Christmas in Butte 1876

Butte was still a crude mining camp built around mining claims at Christmas in 1876. It was customary to salute the dawn of Christmas Day with firecrackers, tying them in packages and hanging them on the telegraph poles. In the aftermath, Park Street and Broadway were littered with bits of paper from the explosions. Then on Christmas night, families gathered at Loeber Hall on Broadway. A play had been presented weeks before raising $170 to pay for the party. The tree was brilliantly lit with candles and a committee of ladies had spared no expense in its decoration. But, according to the Butte Miner, some “croakers” complained that the base of the tree was left unfinished, and it would have been better had the ladies added some moss or other decoration.

Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, 1876, offered suggestions for tree decorating
 and included this engraving to illustrate.

All agreed, however, that the tree was spectacular. The ladies carefully chose gifts for each of the children sparing no expense. Some community members also sent gifts. All were hung on the tree as was the custom. Stockings made out of mosquito netting were filled with apples—a rare and a very special treat—along with popcorn, candies, and nuts for all children ages two to thirteen. Young ladies who had reached the age of 14 had reason to wish they were children again, reported the Miner.

William Porter played St. Nicholas, dressed in a buffalo overcoat, buffalo shoes, and a buffalo cap with long white whiskers and jingling bells. He distributed the gifts, but unfortunately, not all the gifts went to those for whom they were intended. Some of the gifts were taken off the tree by persons unknown before St. Nick could hand them out. This caused some hard feelings, and a dance planned for parents and friends unfortunately never materialized. Children, however, were unaware of others’ bad behavior and went to bed happy as Christmas 1876 passed to become a pleasant memory. 

The Pekin Noodle Parlor: Not a Brothel!

Butte’s Chinese community settled on the block bordered by West Mercury, South Main, West Galena, and Colorado streets in the late nineteenth century. Dwellings, club rooms, laundries, restaurants, and stores selling Chinese goods crowded its thoroughfares and alleyways. Butte attorney F. T. McBride built the Pekin Noodle Parlor building at 117 South Main on speculation in 1909. Hum Yow moved his Mercury Street noodle parlor to the second floor of the new building and soon owned the property.

Upstairs noodle parlors were common in urban Chinese communities, and the Pekin’s central stair and neon sign has long beckoned both Asian and Euro-American customers. Close proximity to Butte’s once-teeming red light district has long fueled local legends about the Pekin. Online reviews of the restaurant unfortunately label it a former brothel because of its seventeen curtained booths. However, these booths were a fixture in Asian restaurants across the West and simply offered diners privacy. Hum Yow’s Chinese Goods and Silks and G. P. Meinhart’s sign painting business originally occupied the two storefronts. A gambling casino operated in the basement from the 1910s to the 1950s. It was a business and family home and never housed prostitution.

For more than a century, the curtained booths in the Pekin Noodle Parlor
have provided private dining and nothing more.

Hum Yow and his wife Bessie Wong—both California-born first-generation Chinese—raised three children in the family living quarters in the building and housed immigrant lodgers as well. While it is true that the building has a basement entrance to Butte’s underground tunnel system, these tunnels were designed to provide steam heat to downtown buildings and are not what many call “Chinese tunnels.”  Butte’s tunnels sometimes provided a means of delivery for food and messages as well as steam heat, but they were not built by the Chinese nor were they exclusively used by them. (Read more about mythical “Chinese tunnels.”)

Butte's Pekin Noodle Parlor is Montana's oldest Chinese restaurant still operated by the same family.
(1979 HABS/HAER photo by Jet Lowe, Library of Congress.)

The Hums retired to California in 1952 and several more generations of the family have maintained this landmark business. It is Montana’s oldest family-operated Chinese restaurant.

Friday Photo: Cousin Jack Race Horses

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.072

The description included with this stereograph states that: "A Cousin Jack is a person from Cornwall." Perhaps this is insight into the humor that photographer N. A. Forsyth intended in his caption. He took the photo in Butte between 1901 and 1911.

