OF PASTIES, PROSTITUTES AND POLITICIANS

I blame it all on my son. I really didn’t want to go. My son Dan extolled the virtues of Butte Montana, told me about the beautiful buildings, that certain je ne sais quoi that makes Butte…..well…Butte. But I’m afraid I had already decided Butte was just not my kind of place from the views of Butte from Interstate 90.

All I could see from I-90 was the open pit mines looming over the town and the dozens of enormous ‘headframes’ over the mine shafts winding in and around both the commercial Uptown and the residential areas of Butte. In the end, we needed to meet somewhere to exchange things we left at each other’s homes, his in Missoula and mine in the Park. I finally agreed that Butte seemed like the ideal spot to meet.

We couldn’t meet until lunch time so we decided we might want to eat lunch at an ‘authentic’ pasty restaurant, Joe’s Pasty Shop. Pasties (past-ees) are an ethnic food item brought over to Butte, Montana by Cornish miners. Pasties are a meal in your palm, a closed pastry stuffed with beef, potato, onion and sometimes other vegetables. We ordered a traditional beef pasty and a Southwest version with chili poured over the pasty, garnished with shredded cheese. The pasty doesn’t have gravy in them because that would make the pastry dough gooey and the pasty won’t hold up in your pocket – the traditional way the miners took their lunches with them into the mines. Can’t say I will ever become as fond of pasties as…oh….maybe fresh wild salmon filet with lemon and butter but I can appreciate their utility.

Mining has been Butte’s major occupation since gold was discovered in Silver Creek in 1864.  But by 1870, the placer mining gave out and Butte’s population dwindled to 25% of what it had been. In 1875, the boom cycle started again as Butte’s first silver ore was discovered. By the end of the 19^th century, copper, in high demand, had been begun to be mined in Butte and its surrounding areas and Butte became known as the richest hill on earth. Butte has had several boom and bust cycles since then but the population stabilized at around 30,000 people in the 1980s and it remains the 5^th largest city in Montana today.

The cultural diversity of Butte is one of its charms. The Irish, beginning their mass immigration to the United States during the Potato Famine of the 1840s, turned their attention 20 years later to Butte and its high-paying although dangerous mining jobs. Miners came from other areas with a mining industry; Cornish, Welch, Canadan, Montenegrin and even Chinese flocked to booming Butte.

From the Interstate you can see beautiful architecture up the hill, memorials of the boom years in Butte, but Butte is not a ‘pretty town’. One of its major attractions is the Berkeley Pit, an exhausted open-pit copper mine about a mile wide and nearly 1/3^rd of a mile deep. Its water is highly toxic. In 1995 a flock of snow geese landed on the ‘lake’ and 342 geese died within minutes from the lethal combination of copper, cadmium and arsenic. I find that weirdly fascinating.

I have to admit, after Dan and my Saturday of sight-seeing around town, I generally find Butte fascinating indeed. The combination of its ethnic richness, labor union history, staunch Irish Nationalist support, its ‘boomtown’ laissez faire businesses like its brothels and gaming houses, and its extravagant architecture from the boom days, leaves one with quite a menu of things to see and do.  After lunch at Joe’s (Adam Richman of the Travel Channel’s Man vrs Food ate there!), Dan and I chose the Pit (because, Dan says, everyone goes there), a delightful but somewhat spooky visit to the Dumas Brothel Museum, and a docent-lead tour of the Copper King Mansion way Uptown. We also took a walk around Uptown where we viewed many of the best preserved and beautiful buildings of Butte’s prosperous past, including a synagogue with an onion-shaped dome, possibly arising from the Russian heritage of its earliest members.

In 1888, during one of Butte’s boom cycles, two French Canadian immigrants built the 3-story Dumas Brothel, even hiring an architect to design it purposefully as a luxury brothel. The Dumas was one of the West’s most elaborate brothels in its heyday. Now it is a decrepit wreck with squishy floors and tattered wall paper. It was built with a 2-story skylighted atrium in the area of the ladies’ rooms, very unusual for the times.  Each room has both a door and a window – where the women would stand much like store mannequins. The men would stroll down the halls ‘window shopping’ for their favorite. (The volunteer at the Dumas says this is the derivation of the phrase ‘window shopping’ - kind of killed what little shopping enjoyment I really have.)

The women who went to West had very few opportunities for wage-earning in the non-industrialized West. Brothels were an option but once taken, society’s disdain of this occupation marginalized women, whose opportunities were very limited and low-paying, even more. In boom towns like Butte, hundreds of women became prostitutes, some living in single-room ‘cribs’ behind the brothels and bawdy houses along Mercury Street.

The women of the Dumas Brothel would have lived in relative luxury compared to their sisters living in their cribs in the alleys and on vacant land. The cash-strapped fans and friends of the Dumas Brothel Museum have been very clever in their use of materials they could find to represent the grandeur of the best brothel in Butte.

Although clearly needing restoration, you can get a real feel for just how luxurious the brothel must have been in its heyday. On the main floor, pocket doors between the rooms could be opened to make room for elaborate parties. The basement has much smaller rooms (cribs) where less important customers, and less prosperous prostitutes, might be entertained and ‘entertain;. The top floor, although not as spacious as the main floor, also was designed with generous rooms for entertaining with its rooms around the outside of the structure and a neweled balcony over which the ladies could entice their customers.

