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.