by Dina Mishev
Our Lady of the Rockies
It’s hard to miss: 90 feet tall, white, and perched at 8,510 feet on the eastern ridge of Saddle Rock Peak overlooking Butte. Our Lady of the Rockies is the tallest statue of the Virgin Mary in North America and the fourth tallest in the world. Behind the Statue of Liberty (305 feet) and a statue of Pegasus killing a dragon (100 feet tall and in Hallandale, Florida), it’s the third tallest statue in the country.
Butte resident Bob O’Bill planned for a 5-foot statue of the Virgin Mary. In 1979, his wife, Joyce, was diagnosed with cancer, and, in a prayer, Bob promised the Virgin Mary he’d build a statue honoring her in his backyard if Joyce recovered. Joyce did recover and Bob began to think a backyard statue wasn’t enough.
From the backyard project, the statue grew to 120 feet high, but, per Federal Aviation Administration rules, anything over 90 feet tall needs an approved, blinking light on top of it. Not wanting to defile the Virgin with such a thing, the statue was shortened to 90 feet. If you think her head and arms look big compared to the rest of her, you’re right. They were scaled for a 120-foot-tall statue and were not resized for the shorter version. Each hand is 8 feet long and weighs 300 pounds. The statue is made of steel and its separate pieces were welded together by Leroy Lee.
Bob, who died in summer 2016 at age 83, worked with friends and the Butte community to make the statue happen on a shoestring budget. Nearly everything was donated. Bake, pasty, and rummage sales helped fund what wasn’t donated. Bob’s friend Joe Roberts donated the land at the top of East Ridge. Four hundred tons of concrete were donated for the base. A Nevada Air National Guard team lifted and set the pieces of the statue into place with a CHAR Sikorsky Sky Crane—Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger approved the mission, which was named “You Betcha Butte Mission.”
Today a foundation maintains the statue and you can visit it during the summer and early fall. Buses leave from the Our Lady of the Rockies gift shop in the Butte Plaza Mall. 3100 Harrison Ave., (406) 782-1221, www.ourladyoftherockies.org
National Historic Landmark
Other National Historic Landmarks in the country are larger by area, but none contain as many artifacts—buildings and structures—as the Butte-Anaconda Historic District. In total, the district’s 42.5 square miles have 6,013 historical artifacts in them. The area was designated a historic landmark not only for its significant copper production, but also for its role in the development of the country’s labor movement. Butte is known both as “the richest hill on Earth” and also the “Gibraltar of Unionism.”
As early as 1878, Butte miners created a union. The members of this union later went on to create the Western Federation of Miners, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It wasn’t easy. Martial law was declared in Butte at least a dozen times. Local labor leader Frank Little was dragged from his house and lynched.
Between 1880 and 2000, the Butte Hill produced 22.8 billion pounds of copper, almost 5 million pounds of zinc, 45.3 million pounds of silver, and 187,000 pounds of gold. Between 1870 and 1983, over 2,500 men died in mining accidents, including a 1917 fire that choked off the Granite Mountain shaft, trapping and killing 168 men a half-mile underground. To this day, that incident remains the deadliest accident in US hard rock–mining history. The Granite Mountain Memorial honors the men who died in the fire, and also those who survived. The memorial is very well interpreted and a visit there is quite moving. Listening to voice actors read the letters of men who died—most died later of asphyxiation rather than in the actual fire—I cried. (If you can’t make it to the memorial, the song “Rox in the Box” by the Decemberists is about the fire.)
By the 1890s, Butte was the largest city between the Mississippi River and the West Coast. Its population was almost 100,000 and there were sometimes 20,000 miners working in nearly 150 mines in the area. Recently, scientists at the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology verified a Butte urban legend: 10,000 miles of mine shafts lay beneath the city.
LOCAL LOWDOWN BOB MCMURRAY, Owner of Old Butte Historical Adventures
Bob McMurray didn’t care about history when he moved to Butte with his wife in 1994. “But Butte history is so unique,” he says. Now he runs Old Butte Historical Adventures, which helps restore historic sites and provides themed walking tours focused on different parts of the city’s history—from its architecture and underground life to its former red-light district. (406) 498-3424, www.buttetours.com
Q: What makes Butte’s history so unique?