The Dumas has a reputation for active paranormal activity, including the ghost of one of the Madams who allegedly committed suicide over losing her lover and patron. A portrait of someone that might be her sets on an easel in the room that had been hers.  A portrait artist once rented rooms in the Dumas and was trying to paint an entirely different portrait when he said he felt ‘compelled’ to paint the portrait of the Madam. Eventually, not wanting to be forced by a ghost to paint a portrait he did not want to finish, he tossed the portrait away and left the building not to return. Later the portrait was found and became part of the lore of the Dumas. I can’t say I necessarily felt the ghosts of the women who lived in the Dumas, some of whom no doubt had very sad lives and perhaps even tragic endings. However, the docent at Copper King Mansion said she had been asked to be a docent there but the hair-pulling and shoving by the Dumas ghosts creeped her out. Well, there you go.

The Dumas went into business in 1888 and continued until 1982 when it was finally shut down by Butte’s last Madam. It is now operated as a museum honoring the contributions of the Soiled Doves of Dumas. As a woman, I was struck by the difficulty the current owners have in obtaining grants and donations for the Brothel’s restoration. I was also mindful that few museums exist to honor entire groups of working women – whether they were seamstresses, or dancehall girls or prostitutes. As it is often said, history is always written by the victors who almost always are male.

Which brings me to the next historic structure we visited, The Copper King Mansion. You have to understand just how rich William Andrew Clark was. The 34-room mansion he built in Butte, now the private residence and B&B for the Cote family, cost a half-million dollars, a lot of money in 1888, but only a half-day’s income for Clark.

Clark had been born to farmers, but had attended college and then law school. He taught school for awhile but soon left for the West with a small grubstake in Central City, Colorado. He was a visionary and recognized the untapped riches of the West.  After hearing about the gold strike in Bannack, he headed to Montana. After working his claim for awhile, he realized he was better suited for managing miner’s mines than working them himself. He began to buy up claims and eventually became one of the wealthiest men in America. Someone once claimed that whenever Clark let go of a dollar bill, it came back to him with another stuck to it.

Clark was a striking man with a full, bushy beard, dark hair and piercing eyes. He married his childhood sweetheart, had children, was widowed, married again, had more children-all while making boatloads of money in mining and banking. He even financed his own railroad to serve Butte’s mines. He and the other Butte Copper King, Marcus Daly, took turns trying to outdo each other with good works. Clark’s philanthropic works included building the popular 64-acre Columbia Gardens and amusement park for Butte’s citizens. This Columbia Gardens is now somewhere in a slag heap, demolished for another open pit mine.

The house he built reflects Clark’s need to show off his wealth. If something was new, flashy and bound to show off his abundant wealth, he bought it.  Money was spent on plaster cast banners along the chair rails of the first floor rooms, then painted to look like gold, copper, bronze and silver. He also installed elaborate Tiffany chandeliers using both carbide gas and electric power. Hand-painted frescoes decorated the ceilings. Rare wood parquet was used for the floors.  The toilets, showers and tubs were the absolutely most modern available.  He put the ballroom, a room he had little use for, on the third floor of his mansion. And all of this has been lovingly restored by its current owners.

 

Being the richest man in America wasn’t enough for Clark. He aspired to enter politics and become a Montana US Senator. His first run for public office was unsuccessful.  He then succeeded in buying a US Senate seat. At the time, Montana’s legislature chose the US Senator. The second time the seat came vacant, Clark stood outside the Montana legislature, handing wads of cash to any legislator willing to promise him a vote, literally buying his Senate seat. This scandalous way of acquiring votes was just too much for the US Senate which refused to seat Clark. The next election, Clark won fair and square (well probably not exactly), partially due to the backlash of not seating Clark and a certain anti-federal sentiment that still exists in Butte today. After all that work and cash, Clark served rather unremarkably a single, undistinguished term from 1901 until 1907.

 

Eventually, Clark moved away to New York. The mansion was sold a few times before being acquired by the Cote family, which still owns and operates the home today.  Four generations of Cotes have devoted themselves to keeping the mansion, and other parts of Butte’s past, historically accurate. Over the years, the Cotes have accepted donations from other buildings that have been demolished to make way for mining and have accumulated many interesting artifacts of Butte’s boom times.  That beautiful ballroom? It is now a haphazard repository of Butte's rich history, including beautiful Victorian clothing, a full pipe-organ from a church demolished to make way for a open pit mine, a working Victrola, and a host of vestments and bibles from Catholic churches abandoned when ore was discovered under their altars. Guests can stay in the luxurious master suite for only $125 per night which, coming from the Park, seems like a very good price indeed.

 

Bottom line, a surprising amount of vivid history is available to enjoy in Butte.  The Copper King’s Mansion is well worth the $7.50 entry fee. You get to tour the beautifully kept rooms, the servant’s quarters, the kitchen, the ballroom – all the while being entertained by youthful docents who really know their Clark history.  The $5 fee to visit the Dumas was also well worth it, although the visit comes with a warning that you proceed at your own risk.  That’s actually kind of fun, I think. The women who lived in the brothel had their own demons and dangers. I think it brings you just a bit closer to the 'soiled sisters' of the Dumas.

 

We ended our Butte visit at Butte’s only distillery, the Headframe. Butte has an amazing array of drinking establishments, I must say. If Irish bars are more your tune, there are plenty of those as well. If microbrews are your passion, you can find several microbreweries in Butte.

 

If you would like to read more about the Dumas Brothel, here’s the link - http://www.thedumasbrothel.com.  Some very good scholarly work has been done on prostitution and the civilization of the West. Daughters of Joy; Sisters of Misery by Anne Butler and Soiled Doves by Anne Seagraves offers well-researched accounts of this. If you would like more information on the Copper King Mansion and B&B, here’s the link http://www.thecopperkingmansion.com .

 

My opinion now that I have actually visited Butte?  Butte is definitely worth the stop. Now, I've said it. My son was right.