Montana
The indomitable Butte, Montana – High Country News
In 2006, I left Alaska with a plan to become a famous singer-songwriter. But before I got to Memphis, I stopped to visit Butte, Montana, where my friend Wendy had bought a $10,000 house and wanted help fixing it up. We weren’t carpenters, but we could demo with the best of them. It was summer, and we’d work all day in dust masks, then smoke joints and drink PBR on her back porch into the evening, looking out at the twisting streets and glittering incandescent lights of Uptown, the city’s historic district. We slept in sleeping bags and peed in a 5 gallon bucket, made coffee on a Coleman stove and wandered over to the Silver Dollar Saloon for open mic night. I fell in love with Butte. It was as if I’d been away for years and finally returned home. I don’t even feel this way about my own hometown. Butte was a beacon in the dark, a warm handshake with cold fingertips.
When winter came, I headed south: Memphis, Nashville, and then Austin, Texas, where I spent 13 years making music. But almost every summer, I came back to Butte.
By 2012, I was growing weary of Austin. Wealth had found a foothold on the central Texas limestone, so I started looking for something to buy in Butte — my other home. One balmy spring day, a real estate agent took me to view a house up in Walkerville, a tiny town that sits above Uptown. Instead, a nearby place — a small green miner’s cottage with an overgrown yard — caught my eye, shining like a penny in the sun, the headframe of the Lexington Mine looming in front of it. This was the house I wanted. But it wasn’t for sale.
When I got back to Austin, I wrote a short letter explaining my pull toward the property. and sent it to the house’s owner, Edwin C. Dobb, a continuing lecturer at UC Berkeley.
Butte was a beacon in the dark, a warm handshake with cold fingertips.
When Ed — as he asked me to call him — wrote back, he explained that he grew up in Butte and lived in that home for years before he took a job in California. He left the cottage locked up, bleaching in the sun, explaining that it held too much sentimental value for him to sell. But he was kind and curious about me.
We wrote letters and spoke on the phone for six years. He became a mentor to me as I struggled with melding art and commerce. I told him I wanted to turn his old house into a writers-in-residence space. We became friends, meeting when I was playing a bar in his California town. Ed was short with white hair, and charming; he wheezed when he walked and drank two beers at lunch.
One afternoon, I was sitting in my Austin backyard when Ed called and said he was ready to sell. I was a waitress and a musician, and no bank wanted to loan me money. But Ed offered to finance the house for four years. And so, in the smoky summer of August 2015, we walked into Summit Title in Butte and signed the papers. The next day, he left in a U-Haul, and I moved into the little green house.
The pipes were busted, the roof leaked. The ghost of Ed was around every corner. My college friend Matt fixed all of the plumbing. Wendy’s husband, David, removed the knob-and-tube wiring so the place wouldn’t burn down. Eventually, I had heat, running water, fresh paint and a roof that I hoped would last. I lived among the things Ed couldn’t fit in the U-Haul: worn-out steak knives, pro-union posters, a kitchen table with a broken leg where he told me he liked to write.
In all my years of coming to Butte in the summer, I saw only a partial view of life there. I marveled at the crystal-clear air, the big sun in the sharp blue sky over the yellow landscape. Butte is located in a high desert that was scraped of trees at the turn of the century, and there are signs of underground mining everywhere: huge hoist houses, tall black headframes where ravens roost amid the giant wheels of old pulley systems that haven’t moved in 80 years.
In the deathly quiet after a fresh snow, I would walk to the old Alice Mine, behind the brownfields, and down to the Mountain Con, another long-shuttered copper mine. Some of my neighbors welcomed me, others did not. Everyone was either born in Butte or Walkerville. Many were elderly. People were curious about the woman who lived in Ed’s old house and trimmed the ancient lilac bushes. It took years to gain their trust, and who’s to say that’s wrong? Now that I’ve been here awhile, I understand why. I cleaned up the yard, took out the trash, baked apple pies and sent slices home to my neighbors.
