A town built around gulches
Most American cities have a ‘downtown.’ Butte Montana has both a commercial uphill and downhill section. The uptown is actually uphill; distinct and defined. If you refer to ‘downtown Butte,’ you might get a quizzical look, as it could be anything not in the uptown business district. This story is about the key intersection of Park and Main Streets in the old uptown, how it got there, and why it has endured.
Park and Main was destined to be the center of Butte. From its beginnings in the 1860s, what is now Main Street connected early placer mining (i.e., gravel, water and a pan) along Silver Bow Creek with the Original lode. The lode was a thick deposit of copper ore that ran across the townsite, just west of the Butte hill. Buffalo Gulch, also placer mined, ran north, parallel to a trail used as a wagon road for bringing wood down from beyond Walkerville. This became Main Street. Park Street was always a thoroughfare, a structural course upon a flat bench running east-west around the hill. It was part of a wagon route extending from Salt Lake City to Helena. Butte’s first bridge spanned Town Gulch on Park Street near Main and Broadway.
This puts Butte pioneer William Owsley’s livery location at Park and Main into its prosperous perspective. (see note #1) The first crossing of Missoula Gulch, which separated the west side from east was another bridge along Park Street. The city filled in that gulch around 1900. Butte was first surveyed in 1867, while still a boom town with a highly transient population of around 500.
Prospectors William Allison and Oliver Humphries drifted north from Virginia City during the summer of 1864. They discovered gold in a quartz deposit on the Butte hill. Word got out and others quickly rushed in. Newcomers constructed the first cluster of log homes on Town Gulch, just east of where today’s Anaconda Road ends. The gulch was near both timber and a fresh water spring. South of Butte, the flatlands were covered in knee-high grass. Outside of barren Big Butte, the hill area was heavily wooded in pine. That’s where the miners chose to build, but their earliest efforts were toward placer mining Silver Bow Creek on the flat. Their first winter was a rough one; only twenty-six stayed around to see it. Of these, a miner’s wife was the lone female. She was treated with the curious interest and respect one might extend to an endangered species today. Miner George Newkirk remembered, “We thought she was the only woman anywhere, as you might imagine.”
The high costs of living
Summer of 1865 witnessed the first settlers along what is now Main Street. The Meiklejohns were a Scottish family who built along Buffalo Gulch, on the west side of North Main, close to Broadway. Like seeds taking root, their four daughters married and raised families in Butte.
A second hard winter with deep and persistent snow left most in the camp convinced that simply residing there was hardship enough. Imagine the confining cold and social isolation of winter in 1860s Butte. The tiny community was snowbound for nearly half the year. Provisions were scarce and prices high. A sack of flour cost $150.00 and tobacco went for $40.00 per pound. Assayers Ange and Allen were paying $14.00 an ounce for gold, and boots cost two ounces of it. Gold was coin of the realm. In such remote areas of single men with a touch of wealth, gambling was endemic. Saloons were equipped with scales for measuring the price of a drink. Bets were placed at the gaming tables in one ounce sacks, and paid out the same way.
Settlers formed into small groups the next spring. Centerville began to develop from such a gathering – forty men and five women. They placer mined with rockers and did fairly well.
Gold lured the prospectors, who established the Summit Valley mining district along ten gulches that ran from the Butte hill down toward Silver Bow Creek. The nearest city of any size was Bannack, eighty miles south. A measure of Butte’s isolation was that its first mail service in 1864 charged $1.00 in gold to send or receive a letter or a newspaper.
Year three and uncertainty ahead
The camp began to hum in its third year. Extensive placer work in the gulches was fed by a small seasonal creek that ran across Park Street a block west of Main. More log cabins went up near French, German and Highland Gulches. Working these deep furrows nearly leveled some out. Only Missoula, Town and Buffalo Gulches ran into what would become the townsite.
Merchants selling miner’s gear and liquor did good business. Hunting and fishing were productive on the flats, with plenty of ducks. Deer and antelope by the hundreds thrived in Elk Park, a short distance north. The little mining community adapted into a forced self sufficiency.
Surface gold mostly panned out after the third year, with inaccessibility of water a constant hindrance. Following the trajectory of nearly all other gold mining camps, Butte’s headcount withered. It was a played out camp when first platted in 1867. The primary four streets assigned were Main, Park, Granite and Broadway. One man on the scene wrote, “We have laid Butte out at last, and if it has any friends, they had better come forward and give it a decent burial.”