Butte’s Famous Female Impersonators

New York City’s Eltinge Theatre on 42nd Street opened amid much fanfare in 1912. Its history includes some interesting ties to Butte. It was named for Julian Eltinge, America’s first famous female impersonator. Eltinge, whose real name was William Dalton, spent much of his youth in Butte in the 1890s. When he began his stage career in 1904, Dalton took Julian Eltinge as his stage name. The Eltinges were neighbors of the Daltons in Butte, and Charles Eltinge was Dalton's boyhood friend.

Via Wikipedia

During Dalton’s youth in Butte, friends recalled that he possessed a good pair of fists and was not shy about using them. Those who knew him as a youngster would never have guessed the direction his career would take. Women adored him for his wardrobe, and his performances sent men “to the smoking room.” At the height of his international career, Julian Eltinge was one of the highest paid performers in the business. In 1907, he gave a performance for England’s King Edward VII. He also starred in silent movies. Eltinge returned to Butte to perform several times throughout his career, perhaps most notably to capacity audiences in the mid-1920s, recreating his dual male/female role in The Fascinating Widow. Poet Dorothy Parker coined the term “ambi-sextrous” in referring to Julian Eltinge. His career faded in the 1930s when a crackdown on cross dressing prevented appearances in costume.  He died in New York in 1941.

Via Wikipedia

Mansel Boyle, who also had ties to Butte, was a popular female impersonator and a contemporary of Julian Eltinge. Boyle was working at a Butte liquor store when he got his start in 1902 with the Overland Minstrels, an amateur theatrical company. Boyle left Butte to find success in the business. Critics claimed that Boyle, under the stage name M. Vardaman, was “the cleverest impersonator ever seen on the stage.” Coincidentally, Boyle later was the manager of the Eltinge Theatre.

In 1998, the long-closed Eltinge Theatre was moved 170 feet down 42nd Street to form the façade and lobby of the new multiplex AMC Empire Theatre.

Holy Trinity Orthodox Christian Church

Butte was home to a large population of Serbian immigrants who came from the area at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe in what was formerly eastern Yugoslavia. Thirty-five families attended the first Serbian Orthodox services, conducted by a visiting Orthodox priest in 1897. They built the first Holy Trinity Orthodox Church at Porphyry and Idaho streets in 1905. Archbishop Tikhon of Moscow, who headed the Orthodox Church in the United States, came to Butte form New York City to dedicate the church in 1906. According to Richard Gibson, author of Lost Butte, Montana, it was the second Serbian Orthodox church built in North America. By 1910, Butte’s Serbian population numbered more than four thousand and eventually grew to ten thousand.
By the 1950s, shallow underground operations of the nearby Emma Mine had begun to harm the church, and the Hebgen Lake earthquakes in 1959 caused further structural damage. The church was razed in 1964 and a new one built at 2100 Continental Drive.  The new church was consecrated on July 25, 1965. The architecture is modern yet traditional. Its three graceful onion domes are readily visible from the interstate. The church today is Pan Orthodox and proudly counts among its members many whose backgrounds reflect Butte’s multi-cultural community.

Holy Trinity Church is especially remarkable for the fabulous frescoes depicting the major Feast Days of salvation history that grace the interior. Stunning art covers literally every inch of the sanctuary. Six iconographers from Belgrade, Serbia worked a total of fourteen months from 2003 to 2006 to complete the colorful and intricate project. Iconographers are holy persons in God’s service who are not allowed personal expression in their artwork, but rather are expert theologians who convey the connection between heaven and earth in their painting.

In centuries past, when most people were illiterate, iconography served educational purposes as the Bible of the poor.  The magnificent frescoes at Holy Trinity preserve this visual tradition. They are breathtaking, inspiring, and well worth a visit next time you are in Butte.        
To see more photographs, visit www.holytrinitybutte.org.

