Butte is ugly, the pamphlets and websites said. Ugly from the days of metal mining, from the reign of Montana’s Copper Kings. Lead-stained ground, air-blown arsenic, metals in the soil. Dingy bars, inedible food. Typical conditions, they say, for mining towns: dust-covered laundry, denuded hillsides pockmarked with holes and decked with structures that resemble gallows but are actually the wooden headframes from which miners descended underground. A river shining with what’s been unearthed. Un-earthed as in unearthly, something taken from its natural state and turned uncanny.
Uncanny, unearthly, ugly. Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton strikebreaker-turned-writer, modeled the fictional town of Poisonville on Butte, calling it an “ugly city of forty thousand people set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” Even today, the first thing you see, driving into town along a strip lined with gas stations, diners and casinos, is the great shorn hill that leads to the Berkeley Pit, a defunct copper mine and a site of pilgrimage, the uncanniest monument of all.
It looked, to me, like mountaintop removal coal mining: a place with the face of the earth scraped off. I’ve lived and worked in and out of mining towns, as a student, a nonprofit worker and then as a reporter, ever since I moved to Central Appalachia in 2014. Between the workers-camp architecture of the town’s low-slung houses and all the holes in the ground, Butte, even though located in in another, much taller glacial mountain range, was still familiar.
I was unemployed, which, despite my lack of consistent income, I cherished for the time it gave back to me. I was in Montana for a writing residency in a house up on the hill in the neighborhood of Walkerville, high above the rest of Butte. I didn’t get much writing done; I was too busy walking in and around the city’s dramatically sloping roads of pressed dirt and pitted asphalt. A little out of breath: The city is a mile high, and, as signs throughout town proudly declared, a mile deep. The red brick of the buildings rises against the backdrop of blue snowcapped mountains in springtime, and distant snowstorms move over the ridges, bringing a chill wind with them.
Even viewed from the top, the Pit is breathtaking in its dissonance with the piney mountainsides, striated in bright red much like a canyon of the Southwestern desert.
I saw, on my walks, the many holes: the Alice Mine, still concave but reclaimed by grass, with its own memorial plaque, at the top of Walkerville, with a breathtaking view of the mountains. And, yes, the Berkeley Pit. I walked in the footsteps of a decade-old essay, “The Pit,” by Montana writer Nathaniel Miller, a poet of the Pit, up to the mouth of the great hole. The writer, perhaps in a balmier season, had traveled all the way to the convergence point, the center of the Pit from which regular life- and earth-forms that make sense are totally cut off. He recounted its gravity — scrubby trees, he said, that appeared to bend towards a center, abandoned artifacts of destroyed communities that seemed magnetically drawn toward oblivion. Even viewed from the top, the Pit is breathtaking in its dissonance with the piney mountainsides, striated in bright red much like a canyon of the Southwestern desert.
All around Appalachia, and around the West too, according to writer Jonathan Thompson in a recent issue of High Country News, open mines crumble, contaminating the groundwater and causing landslides, often in remote locations and communities. But not this Pit: Its reputation as a “place of death” — the nearly mythic occurrence of snow geese landing on it and 3,000 expiring instantly, burned from the inside out — all of that is a part of its pull, and it draws thousands of visitors per year.
Yawning toward a mile long, nearly 2,000 feet deep, and deepening and widening yearly, it contains over 40 billion liquid gallons of acidic water, copper, iron, arsenic, zinc, sulfuric acid, The Pit is the mother of Euglena mutabilis, a microscopic algae that appears to have evolved to survive the rust-colored water, which, it’s been said, changes to green underneath the surface. The Pit is part of the United States’ largest complex of Superfund sites, much of which bleeds into the inhabited neighborhoods of Butte. As Euglena mutabilis flourished in the rusty water, so did life flourish on the contaminated ground, surrounded by snowcapped mountains: white churches, interrupted by spruce and pine, long roads past doors and porches strung with wind chimes, neighborhood cats and the bluebirds they stalk through the grasses, neon and starlit nights where gaggles of teenagers and 20-somethings flock together to basement shows and old-timers gather to watch football and buy each other drinks at bars with names like Pisser’s Palace. I was there in the clamor and music, the regulars shooting the shit, in snatches of conversation I heard voices out of context, a man saying, maybe in a joke, “Hold my hand,” another responding, “I’m coming over, Mom,” they’re buying rounds for the whole bar, they’re joking with the bartender about her failing marriage. I thanked the woman who bought me my Tecate as she stepped out for a smoke break, and I told her how much I love her city, and she laughed as if she didn’t believe me but said she loves it too, and we quietly stared at the streetlight-lit roads that careen up into the clouds and down into the abyss.