Meth was a painful reality in Butte then. In one of the houses down below me, a man who stole cars was openly chopping them up in the alley. I called the cops at one point, but they never bothered to drive up the hill. Poverty remains a fact of life. Houses stay under construction for 20 years. But kids still play like kids, riding barefoot on a 50cc dirt bike to the Excelsior Town Pump to get chips and a pop. I watched a couple of grade schoolers eat a pizza at the picnic table outside Pissers Palace, the only bar in Walkerville.
One summer night in 2019, I was eating a cheeseburger in a bar when I found out Ed had died. I left a $20 next to my half-eaten plate, went to my van and cried. He had a stroke, then a heart attack. I was so close to opening the doors of the writer’s residency, and he would never get to see it.
That October, I played music at his memorial service at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Butte. I choked up mid-song as I played “Caledonia,” by Dougie McClean. Afterward, I hugged Ed’s sister, grabbed my guitar, went home to his cottage and stayed there for days, mourning. In January 2020, I hosted my first writer in residence. I named the program “Dear Butte.” Since then, I’ve hosted 60 other writers. I run the space in honor of Ed: a true Butte Boy-o, as he would call himself. Generous, thoughtful, genuine.
I have learned that there is a shelf life for a lot of transplants. I call it Butte Fatigue. The lack of services, restaurants, the omnipresent pollution — people in Butte are both proud to thrive here despite the lack of amenities, and yet they also desire some of those amenities. I never got tired, and Butte only pulled me in deeper. I have become protective of the place.
I run the space in honor of Ed: a true Butte Boy-o, as he would call himself. Generous, thoughtful, genuine.
Some folks in Butte will tell you that when the Anaconda Company shut down the mine pumps in the 1980s, all the good things and people left. Jobs dried up. What was left behind were mining dredges and the people who couldn’t afford to leave. The population grew old, houses sat vacant. Empty houses were stripped of copper wire, then sold to Pacific Steel for enough money to buy meth.
People in Butte can be deeply suspicious; they are used to a commerce of take and no give. The company extracted all it could from this place and then left a mess behind. So much has been taken from Butte, and everyone who comes here and judges the place is also taking from us in small ways.
I take a while to get to know newcomers, too, now. To be “Butte Tough,” as the saying goes, means not just being hardy and at the ready, but guarding our own. We protect our hearts like people who are used to having their hearts continually broken.
The story that gets missed about Butte amid the tall tales of mining history and a drive-by view of the scenery is the story about the people who chose to stay here. Our elders upheld a credo: that generosity is bigger than money. It’s written into Butte’s DNA. No community member is left behind. What do you need? Your dog walked? A new kidney? No problem.
One day, I was pulling stubborn knapweed from my flower bed when my neighbor, Toad, showed up with a bag of cement and a trowel. He insisted on fixing the cracked sidewalk he’d noticed at the entrance of my house. I said OK and stood at the ready with a hose. Fat raindrops fell as we worked, pelting our bare necks. Toad worked through lightning and thunder. Later, while I was in Texas one winter, he mudded and taped my entire house; he said he needed to get out of his wife’s hair. I could tell you so many of these stories. But folks in Butte shy away from compliments; they’d much prefer you to just buy them a round, or two.
When you are driving east or west on I-90 and see the terraced open-pit mine and the brick buildings of uptown, you might think, “My God, what is this place?” If you drive up Harrison Avenue or Montana Street, the untrained eye sees brokenness and bygone grandeur. That’s the drive-by view a countless string of writers has come here to talk about. But when you live here long enough, you stay, because what Butte sees is its people.
But when you live here long enough, you stay, because what Butte sees is its people.
If there is a lesson America needs to learn, it can be learned here. Butte’s story, to Butte people, is not the failed projects of capitalists or the honeycomb of abandoned tunnels underneath us. Small wins — a new restaurant opening or a vacant house being repaired — can bolster us for years to come. Setbacks are just another thing to climb around together. When you’ve been losing for so long, you only have one another. Butte learned that lesson when the Anaconda Company abandoned this place like a broken toy. The community — ready to help itself — is more powerful than anything it ever built. And we will be here for centuries to come, knapweed growing from an old foundation.
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Severe storms moved through parts of Montana on Thursday, prompting a total of 5 Severe Thunderstorm Warnings. Reports included strong wind gusts and hail in several communities, including Augusta, Choteau, Sunburst, Bigfork, Kalispell and Evergreen.