The Christies Recall Some Butte Adventures

Longtime Butte residents Colin Leys Christie and his wife, the former Ruth Lindsay, reminisced on the occasion of their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary in 1972. Ruth was the daughter of Judge John Lindsay who came to Butte in 1895 as legal counsel to Marcus Daly. Lindsay was later one of Butte’s two district judges. Christie was the son of Alexander Christie, a partner in Leys Jewelry, a family business established in 1888. Colin Christie became a certified gemologist and was the manager at Leys. The Christies told reporters that the key to their successful marriage was a long engagement; theirs lasted four years. When they finally tied the knot in 1912 at the Lindsay home at 831 W. Granite, the famed hack driver Fat Jack delivered the bridegroom and his best man to the wedding.
Ruth and Colin had vivid recollections of childhood in Butte. Colin’s parents were Scotch and tight with their money, so he never had an allowance. When a fossilized mastodon was unearthed during the excavation of Hamilton Street, the construction company charged ten cents for a look at the skeleton. Colin didn’t have a dime, so he never got to see it. And Ruth remembered that the children had to wear scarves over their faces because of the heavy sulfur in the air, and horses wore bells to announce their approach.

This c. 1920s photograph of North Main in Butte shows Leys Jewelry in the lower right corner. The sign is still faintly visible on the side of the building. Photo courtesy Ghost Signs of Butte.

Christie’s uncle, James Leys, started the jewelry business in a log cabin and later moved to Main Street. When the Centennial Hotel burned, it prompted a third and final move to 20 N. Main. The business had its ups and downs. During Prohibition, bootlegging tenants rented rooms above the store and did $1,000 in damages. Then robbers drilled a hole in the floor and stole $2,000 worth of watches. And Christie recalled giving away two thousand white roses when the store remodeled after World War II. After a long business life, Leys closed when Christie retired in 1965.

Growing up in Butte

Butte, the mining camp that became an industrial hub, was as unique for its children as it was an anomaly. Copper king W. A. Clark’s Columbia Gardens, which boasted one of the nation’s first Ferris wheels and a spectacular roller coaster, was his gift to the community, and children especially loved it. Mining camp ruffians and children of prominent mine officials rubbed elbows on the streetcar that took them all to the gardens each week for Children’s Day. Children by the hundreds enjoyed the entertainment. At the end of the day, they would pick huge bouquets of pansies to take home to their mothers.

Children pick pansies in Columbia Gardens. Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.120

But it was not all fun and games. Butte boys who reached puberty and could chew a plug of Peerless tobacco without throwing up were considered man enough to work in the mines. In the 1930s, a sign on the fence around the red light district read “Men under 21 keep out,” acknowledgment that young boys in Butte became men long before they reached legal age. Of all the mining camps, Butte was probably the most dangerous place for youngsters. This made Butte’s children tough and unusually daring. They seemed to thrive in the polluted air and unsanitary conditions frequently noted in reports to the Board of Health.

When Maury Mulcahy was growing up in Butte in the 1930s and 1940s, mine officials came around to his elementary school and showed the kids what a blasting cap was, how to extract the explosive powder, and then warned them not to pick them up. After the lecture, every boy went out in search of caps. They would pour the powder into a bottle with a wick, put it on the train tracks, and try to explode it as a train passed by. Mulcahy knew children who lost limbs to this form of play. The extreme danger made the game that much more fun.

Friday Photo: Columbia Gardens Roller Coaster

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archvies, ST 001.135

Columbia Gardens in Butte boasted one of the nation’s first Ferris wheels as well as this spectacular roller coaster, built in 1906. Photo by N. A. Forsythe, circa 1906-1911.

Friday Photo: Night Owl

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 80-88 Box 1 F8

Emmet Burke (r.) and Ed Craney (l.) hosted the Night Owl program, an all-night Saturday night show on KGIR in Butte in the 1930s.

