Close at the east edge of this Butte is a barren ridge of Rockies
that is sudden and big and breathing-looking, barbarously personal,
touched with varying gifted color-moods and glowering morose
color-passions: at the south the snow-topped Highlands lie long faëry
solitary miles away, caressed at their summits by thin soft sun-rings
and sun-vapors of salmon and sea-green and turquoise and mauve: at
the west a gray-shadowed desert burns red-gold in the setting sun
and sleeps in pearl-and-ashen stillness under midnight stars: at the
north smaller spurs of the range break into foothills and bluffs and
gulches, restful wastes of lonely stones and blurred radiances of
tawny sand: on top of all the rarefied air of these plateau heights
refracts the light into hot dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of
sun on a trailing storm-fringe. This Butte is capriciously decorated
with sweet brilliant metallic orgies of color at any time, all times,
as if by whims of pagan gods lightly drunk and lightly mad.
St. Paul-Minnesota looks a greenlier-prettier town: the Arizona Cañon
looks vastly more fearfully beautiful: Wichita-Kansas probably looks
more a regular town: Akron-Ohio doubtless looks more Americanly
reassuring: Rome-Italy must have a more ‘settled’ look: New York is
much larger and much brighter-looking.
Only this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.
Its insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself
year after year.
There is love in me for this Butte.
I am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long-familiar with
the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing
iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no
_reason_ I feel love for this Butte.
As much as for the mountains in their mourning intimateness I
feel love for all the outsides and surfaces of the town itself:
the stone streets full of houses and shops and stores and brick
walls and laundry-wagons and persons: the vacant lots where boys
play ball: the school-buildings which for twenty years have needed
the same green grass around them and the same playgrounds for
school-children to play in (and will go on twenty years needing
them): the little mines in unexpected midtown blocks with their
engines and hoists and scaffolds and green coppery dumps: the big
mines on the Hill busily working day and night, a bristling citadel
of smoke-stacks and tall buildings above the treasure-drifts and
tunnels that come down honeycombing the town under its streets
and hoses and yield up wealths of monthly millions: the desolate
wind-swept cemetery on the Flat: the Timber Butte: the School of
Mines: the Brophy grocery-window full of attractive grocery-food:
the St. Gaudens statue of Marcus Daly: the few sweet green trees on
North Montana Street by the court-house: the edge of Walkerville:
Ex-Senator Clark’s old-fashioned closed house in Granite Street: the
stone Episcopal Church with the memorial windows: the surprising
steep Idaho Street hill: the old Reduction Works reminiscent of the
bygone Heinze and the bold buccaneering days: the Montana Street
cemetery at last kempt and nurtured green as Beloit-Wisconsin: the
little rocky Missoula gulch: the North Excelsior Street neighborhood
where I wrote my Devil and Gray-dawn book: the Butte High School
where I studied and meditated youngly: the old Library where I used
to get a variety of books in my gangling girlhood: the electric
ore-trains going to Anaconda: the vegetable Chinamen: the Post-Office
News-stand: the Mexican tamale venders in the early night: the sweet
green trees and other greenness in people’s yards garnered and
cherished in a way which would astonish Toledo-Ohio: the brilliant
sparkling look of the town from far out on the Flat late in the
evening, like a mammoth broken tiara of starry diamonds, twinkling
points of blue and orange and cerise and violet, fired and flung
against a mountainside of dark velvet,--an aspect intensely Butte:
the cool mosquitoless summer nights: the Anaconda Standard: the
sulphurous smoky deadly-cold winter mornings: the Cornish and Irish
and Austrian and Finn miners: the little slim green onions in the
markets: the noise and color and morale of the crowds on a Miner’s
Union day: the markets on the afternoon shade side of West Park
Street full of crabs and lobsters from Seattle and shining fish from
California, and mushrooms and froglegs and squabs and hothouse things
from hereabouts: the Parrot smelter: the Chinese gardens at Nine
Mile: the Italian village of Meaderville: the fortified battlemented
look of the town at the east of South Butte: the mystic familiar
sand-and-barrenness--
All of it has a feel of something aloof and metallic and distinctive
and gray-purple and Butte-Montana. Gray-purple is the color of the
town, its spirit-tone. Its odor and fascination are gray-purple.
This Butte is bodily a young rich present-day city of a
hundred-thousand population, all told: miners who bulwark
its foundations: masses who make and manage its business:
millionaire-members who spend most of their lives and dollars in
New York: all are Butte-made. But its soul is still the soul of the
frontier mining-camp which sprang into copper being when the Comstock
mine in Virginia-Nevada failed of its silver-ish promise.
A very few years ago--what one could count on one hand’s
fingers--there were no lids in this Butte. Every summer bony
thoroughbred horses from Juarez and Denver raced round the oval track
on the Flat, watched by a shrieking betting throng of Butte citizens
and citizenesses, ridden by silk-bloused black-booted jockies, their
finish-spurts under the wire chaperoned by a flock of bookmakers.
Roulette and poker and faro were wide-open in the town and flavored
the air with a taste of gray-purple hazard. Gin-palaces and
mining-camp dance-halls, highly de-luxe’d, lent their tinted breath
to the current. Noodle-ish and little bacchanalian dives flourished
in unexpected nooks. The police court on a Monday morning resembled
the debris from an alcoholic human volcano, a condemned but owned
portion of this Butte in its Butte-Montana-ness. All of it was but
one element in an isolated prosperous town of many elements, but it
someway tinctured all.
No pagan-wild sunset burst above the west desert but suggested that
the vague lid was off the town, and vaguely lost: a lost lid.
The gambling lid is fast on now--if they gamble they gamble under it.
And no more do ribby horses and surprising-mixed crowds disport them
at the deserted race-track.
But the setting Butte sun suggests the same wealth and wildness as if
always its celestial chemistry were shot with essence of mining-camp:
rich, generous, feverish and virile.
Brophy’s grocery-window and the Marcus Daly monument and the
Parrot smelter and the Clark house and the Idaho Street hill--all
of it--owns the gray-purple which is not St. Paul and not Wichita
and not Pittsburg and not Spokane: not anything except intensely
Butte-Montana.
I have felt it since I first lived here in little young short-frocked
days, and I felt it when I lived away from Butte: I feel it all these
now-days to the roots of myself.
I have no reason: but the contrary: to love Butte as a townful of
human beings.