At what seemed as good as Butte was going to do, there were around sixty houses, four stores, three saloons and a restaurant. Pioneer David Upton claimed a population of about 150. He said only six women resided in Butte after 1867, and he proceeded, nearly thirty years later, to name each of them.
Dry isolation nearly kills the camp
Placer mining demands water, and Butte was both high and dry. Large ditches were dug to bring water from surrounding creeks to the camp. John Noyes and David Upton made money furnishing working water for miners in the summer of 1868. The following summer was miserably dry, and lack of sufficient water for sluices and rockers (see note 2) caused many to leave. From 1870 through 1874, Butte was busy only during wet weather.
Placer mining, difficult as it is, is child’s play compared with the rigors of hard rock, or quartz mining. In addition to having to drill, dynamite, excavate and support underground diggings, the resulting ore was bound up in granite, and required stamping and smelting in order to be refined. In Butte, this meant hauling crudely concentrated ore by wagon 400 miles to the nearest rail head at Corrine, Utah. From Salt Lake City, it was off to a faraway place like Swansea, Wales or Freiburg, Germany where technology to separate and refine the precious metals existed.
William Burke in Copper Camp claimed an 1874 Butte population of just fifty. Merchants bailed, shops closed, cabins relocated to places where prospects seemed better. As desperate as things were, the camp did manage to maintain two saloons in town. Groceries had to be procured from Highland City or Silver Bow.
The quarry changes
With Butte poised to join the roster of so many ghost towns in the mountain West, William Farlin hit a metallic bulls-eye. He called his 1866 quartz claim the Asteroid. When its black ledges assayed high in silver, he restaked his claim as the Travona in 1874. Butte never could keep a secret. Silver prospectors now stampeded to Butte. More complex and expensive development associated with hard rock mining, like crushing mills and smelters, began construction.
A couple of people critical to unlocking the riches of the Butte hill were already in the area by this time. William A. Clark was trading goods between Bannack and Salt Lake City when Allison and Humphries first panned out some gold in 1864. Clark raised enough money to partner in a Deer Lodge bank. When, in 1872 Farlin defaulted on a loan intended to further develop his Travona holdings, Clark took over the mine, and a copper king began his ascent. The other person, Marcus Daly was a silver mine foreman in Nevada. Sent by his financial backers to assess the silver potential of Butte, Daly arrived in 1876, and demonstrated an uncanny instinct for finding a third, and more wildly prolific metal in the hill, copper (see note 3).
A mountain of copper
Silver saved Butte initially. It led to the first railroad, a branch of the Utah and Northern, coming into town in 1881. A year later, Butte’s population reached 4,000, coincidental with the discovery of copper at Daly’s Anaconda mine. An opportune find, right in step with Bell’s invention of the telephone and Edison’s first electric power plant. Supply and demand seldom met in a more symbiotic way. Growth of the city on the hill reflected a bull market in copper. Butte’s population surged to 20,000 by 1885. Future prosperity seemed assured.
Copper was the metal of the moment, and Butte’s supply appeared inexhaustible. The burgeoning telephone and telegraph markets competed for copper with a parallel effort to wire cities for electricity. Nearly every mine worked three shifts per day to meet the need. A wide open 24 hour city resulted. The working definition of ‘wide open city’ was one that could satisfy a man who wanted to buy a drink, place a bet or hire a prostitute at any hour of the day on any day of the week.
The early pilgrims that flocked to Butte were single men, escaping dismal prospects following the American Civil War, or similar struggles in parts of Europe. Men played a precious metals lottery with their feet, migrating to the gold fields of Montana. Some mined the hard rock when the placers went dry, searching for gold and silver. Many left busted after back breaking effort, but some stayed, either with the luck of good ore, or ‘upstreaming’ into more lucrative work, like bartending.
A man’s world
In 1884, Butte’s fast growing uptown district skewed toward a working man’s leisure activities. In the two blocks from Broadway to Galena Street along the west side of Main, were twenty-one properties, ten of which were ‘drinking establishments.’ On the east side of the same stretch, five of the fifteen properties were saloons and one was a liquor store. Such a density of bars speaks to the unquenchable thirst of the city’s inhabitants.
Saloons, boarding houses, restaurants, gambling houses, brothels – all worked together to lighten the load on a man’s wallet, come payday. Several establishments never closed. The M&M cigar store, which was restaurant, bar and gambling house in one, went a full century before locking its front door. This was a feature around uptown Butte for a long time. Park and Main appeared almost equally busy at midnight and noon.