The Kontinental Klan

Prohibition’s failure had some consequences no one seemed to anticipate. Illegal moonshine flowed more freely than legal booze either before or after the nation went dry. Illegal traffic in liquor fostered criminal activity which led to organized crime. But another rather bizarre consequence was the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan across the Pacific Northwest. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan claimed a platform that claimed to be anti vice and corruption It was also pro patriotism in the wake of World War I. The Klan targeted blacks, Jews, Catholics, and foreign born people. In Montana, since there were very small African American and Jewish populations, the KKK targeted Catholics and foreign-born residents.
Montana’s leader, or Grand Dragon, was Lewis Terwilliger, a former mayor of Laurel. Terwilliger christened Butte the “worst place in the State of Montana” because of its cultural diversity and its many Catholics. Little wonder that Butte is where Montana’s first chapter organized in 1923. There were eventually some forty chapters in a number of Montana cities and towns during the depressed 1920s into the 1930s.
On September 10, 1925, Laurel residents were shocked to see a burning cross on a butte four miles west of the city. The Laurel Outlook reported that the fire lit up the night sky and "it looked like all the dragons, wizards, witches, ghosts—or whatever they are called—from all over the country had gathered there." Wearing their customary white flowing robes and peaked hoods, some 2500 members gathered on the butte. Fireworks announced the initiation of one hundred new members.
Nationally, the Klan organized in Georgia in 1915 retaining much of the dress, rules, and cross-burning of the original nineteenth century organization. In Montana and the Northwest, however, the Kontinental Klan, as it was called, was not as violent as its counterparts elsewhere. Prospective members had to be native born, white, Protestant, Gentile, and American citizens. Interestingly, many of Montana’s 5,000 members were women who belonged to separate women’s chapters of the Kontinental Klan.

Women of the Billings Ku Klux Klan  No. 7 gave this memorial marker in 1928. What is marked, however, is a mystery; only the stone remains. Courtesy of Harry Axline.

Friday Photo: Butte's Salvation Army

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 74-37

Men enjoy a meal at the Salvation Army in Butte during the Great Depression. The calendar appears to show April 1935.

Friday Photo: High Ore Mine

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.144

N.A. Forsyth captured this stereoview of workers coming off shift at Butte's High Ore Mine circa 1909. Click the photo for a bigger version.

P.S. The same photographer snapped this humorous photo of "miners."

Mules in the Mines

As electricity came to the mines in Butte in 1915, mules were phased out. Miners were sorry to see them go as they added so much personality to the dangerous work. Some mules loved the miners’ rough caresses and others would bite or kick and wanted no human attention. Hundreds of mules worked in miles of tunnels beneath Butte. Mules went below loaded vertically on the hoist, head down. Once there, they never again saw the light of day until they retired—if they were lucky. Now Kate–she was a kicker. No stall could be built around her that she wouldn’t destroy. She could kick any electric light hung within ten feet of her and when she needed new shoes, the blacksmith would not approach her until she was hog tied and strapped down. Then she would try to kick the shoes off, and sometimes did. Miners called her hind feet “sudden death” and “six months in the hospital,” respectively.

Mule Train on 1100 foot level, Rarus Mine, Butte. N. A. Forsyth, photographer.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.163

Everyone loved Babe, one of the smartest mules to ever work in Butte. Babe loved tobacco. If she saw a miner smoking a pipe during lunch, she would stand close so she could inhale the smoke. Babe was never bridled and took verbal directions. But she complained with looks and groans if asked to pull more than four ore cars in a string.  Sharkey was a thief who knew how to find the men’s lunch buckets. He would often sneak away and work the top off of some poor miner’s dinner pail. Every mule had its own personality and most had at least one miner who missed it when it went to mule heaven at the end of its long road.

Friday Photo: Butte's Christmas Tree

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Workers used mechanical assistance to decorate this tree outside the Butte courthouse circa 1917. Have you put your tree up yet?