Mining in the Pit was safer for the worker than mining deep in the crisscrossing shafts below the city, where collapses and explosions and silicosis left Butte strewn with widows. But the Pit, or the company that owned it, Anaconda Mining, was insatiable. In the Pit’s founding years, it ate the town’s immigrant communities of Meaderville and McQueen, along with 30 city blocks. The need for miners decreased; as people left, the Pit expanded, with city officials convinced that the only way to save Butte was to consume it. Onlookers blamed a downtown fire on Anaconda; the company lost more support when it closed down Columbia Gardens, a site it had founded as an entertainment district. Nothing but the Pit could be left. And then the company went belly-up, and the Berkeley Mine closed for good.
I told her how much I love her city, and she laughed as if she didn’t believe me but said she loves it too.
Officials mulled what to do with it. Make it into a ski slope? A Disneyland mining camp? Instead, it was left as is. The Pit’s viewing stand has a snack bar and some historical signage and restrooms, accessible seasonally for $2. Trails connect it to other industrial sites in Butte.
The gallows and the Pit became ghostly monuments to extraction, memorials to the dead, as a part of an industrial walking trail throughout the town. The best time to walk through them is around sunset, of course, when the sagebrush seems to catch light from inside and turns the hills golden. Sociologist Rob Shields said places like these are not simply locations to view, but “for someone and of something.”
The sites are inhabited by their former use in so many ways. Even in the process of cleanup, Butte still suffers a higher-than-average rate of death from the usual broad array of mining town illnesses. And yet, scientists argue that if not for the Pit, the air and water would be even more contaminated; even as it poisons, it protects — and remembers.
Butte’s memory of itself extends beyond the act of extraction. Plaques are everywhere, tours and museums. Here is where immigrants from a dozen countries lived in the boomtown times; this was the Copper King’s house; the miner’s union hall was here, and this is where the Walkerville miners’ band paraded every year. And here is where the miners blew up a building during a labor dispute; this is where blood flowed in the streets during the strikes and rebellions.
At some point I ended up in a dive bar called Sam’s Place with a small crew of copper miners. I shot pool (badly) with a couple of them, one who played in a metal band and hoped to make the transition to life as a tattoo artist, another with anarchist patches on his coat who was dealing with a livelihood-threatening back injury and whiling away the afternoon on, he said, a “spritz” of acid. The Pit, ugly as it is, they told me, is a protector, a troll that squats before the proverbial bridge, and asks, “You love Butte? Oh, yeah? How much? Enough to live on top of a Superfund hill made of compacted dirt and 10,000 miles of hollowed-out mine shaft?” Do you have to believe a place is beautiful in order to love it? And the rich, at least up until now, have eschewed it, though now they are coming, the miners said, shaking their heads at the creeping increase in their rent. Turn your unwelcome eyes away and leave us be.
In October 1916 edition of local newspaper the Butte Miner, poet Berton Braley wrote:
She’s ugly, you say, old Butte,
and grimy, and black, and drear,
Why partner, I never could see it,
and I’ve been here many a year.
At an Irish bar one night, an apple-cheeked man turned to me while his wife was dancing, and said, “Butte’s tough.” He said he’d never been more than a hundred miles from Butte because he can’t bear to leave.
I climbed up to the gallows. Walked up the hill, where the patchy prairie dirt is packed so tight that nothing but grass could ever grow there, packed over a hundred years of waste and slag and tailings. The mine shafts are cut off now, you can’t see them, but if you stand above them you can feel how empty the ground is, hollow, carved deep into the rock. Perhaps if you knock on it with your fist you can hear a distant ringing like a bell. The pool in the Pit shines down below, settled in the man-made canyon. All hail red rocks, all hail the fake canyon, all hail the spirits of the dead and the newly living, nurtured in the world’s Poisonvilles. I sat on a hillside and imagined my boots touching another pair of boots, leather maybe, beneath a layer of earth, and the boots attached to the sitting form of a ghost in a hard hat eating the pork chop sandwich his wife fixed for him, upside down. Maybe at dusk that ghost — and the other ones, hundreds of them — come back up to sit and look at the glittering lights, the snow on the mountains pinkened, the whole world (the hole world?) laid out at their feet.
Note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Dashiell Hammett’s name and to correct the number of snow geese who died when they landed on the Berkeley Pit. It was 3,000, not 10,000 as originally estimated.
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