Exponential growth in Butte’s population forced the town to diversify into enough service and mercantile industry to support it. With merchants, doctors, teachers and lawyers came families. Park and Main became the epicenter of commercial and recreational activity for the community. It was still a district of saloons and gambling houses, but now with stores, theaters and restaurants sprinkled in.
Two looks at phenomenal growth
The intersection developed quickly. Butte first incorporated around 45 blocks in 1879, with Park and Main at its center. Ramshackle wooden frame structures lining Main street suffered a major fire in autumn of the same year. The city responded with an ordinance specifying that new construction within the business district be of stone or brick. Butte’s new found wealth reflected itself in serious professional architecture during the rebuild.
Above is a pictorial map of Park and Main in 1884. Patrick Largey’s State Savings bank stood on the southwest corner, Across Park was the Lizzie Block (85). William Owsley’s livery occupied the northeast corner and the Board of Trade saloon held the southeast. Around these were clusters of banks, saloons, theaters and stores. City hall and city jail lay just a block north.
Even a quick glance at the same corner twenty years later, in 1904, shows the incredible degree of maturation within the uptown. The tallest building on the corner is the Owsley Block at the northeast corner. Across Main is the Lizzie Block. The southwest corner was about to see a new eight story State Savings Bank and the southeast remained Board of Trade saloon with a small assortment of other businesses.
Civilization comes to Park and Main
Butte’s peak era, in terms of population and civic enthusiasm, lasted from about 1910 to 1917. Silver Bow County’s 1900 population of 30,000 nearly tripled within the next twenty years. (see note 4) It was a go-go time with a bifurcated culture; meeting the off-shift demands of single mining men while seeking to accommodate a family’s free time.
Butte was a city rife with contradiction. It built palatial theaters that attracted world-class performers. It also had a robust appetite for vaudeville and burlesque shows. Butte loved classy supper clubs and piano bars, but also roadhouses with moonshine and Sunday chicken dinners. Bars were the exclusive province of men, but the town also allowed wine rooms, where women could legally associate with men over a drink. The Catholic high school was a short walk from three bordellos. Police chief Jere Murphy emptied the city jail in observance of Christmas at least twice.
Over 200 licensed Butte bars operated in 1917, while the city also supported 42 churches and 32 schools.
The Park and Main hub grew to cater to the ladies and children. It was a short walk from Butte’s big department stores, Hennessy’s and Symon’s. The Grand Opera, Broadway, Ansonia and Rialto theaters drew crowds to live shows and movies. Chequamegon and Green’s restaurants sat across Main from Brophy’s Grocery. The Atlantic, California, and Walker’s bars were the city’s most popular watering holes. Metals, Miner’s and First National banks kept the economy flowing. Visitors stayed at the Finlen, Thornton and Butte hotels, and strolled to the shoe stores, jewelers, doctors, photographers, tailors and fortune-tellers clustered around the intersection.
Dynamism in a youthful place
It was a young town – the 1900 census identified 85% of Butte’s population as under the age of 25. Most of these were men, wagering their health in the mines and their wealth in the gaming houses, saloons, dance halls and brothels of uptown. Saturday was both payday and a day off. The combination created an irresistible urge to blow off some steam.
Butte’s police force stayed busy, forced to tolerate fringe behaviors in the simple fact that their jail could in no way accommodate all the lawbreakers at once. It usually sufficed to round up a few, serving as notice to others that the risk of apprehension was yet another game of chance. Officers and detectives generally focused on the same uptown area that revelers did. Park and Main occupied the center of both Butte’s behavior and its consequences.
Where the people lived
Mining progress within the city dictated its physical development. Winters were snow-filled, with temperatures falling below zero. By contrast, the underground mines felt downright tropical as the shafts sank deeper into the Butte hill. A chippy cage full of miners would surface after a hot shift, with every man steaming in the bitter cold. Early miners were wise to limit the walking distance back to their homes. Neighborhoods sprung up close to the head frames of their employers.
School children used to gather on the hillside and watch the men raised, and it was an afterschool pleasure to watch them literally disappear in this cloud, this puff of smoke. – David Emmons
A degree of isolation was added by the need to dispose of waste rock from the various mines. Usually dumped nearby, the tailings created vast berms and insulated one cluster of people from others. The layout of roads followed contours of the waste dumps, leading to serpentine roads that conformed to no particular grid.