P.S. Remember this homesteader's Charlie Brown tree?

Friday Photo: Columbia Gardens

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.113

A balloon floats above Butte's Columbia Gardens, circa 1900-1910. N.A. Forsyth took this stereoview along with lots of other photos of Butte. Do you remember the gardens?

P.S. Copper King William A. Clark built the gardens for his miners.

Sculpture Gardens

During the nineteenth century, there was a national movement to plan park-like cemeteries with curving driveways and landscaped grounds outside urban areas. The idea took hold in Montana. Our major cities have beautiful park-like cemeteries where turn-of-the-century residents went not only to visit graves but also to picnic and enjoy nature. Missoula’s City Cemetery, Kalispell’s Conrad Cemetery, and Billings's Mountview  are a few examples. Cemeteries were usually located out of town for aesthetic reasons, but planning cemeteries out of town in Butte was a necessity because of health and sanitation. Urban mining everywhere created ground disturbance, and early burials in city churchyards or on private property did not always remain underground. Bodies turned up in odd locations, and exposed burials, especially during epidemics, were a serious health hazard. Keenly aware of this grisly problem, fraternal organizations established Mount Moriah Cemetery in 1877. Rather than curving driveways, it was laid out in simple blocks since there was no landscape to accommodate curving driveways. As much as the community wanted a beautiful cemetery, in nineteenth-century Butte this was impossible. Open hearth smelting polluted the area and prevented anything from growing. The cemetery was bleak and ugly. Butte’s citizens, however, made up for the lack of landscaping by placing fanciful and lovely tombstones on their loved ones’ graves. Butte has the most unique and attractive cemetery art of any in Montana. The desire to create “a spot of beauty” was at first far-fetched. But by 1905, as smelting centralized in Anaconda, trees and shrubs did begin to grow. Today Mount Moriah and Butte’s other sculpture garden cemeteries rival any in Montana.

Mount Moriah has many beautiful sculpture tombstones like this tree stump, which symbolizes a life cut short.
Photo from Buried in Butte by Zena Beth McGlashan

Evolution of the Drug Store

Butte druggist C. B. Hoskins had been in the pharmacy business more than forty years when he reminisced in 1931. When he started in the business in 1883, he had to make his own mixtures, fluid extracts, pills, and emulsions. He had to know his ingredients and the effects they would bring. There were not so many items in the inventory, but the reactions they caused were very well understood.  Physicians carefully monitored their patients, and if the prescribed drug did not work, physicians blamed the pharmacist for not correctly mixing the doctor’s prescription.

Hoskins's drug store would have looked much like this one.
Courtesy Montana State University Libraries

A druggist usually had an apprentice who learned the trade under him. Druggists were responsible for all aspects of their apprentice’s education. Many highly skilled druggists never saw the inside of a school. Hoskins pointed out how things had changed. Fifty years ago, he recalled, druggists made all the pills. But by 1930, there were so many manufacturers that druggists had become only servers. The shelves were stocked with pills of all kinds, ready made. All you had to do was count them out, and the druggist, once paid for his knowledge of mixing, now made only a small service charge. Radio advertising created a demand for a number of things, and unlike printed advertising that carried responsibility for the product, radio advertising could say anything with no consequence. Hoskins went on to lament that the student of today who went to pharmacy school learned all kinds of chemistry that really didn't help him in the job. He should be learning other skills, he said, like stocking notions, selling hardware, and making ham sandwiches.

Butte's House of Mystery

The Montana Standard of September 2, 1936, reported on the demolition of a mysterious building on the corner of Galena and Wyoming in the heart of Butte’s historic red light district.

 1916  Sanborn-Perris map of Butte shows the House of Mystery on the corner of Galena and Wyoming. Note the label “Female Boarding” on neighboring buildings denoting prostitution.