BOB MCMURRAY: For decades, Butte was the center of power for Montana. Nothing happened in the state of Montana that didn’t go through Butte. So many people think Butte was just a rough town, but it was also a metropolitan city back in its day. This combination of cosmopolitan city plus two-fisted drinking town is what makes it so special.
Q: Can you talk about Butte’s cosmopolitan side?
BM: Butte had electrical lighting through the entire city in 1881. New York had electrical lighting in 1881, but the whole city didn’t get it until 1886. There were New York architects working in Butte. Cass Gilbert built the Metals Bank Building in Butte and is famous for designing New York’s Woolworth building and the US Supreme Court building.
Q: What about its two-fisted drinking side?
BM: In 2005, the Prohibition-era Rookwood Speakeasy was found in a boarded-up basement of a former hotel/boardinghouse. Even if you had made it down to the basement, [the entrance to the speakeasy] was hidden behind a mirror in a coat closet. The original idea was that it was hard to find.
Q: What was it like when it was found?
BM: The woodwork and everything that is in there is all original. All we did was clean up and make some minor repairs in the ceilings. We didn’t even paint in there. It’s all the original paint. There’s a hat, the gambling board, the red lamp sitting on top of the back bar. The floor is a 2.5-inch-thick, six-sided, hand-fitted terrazzo marble floor.
Q: Can people check this speakeasy out?
BM: Not on their own. We [visit] it on our Underground Tour.
Q: What are other places people can only see on a tour?
BM: The former jail where Evel Knievel spent a night. When the federal government shut it down in 1971, they classified it as a dungeon. There’s another speakeasy too; hidden in a wall behind an underground barbershop. In 2009, I had a 93-year-old woman on the tour who, when she was a girl, was sent by her mom to find her dad at that barbershop. But she’d never found him there. She got very excited when I opened the hidden door. “Now I know where my dad was at!” she said.
Q: An underground barbershop?
BM: When it was a thriving city, Butte had blocks and blocks of businesses on a level below the streets.
Q: And did all of this underground stuff just disappear?
BM: As good as. The underground level was sealed off in 1968 when a flash fire ran through it. The city put steel panels over doors and windows and filled it all in with dirt. It was sealed until 2004 when some of the downtown sidewalks that had a level below them started falling in.
Q: How much stuff is hiding on this level?
BM: It’s hard to say. There are sections all over downtown, but most are filled in. Between Broadway and Granite on one side of the street, probably maybe one-quarter of that distance is still intact underneath.
Q: What else is hiding around Butte?
BM: From my understanding, there were some buildings that burnt down years and years ago that shared a three-level subbasement for parking cars. After the fire, supposedly they capped the basement off, with the cars still down there. Butte has all kinds of stories like this. If they were true and we could find these things, it would be totally amazing.
Evidence of Butte’s diverse history can be seen in the mansions built by mine owners; the fourteen giant iron headframes, which stand directly above the old mine shafts and lowered miners, mules, and equipment as deep as 1 mile underground; crenellated brick buildings that were form
erly banks and offices; and dozens of simple miner’s houses. Many of the latter are covered in layers of soot and abandoned. Butte’s population began to decline as copper prices fell after World War I and has stabilized at about 34,000. Butte–Silver Bow Chamber of Commerce: 1000 George St., (800) 735-6814, www.buttecvb.com; National Historic District—butte-anacondanhld.blogspot.com/
Copper King Mansion
It took construction workers and artisans 4 years to construct William A. Clark’s thirty-four-room mansion in Uptown Butte. The Romanesque Revival Victorian home was ready in 1888. Other design features in the home include Tiffany stained glass windows, fresco-painted ceilings, hand-carved staircases and fireplaces (the bird’s-eye maple fireplace in Clark’s former bedroom is especially amazing), and parquet wood floors.
Clark made his fortune in banking before going on to own newspapers, a railroad, mines, smelters, an electric company, a sugar company, and oil wells. He also served one term as a US senator from Montana (1901–1907). The city of Las Vegas was built on ranchland he once owned in Nevada; Nevada’s Clark County is named for him. Clark died in 1925. His last surviving child, Huguette Clark, died only in 2011, at the age of 104. She was a recluse with no kids and a $400 million fortune.
