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Rediscovering Butte: New museums open on rich veins of American history
June 28, 2009
 Bell Diamond Mine in Butte, Mont.  Original office at Butte Adjustment Company
The citizens of Butte have some stories to tell.
Although many of the storytellers are long gone, new purveyors of the town’s history have moved to town.
With the resurgence of demand for copper and molybdenum (especially overseas in China), a collaboration between Old Butte Historical Adventures and real estate developer Jeff Francis has shed new light to seven of Butte’s intriguing historical locations.
Butte author and photographer Mike Byrnes was poking around the basement of the Rookwood Hotel when he noticed a peephole in a door. Immediately he knew what it was, said Byrnes, but what he didn’t know was the valuable piece of history he was about to unlock. Behind the door of this 1912 hotel was a Prohibition-era speakeasy, complete with an American and National league baseball betting board, card tables and a full bar.
The Rookwood Speakeasy was just one of the historical treasures uncovered this past year after sitting untouched for 60 years.
The 1892 Stephens Hotel offers a glimpse of a rooming house, replete with a series of letters that tell the story of a communiqué between a prostitute and a loyal client.
The Myra Brothel sits above Tony’s Tin Shop. In the nearly untouched shop, built in 1914, an old coal and wood stove, trade journals and an array of tools leave you ready to roll up your sleeves and get right to work.
In the lot in back of the brothel sits the original shanty structures that housed some of Butte’s indigent population in the early 1900s.
“For 40 years, nothing grew in Butte,” said Denny Dutton, Old Butte Historical Adventures tour director. Dressed dapperly in period pin stripes, Dutton spins yarns, imparts facts and historical anecdotes to tour guests on tours of Butte’s historical venues. “Some days the pollution was so bad they had to turn the street lights on at noon,” Dutton says.
The museums alone will fuel your imagination of bygone days, but Dutton’s narration along with a charismatic cast of tour guides dressed in period costumes lends additional animation to the trip back through time.
Not to be missed while visiting historic Butte is a trip to the Mai Wah and Wah Chong Tai buildings for Asian history exhibits as well a stop off at the Dumas Brothel (specifically built to be a parlor house) catering to clients for almost a 100 years from 1890 to 1982.
Looking into crater of the infamous Berkeley Pit, you can learn how Atlantic Richfield has developed a method to mine copper from the metallic waters of the artificial lake. After the Depression, many of the unused buildings and basements uptown were simply boarded up when people left town. The Berkeley Pit, the largest open pit mine in the United States as well as the cradle of the nation’s largest Superfund site, closed in 1982. It reopened in 2003 with stricter environmental standards and a new water-treatment plant.
Nearby is the Granite Mountain Memorial, which commemorates 168 miners who died in a 1917 fire that is the largest hard-rock mining disaster in U.S. history.
Gold was first panned in Silver Bow Creek in 1864. But it was silver and copper that put Butte on the map, swelling its city limits at the beginning of the 20th century to the largest city between Seattle and St. Paul. But as the Depression crippled the U.S. economy, demand for copper and precious metals dried up. So did Butte’s population.
In 1879 the first electric railroad in the United States connected the 30 miles between Anaconda and Butte. By 1920, the population of the “Richest Hill on Earth” surpassed 100,000 people and as many as 200 mines operated around-the-clock.
Butte’s booming economy and diverse population gave rise to a wide range of cultural institutions: theaters, operas, restaurants and churches enriched its citizens, while a dizzying array of bars and brothels, horse tracks and an amusement park kept the hard-working people of Butte entertained.
During its mining heyday, there were roughly 2,500 Chinese immigrants living in Butte. Forbidden to walk the streets by day, the Chinese community constructed a large network of interconnecting tunnels that today remain hidden and closed off to the public. Used for both transit and mining, all told, it is said there are 10,000 miles of tunnels burrowing under Butte.
Butte’s underbelly also lays claim to the 1921 murder that triggered the Tong Wars — a series of riots, murders and rivalries that eventually spread to Chinatowns in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.
As one of only two cities in the United States designated as a National Historic District, the Copper King Mansion, the Arts Chateau and the stately Silver Bow Center (all built before 1910) have drawn tourists and history buffs to Butte for years. Touring the city of Butte is akin to traveling through time, taking you on a real and imagined journey through the sometimes wild and wooly history of the West.
A century later, Butte is still a family place, but behind its modest façade, a gold mine of stories tells the tale of one of America’s most productive cities.
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