The strongest reported wind gust was 60 mph near Augusta, while hail up to 1 inch was reported near Evergreen and Kalispell.
STORM REPORTS:
12 SE Grant — 56 mph thunderstorm wind gust
7 NNE Augusta — 60 mph thunderstorm wind gust
5 ENE Choteau — 59 mph thunderstorm wind gust
Sunburst — 54 mph thunderstorm wind gust
Ennis — 59 mph thunderstorm wind gust
3 SSW Ennis — 52 mph thunderstorm wind gust
2 E Helena — 54 mph thunderstorm wind gust
19 E Swan Lake — 56 mph thunderstorm wind gust
2 NNW Yaak — thunderstorm wind damage – Multiple downed trees reported along Highway 2 between MM 3 and 8
3 WSW Blacktail — 53 mph thunderstorm wind gust
1 NNW Troy — 49 mph thunderstorm wind gust
5 ENE Choteau — 56 mph thunderstorm wind gust
Turah — 0.88″ hail
1 NNW Bigfork — 0.75″ hail
3 SW La Salle — 0.50″ hail
2 N Evergreen — 1.00″ hail
1 W Kalispell — 1.00″ hail
3 WNW Kalispell — 0.75″ hail
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LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — A man from Las Vegas has been sentenced after stealing coins and precious metals from a Helena shop in Montana.
This comes after Bishop Lott, 47, pleaded guilty in January to one count of interstate transportation of stolen property.
A judge sentenced Lott on Thursday to 27 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $276,153.08 in restitution to the Helena business as well as five other theft victims.
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The government alleged in court documents that Lott, along with Ricky Rynell Rose, broke into Wayne Miller Coins in Helena and stole nearly $59,000 in coins and precious metals from a Helena business.
Rose pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to 39 months in prison.
The Helena Police Department received a call on March 3, 2024, reporting that Wayne Miller Coins had been burglarized earlier that day.
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As part of their investigation, Helena police officers reviewed surveillance footage from multiple businesses. They analyzed email account data, which led them to Lott and Rose, who had taken the stolen material to Nevada.
Political spending that is funneled into elections from a variety of nonprofits is known as dark money — and unlike campaign spending or the money deployed by PACs and super PACs, these sources are not required to disclose their donors. Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which created the country’s current election spending landscape, this has ramped up dramatically, with the 2024 election seeing a record $1.9 billion in dark money spending, nearly double the $1 billion spent in 2020. Now, some campaign finance reformers think they’ve found a state-level reform that can rein in this spending.
Now, campaign finance reformers think they’ve found a solution, and it’s already in place in Hawaii.
A newly enacted corporate law, SB 2471, changes the powers that corporations, or other artificial persons like nonprofits, are granted by the state of Hawaii. In the United States, states grant artificial persons powers as part of an agreement that allows those artificial persons to operate in the state. SB 2471 works by changing the powers that Hawaii grants these entities to disallow them from spending on politics at all.
Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to Federal Election Commission commissioner Ellen Weintraub, told Salon that the law operates upstream of Citizens United by dealing with the powers granted to corporations and other artificial persons, rather than trying to regulate what they can and cannot do with those powers.
“Citizens United said, ‘Hey, if you’re a corporation that is empowered to spend in politics, your right to spend independently in politics can’t be infringed,’” Moore said. “Fine. What this [Hawaiian law] does is say, ‘You know, we’re not going to create that kind of corporation anymore. We’re going to create the kind of corporation that doesn’t have any political spending powers.’ Citizens United and all the other campaign finance cases that the courts have ever decided do not speak to that.”
In his analysis, Moore said this strategy also has a better chance of standing up to scrutiny from the Supreme Court because courts have long upheld a state’s ability to assign powers to corporations operating within their borders, going back hundreds of years.
“They’re gimmicks, and the Supreme Court is not usually impressed by gimmicks.”