The Cote family has owned Copper King Mansion since 1953. Today they rent several rooms out as the Copper King Mansion Bed & Breakfast. Though Huguette never lived in her father’s Butte home, one of the rooms available to rent is named for her and decorated in the style of a young woman. The mansion is open for guided tours daily from May 1 through September 30. (Tours are available by advance reservation other times of the year.) It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. 219 W. Granite, (406) 782-7580, www.copperkingmansion.com
Pasties
During its mining heyday, Butte was home to thousands of immigrants from Ireland, England, Italy, Wales, Lebanon, Canada, Finland, Austria, China, Mexico, and Croatia, among other countries. All of these cultures brought their own foods with them. Butte once had a bustling Chinatown stuffed with noodle parlors, but today the pasty—a savory pastry stuffed with meat, potatoes, and onions—of Cornish and Welsh immigrants is still going strong. It’s the simple heartiness of a pasty that most closely identifies with Butte’s character. At Joe’s Pasty Shop, they use the same recipe that Joe Novack used when he opened in 1947.
Other miners saw the convenience of the Cornish and Welsh miners’ lunches of meat pies and they caught on, albeit with some variations. Finnish miners stuffed their pasties with rutabaga.
Pasties are the size and weight of a brick, but it’s still more difficult to pronounce “pasty” than it is to eat one. It’s “PASS-tee” not “PASTE-tee.” Joe’s—and pretty much every other place around town that serves them—gives you the option of topping your pasty with gravy or not, but, since you don’t need to worry about packing yours neatly in a lunch pail like miners did, it really isn’t a choice: go for the gravy. 1641 Grand Ave., (406) 723-9071
World Museum of Mining
The World Museum of Mining might be Montana’s most interesting museum. You can travel in a steel cage 65 feet down into the earth, wander through a re-creation of an 1890s mining town in which buildings are stocked with thousands of period artifacts, admire a mineral collection with hundreds of specimens, and marvel at the level of detail in twenty dollhouses—all in the same visit!
Don’t think that dollhouses and forty bisque porcelain dolls belong in a mining museum? The original owner of the collection, Samie Jane Keith, was a volunteer at the museum from its opening in 1963 until just before her death. In her will, she donated her collections to the museum. In addition to the buildings themselves, each house is stocked with hundreds of miniatures—look closely and you might see miniature cookbooks, dishes, and silverware. (A side note: At the time of her death in 2005, Samie was the longest continuous resident of nearby Ramsay; she moved there in 1937.) The oldest dollhouse in her collection dates from 1943. Some of them are modeled after real structures in Philipsburg, Montana.
The trip down 65 feet into the Orphan Girl Mine, a former working mine that is actually 2,700 feet deep, is as cool as you imagine. And it should not be attempted if you’re claustrophobic.
Like the dollhouse collection, the museum’s mineral display is the work of a Butte local, Roy Garrett. Roy’s first mining job was in the Orphan Girl and he worked in the city’s mines for 40 years. Among the specimens that come from around the world are copper, stibnite, malachite, and blue vitriol. The minerals in one display case glow under a black light. 155 Museum Way, (406) 723-7211, miningmuseum.org
The Berkeley Pit
I’ve read that Butte’s Berkeley Pit is “one of the only places in the world where you can pay to see toxic waste.” I find it hard to believe that there’s anywhere else in the world that has made toxic waste a tourist attraction. But that’s part of what makes Butte awesome. It takes what it has and makes the best of it. For $2, you can access this Superfund site’s viewing platform and peer down into the 1,780-foot-deep pit half-filled with water as acidic as lemon juice and laden with heavy metals like arsenic and sulfuric acid.
As crazy as this sounds, it’s worth $2 to see the Berkeley Pit. Depending on the light, the “lake” looks like a bottomless black abyss or ruddy and red, with lime-green undertones. The red and green colors are from iron/manganese and copper in the water. The 700-acre lake is 1 mile by ½ mile; the sides of the pit are tiered and the range of colors in the different layers is beautiful—even reminiscent of the Grand Canyon—until you remember they’re part of a Superfund site.