As particular mines hired with a preference for certain countrymen, a number of ethnically distinct enclaves resulted. These residential areas became entities in themselves, with churches, bars, social societies, cuisine, culture and customs specific to the people who constituted them. Most often, they shared a former geography, like the Cornish in Walkerville, Italians in Meaderville and Eastern Europeans in McQueen. The folks from the hill resided above those from the flats, and Finntown was very little like Williamsburg. Fully half of Butte was Irish. As late as the 1960s, the Butte phone directory included two pages of Sullivans. Everyone knew the Harringtons, Learys, O’Neills and Sheas, but not necessarily the same set.
A person could grow up somewhere in Butte with scant knowledge of other parts of the city. This would be expected in a place like New York City, with its five boroughs, three hundred square miles and eight million residents. But Butte was far smaller while somehow just as provincial. This is not meant to disparage the city or its people. Instead, it’s a longtime personal observation of structure and tribalism in a working class city..
If one spot in town tied the population together; where a person from any of Butte’s many neighborhoods could certainly be found at some point within the year, it would be the city center at Park and Main Streets.
Park and Main as epicenter
A Butte city guide from 1937 notes that one particular crossroads was the knot that tied the package together:
LOCAL TRANSPORTATION — The Butte Electric Railway Company operates trolley cars and buses to all parts of the city and to the suburbs of Centerville, Floral Park, Meaderville and Walkerville. Nearly all cars and buses pass the intersection of Park and Main Streets – the main intersection of the city.
As the one common point in a crazy quilt town, Park and Main developed early. It was well positioned between the moneyed elites of the west side, and the working miners to the north and east. Immediately south were Butte’s once vibrant Chinatown and burgeoning red light district.
Park and Main, center of the commercial district, thrived when copper sold high with three shifts hammering away. Getting there was easy. In 1937, 45 miles of electric street railway, six taxicab companies and 11,000 autos filled its roads. The 1925 Short History Of Butte claimed 253 miles of streets. That’s above ground. Even more extensive were the 2,700 miles of tunnels below, from 150 producing mines.
Park and Main loses its way
Butte experienced several booms and busts; close calls, but nothing fatal. It went from never having a labor strike before 1914 to being paralyzed by them. The community survived a 1950s transition to open pit mining that slowly devoured the eastern half of the city. Meaderville, Dublin Gulch and McQueen disappeared.
Silver Bow County saw its population crater in the late 1970s, and level out at less than half its 1917 numbers. The development of the flats came at the expense of the hill. This was similar to cities across America – a hollowing out of the city center as suburbs predominated. Some of uptown Butte now looks like an architectural museum; a fitting backdrop for production of movies with a 1900s theme. In fact, an emerging aspect of Butte’s appeal lies not so much what it is as what it resembles. This shortchanges the rich history of the actual place.
When the Anaconda Company’s Chilean copper holdings were nationalized in 1971, it could ill afford the loss. Anaconda proposed to expand open pit mining into Butte’s business district, with the alternative being full closure of operations. Park and Main would be no more. Disheartened by a series of catastrophic fires uptown, there was not a lot of political or even business owner resistance to the idea. Thanks to the friction generated from people willing to move, but with opposing points of view, uptown survived.
Local groups debated relocation costs, loss of historic buildings, sites for a new business district, and the company’s $11 million offer to buy out uptown. In the end, the city council voted against selling out. Anaconda sold its Butte holdings to Atlantic Richfield. In turn, ARCO shuttered all mining activity in 1983. The vast underground networks of tunnels filled with water, and have since backfilled the Berkeley Pit with 50 billion gallons of poisonous and acidic water.
Butte today is one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the U.S. You could overlay this on Butte as one of America’s largest E.P.A. Superfund sites. A paradoxical place of great historical importance, while a near orphan, whose corporate and governmental parents strive to avoid taking responsibility.
Montana Standard writer Frank Quinn wrote of Butte in 1875, “the principal resource of the camp lay in the energy of the individuals there.” Still true today. Butte prevails and enjoys the day, while its east ridge disappears. A second vast reservoir of toxic water and sludge builds behind an earthen dam to the northeast of town, out of sight and largely out of mind.