“The Supreme Court has said for 200 years that the states can do whatever they want in terms of assigning powers to corporations. They made a fatal assumption in Citizens United that 100 years ago, when states gave away all the powers and said, ‘You can do anything that a human could do,’ they assumed that states would never change their mind on that,” Moore said. “But they never said the states couldn’t change their mind on that, and now they are.”
For example, a recent court ruling in Delaware allowed a change to a town charter that would allow corporations to vote there under some circumstances.
Moore believes that this Hawaiian law, and others like it in the works in other states, have a good chance of surviving at the Supreme Court. However, some critics disagree, saying this legal maneuver is likely to be struck down.
Brad Smith, the chairman and founder of the Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit that advocates against limits on political speech, including political spending, called the move an “end run” around Citizens United.
“They’re gimmicks, and the Supreme Court is not usually impressed by gimmicks. If you want to do it, you probably have to change the makeup of the Supreme Court or be willing to pack the court and have the political muscle to do it,” Smith said.
In his opinion, the court is likely to see Hawaii’s law as a violation of the First Amendment and is unlikely to look favorably on the argument that these laws deal with powers rather than with rights and that this has to do with how corporations have changed in the past 200 years.
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Smith explained that in the past, states used to create bespoke statutes for corporations to do something like operate a ferry or a toll bridge. These days, however, the laws governing corporations are more uniform.
“That’s just not how corporations operate in the modern world,” Smith said.
Smith added that he suspects the court will see this law as conditioning the creation of a corporation, or similar artificial person, on forfeiting the right of the people forming a corporation to political speech in the form of spending.
“You could not have the state say we’re going to allow you to register your home, but only if you agree that you won’t spend any money from your home equity line of credit on any kind of political activity,” Smith said. “You can’t deny people the benefits of the law based on a determination that they give up some type of constitutional rights.”
Notably, under Hawaii’s law, the people who form corporations are still allowed to engage in political spending; it’s just that the artificial person in question is disallowed. Still, Smith said, he believes the court will still see the law as unconstitutional.
What’s clear is that this new law, or one like it, will likely be headed to the Supreme Court and that’s because there are already other states where people are mobilizing to create similar laws.
Jeff Mangan, the founder and president of the Transparent Election Initiative, is already spearheading an effort to get a similar statute on the ballot in Montana in 2026, telling Salon that the group is only about 1,000 signatures away from meeting the petition requirements, with four weeks left.
“It’s an all-volunteer effort in Montana, we don’t have any paid signature gatherers, and it’s something that hasn’t been seen in a couple of decades here,” Mangan said.
While election finance reform is typically seen as a progressive issue, Mangan said that the initiative has been well-received by Montanans of all political leanings and that he’s optimistic that the measure will pass, though he’s expecting a significant political battle once the ballot measure is approved.
“We start with a very simple question: Do you believe there’s too much money in politics?” Mangan said. “Citizens will say ‘Yes,’ and they may not agree exactly what the solution is, but we can all agree that there’s too much money in politics.”
Mangan acknowledged that the law, if passed in Montana, would be limited in that it only addresses dark money, which is a relatively small portion of political spending. While 2024 saw nearly $2 billion in dark money spent, it saw some $15 billion in outside political spending, according to the election spending watchdog OpenSecrets. Still, Mangan said, he’s already had organizers in all 50 states reach out expressing interest in the project and in starting similar efforts in their home states.
The Montana measure has also already survived a legal challenge at the Montana Supreme Court, which makes organizers optimistic that the law will survive a federal challenge. The court ruled that the law was not an infringement of rights because the law “speaks only to powers, not rights, and it does not expressly revoke any constitutional rights.”
Still, Mangan expects that his group and the supporters of the measure will have to fight tooth and nail to get the bill passed via referendum if and when it appears on the ballot in November.
“It’ll certainly be a David versus Goliath battle. They’ve already started. The Chamber of Commerce and industry groups attempted to stop the initiative right at the beginning of the signature-gathering phase. They sued the state to stop us from gathering signatures. They were unsuccessful,” Mangan said. “We expect litigation at every step of the way through this, not to mention whatever political campaign they choose to throw at us, and I would imagine it’ll be expensive and immense. It almost makes our point. Exactly the reason we need the Montana plan is because of exactly what we’re seeing being thrown against us.”
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