Active from 1955 until 1982, the Berkeley Pit produced enough copper to pave a four-lane highway 2 inches thick between Chicago and Long Island (or a four-lane highway 4 inches thick between Butte and Provo, Utah). Silver and gold were also extracted. Scientists are now studying fungal and bacterial species that have evolved to live in the toxic water. Compounds isolated from the few organisms that can live in the pit have shown an ability to kill cancer cell lines.
Things in the pit’s water might kill cancer; they definitely kill geese. A flock of snow geese landed on the lake in 1995 and overnighted on the water. More than 300 were found dead the next morning. That was the lake’s deadliest night until 2016 when as many as 10,000 geese landed on the lake. The death toll release stated that “thousands died.” After the 1995 incident, pit officials installed anti-goose technology, but it was all to no avail in 2016. The birds were unfazed by wailers, fireworks, and rifles fired in their direction. The pit’s “Goosinator,” a large, orange, remote-controlled boat meant to scare birds, was dispatched. The weather was so cold its batteries quickly died.
There is a federal law protecting migratory birds that allows for fines up to $5,000 for each dead bird. British Petroleum and Montana Resources now share responsibility for the pit. 300 Continental Dr., (406) 723-7060, pitwatch.org
MARCUS DALY STATUE
Marcus Daly is the only one of Butte’s three “Copper Kings” (Frederick Augustus Heinze and William A. Clark were the other two) to have been immortalized in a sculpture on display in the city. The Daly sculpture is also remarkable for being the last piece completed by artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens before his death in 1907. There are not many pieces of St. Gaudens’s work in the West, but on the East Coast, he did the Sherman Monument in New York, the Adams Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Shaw Memorial in Boston. St. Gaudens also designed the $20 “double eagle” gold piece and the $10 “Indian Head” gold eagle. Daniel Hennessy, founder of the department store chain Hennessy’s, which Daly was a financial backer of, financed much of the Butte sculpture. The statue was initially on Main Street in front of the Federal Building, but was moved to its present location at the entrance to Montana Tech in 1941.
ROAD TRIP 2 BOZEMAN
Undeniably the hippest of any community around Yellowstone, Bozeman is a college town set at the edge of Animal Planet and populated by uber athletes who make scaling frozen waterfa
lls look easy. In Bozeman, you can get killer cold-brewed coffee, browse a museum affiliated with the Smithsonian, and hike to the top of a 10,000+-foot mountain all in the same day. Montanans who live outside of Bozeman call the city the “Bozone” and joke that it’s “20 minutes from Montana.” Everyone else calls it pretty much perfect.
LOCAL LOWDOWN
JOE JOSEPHSON, Ice Climber
Born in Big Timber, 60 miles east of Bozeman on the interstate, Joe Josephson has mostly lived in Bozeman since 1998. Before that, the talented and avid ice climber spent about a decade living and climbing in Calgary, putting up many first ascents during his time there.
Joe has had a couple of short stints living elsewhere in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: in Livingston (page 49) and in a yurt in Kelly (page 93). He’s had the greatest impact in Bozeman though. He’s been the director of the Bozeman Ice Festival since 2006; authored the most comprehensive guidebook for ice climbing in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Winter Dance); founded the 501(c)(3) advocacy group Friends of Hyalite, of which he’s still the executive director; has worked with ranchers in the Paradise Valley to make wildlife-friendly fences; and is a conservation coordinator for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Q: You’ve lived in a couple different gateway communities to Yellowstone. How do they compare?
JOE JOSEPHSON: I don’t think I know others well enough to compare them, but I know they’re all quirky in their own ways. I’ve also observed over the years that the idea of a gateway community has changed. When I was growing up, it was Gardiner, West Yellowstone, Cooke City, and that was about it. You kind of thought maybe Red Lodge, and maybe Cody and maybe Jackson, but not really. They weren’t like the towns that were right at one of the park’s gates. Now though, the idea of a gateway is much broader. I think it’s fair to call Bozeman a gateway to Yellowstone now.