Glimmers of a future for Park and Main
The latest mining venture on the east ridge is seen by the city as necessary, though it employs only 390, a tiny fraction of the 14,000 miners Butte once supported. Meanwhile, Park and Main represents the part of Butte containing its tourism potential, historical value and budding movie star status. The hit series ‘1923‘ was partly filmed in uptown Butte. It added an estimated $25 million to the city’s economy, dwarfing what the mining city’s corporate kingpin offered for the whole caboodle in 1975. Sometimes the best bet is to just stand pat.
Apart from the mines, ethnicities and developmental battles of Butte, its history has always centered around Park and Main. That, not mining is the focus of this narrative. It is intended to provide the reader a sense of the times and the fortunes of some of the people associated with a key intersection in a fascinating place.
Notes
Note 1: Much more about William Owsley in the next chapter, at https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/northeast-corner-owsley-block/
Note 2: A rocker is a box the miner would shovel gravel and dirt into, then rock back and forth in hopes that the heavy gold would settle out. A sluice was basically a fixed gutter doing similar work over a longer run. Butte was especially frustrating for placer mining as the sluices ran nearly dry in the summer, then froze solid in the winter.
Note 3: A man with a shovel and pan can placer mine. Quartz mining required intensive capital in the late 1800s. Clark generated money quickly by shrewd integrated acquisitions and aggressive development. Daly represented wealthy partners who made a fortune in Nevada and invested it in Butte. That each ran a principal bank in Butte was to their further advantage.
A Butte banker was like a poker player with house advantage. He was positioned to see who deposited assets, and who negotiated for loans. He knew who might be susceptible to a buyout, or allow a banker to insinuate himself as a silent partner with economic leverage. It takes money to make money, but Clark and Daly also understood mining and could calculate the upside of risk. They were in the best position to take advantage of what the Butte hill offered, and neither was shy about leveraging his position.
That they recognized the value of copper, while most miners chased gold, then silver, was to their credit. Being in the right place is good, but being there at the right moment is invaluable.
Note 4: Population numbers vary, sometimes widely, by source. To arbitrate this, I cite data for Silver Bow County (essentially the Butte metro area) from the US census, as posted on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bow_County,_Montana It gives the following:
Resources
A dependable and well-written source of early information on the Butte camp was a Montana Standard article by Frank Quinn from June 13,1954, titled The Rise Of A City.
Aspects of Butte in 1900 from a thoughtful essay by Bradford Watson and Sean Burkholder in Scenario Journal; Fall, 2015.
For more on William Clark, Marcus Daly, Fritz Heinze and the ‘war of the copper kings,’ The Battle For Butte; Michael Malone; 1981; University of Washington press, and War Of The Copper Kings; C.B. Glasscock; 1935; Grosset and Dunlap.
A combination of the Great Depression, labor walkouts and layoffs, industrial mechanization and international competition forced Butte’s population downward from the latter part of the 1920s. It has largely held steady since 1990.
An excellent resource for the development of Walkerville, Centerville and Butte can be found in the original National Historical Landmark proposal from 2006. https://www.co.silverbow.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/22605/Butte-Anaconda-NHL-nomination
Density of bars along Main Street in 1884 from Sanborn Fire Insurance map of that year. Found in Library of Congress.
The 1925 book, A Short History Of Butte, by C.W. Towne is subtitled, “Containing a few statistics pleasantly told.” It is available digitally from The Montana State Library; https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/5761
An extensive and annotated timeline appears in Copper Camp, and informs some of the dates cited here.
An NBC article from 2021 asserts Butte’s status as Largest National Historical District (by contributing resources) https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/preservation-groups-work-to-keep-largest-historic-district-landmark-in-butte
The Center For Community Progress worked with Butte-Silver Bow County to create a comprehensive report detailing the woes of uptown Butte, and suggesting measures to improve the deterioration of buildings and resulting vacancies. From it came specific demographic information used in this essay. https://www.co.silverbow.mt.us/DocumentCenter/View/3764/Center-for-Community-Progress-Final-Report-on-Address-Vacancy-and-Abandonment-in-Uptown-Butte
Reference to 14,500 miners actively working in Butte (in 1916) from George Everett of the Butte Silver Bow Archives in an undated paper called When Toil Meant Trouble: Butte’s Labor Heritage. https://libcom.org/article/when-toil-meant-trouble-buttes-labour-heritage
Estimate of economic impact of ‘1923’ on Butte economy from The Montana Standard at https://mtstandard.com/news/local/1923-was-a-good-year-for-butte-bringing-an-estimated-25-to-30-million-boost/article_2ac7bffb-c4ef-57d5-8ea0-7ceb48f7dbbd.html