The long-abandoned building had been slated for demolition before, but the owner had always managed to avoid it. This, time, however, the public eyesore was coming down. As WPA workers began to gut the interior, they discovered the secrets it had long disguised. From the street it appeared to be a two story structure with street entrances to a dozen cribs—tiny offices where the women of the neighborhood had once plied their trade. In one of the crib windows, a display of women’s underwear lay in a pile, its fabric rotting and threadbare. But deeper within the building, workers discovered a three-story maze of hallways that criss-crossed each other, hidden passageways, false floors, tiny closets, and trick wiring. Electrical wires passed through the closets in such a way that the lights could be stealthily switched off from inside. Why would someone need to suddenly and clandestinely throw the building into darkness? When workmen pulled up the flooring with their crowbars, they exposed another dark secret in the basement: a buried room dug out of the bedrock with three filthy beds where someone, at some point in time, had obviously hidden. On one of these beds lay a faded photograph, taken by an Oakland, California, photographer, of two young Chinese boys, one dressed in a traditional embroidered tunic and trousers, the other boy in early nineteenth century American dress. Tunnels from this dugout room ran beneath Wyoming and Galena streets, but bedrock stopped both midway. Today a parking lot sits on this corner, and while the house is long gone, its mystery lingers in the tall tales of Butte.

Auditor

Butte’s Berkeley Pit is as poisonous as battery acid. An entire flock of snow geese mistakenly landed on its surface in 1995 and died before they could take flight. But for one lonely matted, mangy canine, the pit’s acrid, crusted shores were home for seventeen lonely years. No one knows where the dog came from. The handful of miners working at Montana Resources, Butte’s only active mining company, named him Auditor because they could never predict when he would show up. He was not a friendly dog, shunning the humans who tried to love him. Miners left him food and water, built a doghouse shanty, and fixed him a bed. He only settled there at night occasionally.

Courtesy Travels with Ace

Auditor’s long, tangled dreadlocks made him look like a moving pile of rags. While the dreadlocks perhaps hinted at his lineage, they likely kept him warm in brutal weather. As he grew old, miners mixed baby aspirin in his food to ease arthritis. One miner once earned enough trust to clip the hair from Auditor’s eyes so that he could see. Miners say that beneath his dreadlocks, he had beautiful eyes. Auditor roamed the wasteland, living where no other living thing could. How the pads of his feet could escape burning from the acid of his habitat defies explanation. In the end, Auditor died peacefully in his shanty in 2003. He was 120 in dog years.

P.S. Remember this heartwarming cattle dog?
P.P.S. Today is Evelyn Cameron's birthday.

Kirby Grant

Here’s a bit of Montana trivia. Kirby Grant Hoon Jr., who used the stage name Kirby Grant, starred in the 1950s television series Sky King. Remember that? He was born in Butte in 1911 and grew up in Helena where his father, Kirby Grant Hoon Sr., was postmaster. Kirby Jr. was a 1929 graduate of Helena High School. In the series, he played wealthy Arizona rancher Schuyler King, nicknamed “Sky,” who fought bad guys and rescued people with his airplane. His niece Penny, who lived with him on the Flying Crown Ranch, was his sidekick on these adventures. Kirby was a pilot in real life and learned to fly the airplanes in the series. Early television demanded simultaneous filming of multiple episodes, and so Sky wore the same clothes on every show. File footage, especially of the plane flying, was often used numerous times, and sometimes the film would be reversed so that the plane appeared to fly in the opposite direction. On these occasions, observant fans could notice that the numbers on the aircraft would be backwards. Seventy-two episodes aired on ABC in 1953 and 1954. CBS later rebroadcast the series.

Kirby Grant (left) with Gloria Winters and Ron Hagerthy. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Kirby Grant did little acting after Sky King. He and his wife founded a ranch for orphaned or abandoned children, and he was often honored at aviation events. On October 30, 1985, Kirby died in a traffic accident in Florida en route to the last successful launching of the space shuttle Challenger. Astronauts had planned to honor the Montana native for his encouragement of aviation and space flight.