in. But I have to say I’m fortunately open-minded because my interests are such that I understand writing quite expansively — not just strictly as prose and poetry, but as something that’s at the foundation of forms like music and film.
I mentioned earlier that you’d be hard-pressed to find any significant American films from the 1940s free of noir influence. I also said earlier that I subscribe to the Tarantino philosophy when it comes to influences. But I also subscribe to his outlook when it comes to (me using air quotes again) rules. Namely, rules exist to be subverted, co-opted, or on special occasions, abandoned entirely. And though the independence of vision is distinct, Joel and Ethan Coen are a set of screenwriters who have similarly created their own standards for a text’s internal logic. And this won’t be a surprise to anybody familiar with their filmography, but because these guys were heavily influenced by Hollywood’s Golden Age, their early interests very naturally went to the source texts of the films they grew up with, some of which were Dashiell Hammett stories specifically.
Now, I don’t do this often because I’m not much of a speculative writer, but one thing I have discovered when going through the motions of writing something that’s distinctly period and highly regional is that the most helpful reference texts always have a real investment in diction and idiom that’s peculiar to a very specific time, place, and culture. Coen scripts in general are a masterclass in this element, but that’s not a coincidence. Though some are more faithful than others, many Coen projects are adaptations. Their 1990 crime drama Miller’s Crossing is one example of their looser adaptations, and the script for it draws from two Hammett texts: The Glass Key and — maybe you’ve guessed it already — Red Harvest. And after reading Red Harvest, it’s easy to see just how foundational texts like it are to the way the Coens write dialogue.
Like Hammett’s dialogue, a Coen script reliably has banter that’s up-tempo with diction that’s very speaker-specific. I can see why somebody would go to Red Harvest to build an ear for diction. In twenty non-dense pages of prose, you can pick up as many interesting words — some of which you’ve probably heard once or twice before, but never used. It’s a type of texture that now acts as a world-building function for modern readers. And I now recognize how much I take that unusual diction for granted, so much so that I didn’t realize how little of it we see in contemporary fiction. Like, I’m almost tempted to make up some kind of bingo game to encourage people to bring back words like flunkey, umpchay, hoosegow, shyster, and gum-shoe. But even that’s telling of the type of thing Hammett excels at. The particular diction is a mainstay in the world of these novels, but it’s hard for me to imagine reading something current where that altitude of diction wouldn’t feel like a kitschy flex. It’s challenging to think up a hard and fast rule for toeing that line between interesting and indulgent, particularly when we’re comparing books from different centuries. But I wonder if credibility to pull out the strange idioms does, to a significant degree, derive from setting. And I raise that because Red Harvest, which is about a town called Poisonville that’s heavily based on 1920s Butte, actually called to mind a line from the first leg of this bender. From Maclane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming:
The population [of Butte] is not only of all nationalities and stations, but the nationalities and stations mix and mingle promiscuously with each other, and are partly concealed and partly revealed in the mazes of a veneer that belongs neither to nation nor to station, but to Butte.
This strikes me as a possible litmus test for the kind of setting that lends to breaking rules and taking liberties. In a sense, if you can point to a place as unfathomably cosmopolitan as Butte was in the early 20th century, anything goes. And indeed, in just the plot and structure of Red Harvest, a lot seems to go and the fact that every nocturnal, gin-soaked twist and turn strains belief in the convenience of its placement and sequencing may be the very point. The “anything goes” principle has always served the nihilistic philosophy of Joel and Ethan Coen. One of the hallmarks of the much obsessed-over Coen universe is that the arbitrary cruelty of the world (which can feel indulgently cruel) is also ripe with absurd comic potential. And it’s the comic possibility — the fact that a narrative unfolding could make you laugh and land in better circumstances than where it began — that functions as a kind of hope. It’s almost the wisest kind of hope in that it’s the opposite of naive optimism. And I think that’s also the type of hope often attributed to Butte. Irrational, maybe, but never naive. Butte’s seen enough shit and been fucked over enough to know better. Lest they need a reminder, there’s a Superfund site that has already swallowed up whole neighborhoods as evidence that the greedy bastards of the world are never above bailing on a cheap date without notice.
“Where is Butte’s rival?”
Mary Maclane guessed Butte’s population was somewhere near 70,000 in 1901, adding, “but those seventy thousand are in their way uparalleled. For mixture, for miscellany — variedness, Bohemianism — where is Butte’s rival?” This suggests that Butte, which had been a mere “ramshackle mining encampment” 30 years before Maclane wrote I Await, had come into its own by the turn of the century. And whatever recognizable essence it established over a century ago is the one that has survived.
That essence, intangible and immeasurable though it may be, is what gives Butte its Butte-ness. And the effort to capture it, much like what I attempted with this reading bender, is always going to come up short. In one of the great chapter-opening sentences I’ve read in some time, Michael Punke puts it this way: “The unruly braids of Butte history defy those who search for tidy summation.” I agree with that. And if there’s anything to take away from my own foray into Butte-inspired texts, it’s clear the town is nothing if not defiant. But in the absence of physical artifacts to parse Butte’s stories, it is texts like Maclane’s, Punke’s, and Hammett’s that help us distill some of the Butte-ness that many of us can only sense and guess at.
More Butte reading
- Tracing the Veins by Janet Finn (University of California Press)
- Mining Childhood by Janet Finn (Montana Historical Society Press)
- The City That Ate Itself by Brian Leech (University of Nevada Press)
- The Battle for Butte by Mike Malone (University of Washington Press)
- Mining Cultures by Mary Murphy (University of Illinois Press)
- The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 by David Emmons (University of Illinois Press)
- Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front by Matthew Basso (University of Chicago Press)
- Trilogy by Ivan Doig
- Whistling Season (Perfection Learning Corporation)
- Work Song (Penguin)
- Sweet Thunder (Penguin)
