Butte America

Butte Montana, what a weird and fascinating place. It's a close rival to Trona as one of my favorite American towns.

And this is a very brief history of Butte:
Butte was a booming mining town and it all started because some folks came West looking for gold. Butte had about 500 residents until that gold started running out, and the population dropped to 240. In the 1870s some folks realized there was lots of silver in the quartz around Butte. Silver is much easier to get at since it doesn't require water, like prospecting for gold does, and water is pretty scarce around Butte. But in the 1880s things really got crazy when the mining folks realized there was lots and lots and lots of copper in the hills, pure copper veins 100 feet across in fact. This was extraordinarily fortunate because the world was at that very moment becoming electrified and what is one of the best conductors? Copper. The Anaconda Mine alone (and there were other successful mines) produced more than 50 million pounds of copper by 1887. There were a few well known richy-miner-big-wigs competing for the riches, causing a huge labor demand and helping to make Butte grow like mad. So immigrants came in droves to work the mines and by 1917 Butte's population exploded to over 100,000 (it's about 30,000 now). But besides the obvious draw-backs to the dangerous work conditions of mining, the town was nasty. And I mean poisonous nasty. The air was so nasty that the street-lights burned day and night, vegetation wouldn't grow, and dogs and cats were commonly found dead in the street. In fact, that's why the Anaconda smelter was built 30 miles from Butte. Long story short, the Great Depression happened and the copper got pricey to extract. Eventually the good old Anaconda Company decided to "mix things up" a bit in the 1950s and started open pit mining. The Berkeley Pit was born, one of the most alluring and repelling Butte attractions.

I was expecting a platform next to a hole in the ground, but I didn't expect this creepy white fluorescent lit tunnel to get there. I felt like I was in a Stanley Kubrick movie, and half-expected to have to do this scene over and over.

Behold! Montana's deepest body of water. This was the location of Butte's downtown (including thousands of houses, apartments, bars, grocery stores and an amusement park), but it was leveled for copper mining. The pit is more than a mile wide and 1800' deep. When the mining stopped in 1982, the water pumps at the bottom of the pit stopped too. The ground water seeps back into the pit towards its natural levels, but it brings the poison from the mine as it rises. The water is so toxic--in addition to being loaded with heavy metals, it's as acidic as vinegar--that it actually killed an unsuspecting migrating flock of 342 snow geese in 1995. The town has to treat the water to keep the level below their ground water level, lest they all be poisoned. I was hoping to learn more about Auditor at the pit, but we didn't see any information about him and I forgot to ask. At the visitor's center next to the pit, I unthinkingly introduced Esmé to the convenience of drinking fountains. Here's hoping that the fountain's water comes from far, far away.

After visiting the pit, we parked near the edge of uptown Butte and meandered for a couple of hours. Uptown was pretty big, I can't imagine how much bigger it must have seemed before the downtown was leveled. We were both mesmerized by the tall buildings, much taller buildings than in our lovely Missoula. We were also amazed by the lack of anything in the buildings. We tentatively decided that Butte wouldn't be the worst place to live since we could actually afford to buy a really nice house or loft, as they are cheap and aplenty. It would be hard to overstate how eerie Butte's uptown is. In floorspace and the general size of the buildings, it seems like it belongs in a town like Omaha. But it's just so...empty.

The M&M (right center) is a tavern/casino/cafe that was in continuous operation from 1890 until 2003. The story goes that when they went to lock the front door at its closing, the key wouldn't turn in the atrophied lock. It's up and running again.

The North edge of uptown Butte yields the strange juxtaposition of a turn of the century business district and a giant mining headframe.
Butte's had a huge influx of immigrants from Asia (not to mention all the other corners of the globe--in addition to its Chinatown it had a Little Italy, and communities of Lebanese, Irish, and you name it), and this is near the old heart of Chinatown.

What mining town would be complete without a red-light district? Here lies the Dumas Brothel, 1890-1982. The longest running house of prostitution in the US of A. It would've cost us $12 for a tour, so we passed. Maybe next time. After we moved to Montana I was surprised to learn that there were legal brothels in the state (and in Northern Idaho) until the early 1980s.

The Hotel Finlen overlooks Ludwig while he was parked near the brothel.

It seemed to me that the residential neighborhoods near Uptown reflected the American mining areas where the immigrants would've come from. The close-together housing and porches right up to the street look a lot like Eastern Ohio and the older mining towns in Pennsylvania.
After we'd seen most of what we wanted to see, we left the strangeness of Butte and headed North to our campground.

(Much of the above information was gleaned from various Montana books we have but are too lazy to formally cite.)
(next: camping in the mountains)