Montana Festival of the Book

Mining Butte’s Stories

By Kerry McMannis, 9-29-06

With the copper mines exhausted long ago, Butte, Montana sits above miles and miles of abandoned tunnels. Over the decades the wealth of this now empty shell was extracted and carried away in the pockets of the copper kings. But Butte is not a ghost town.

"There remains much to be mined in Butte," said Michael Punke, a Missoula based author.

The authors and artists of Montana are resurrecting the true wealth of this western town. The stories told here are not romanticized, the mines, environmental devastation, and the human loss. But lack of romance clears the way for the true stories of beauty and humanity that flourished within the bleak landscape.

Retelling Butte was the title of the opening presentation for the 2006 Montana Festival of the Book. Master of Ceremonies, Jim Driscoll started with a tribute to Richard O'Malley. O'Malley's memoir, Mile High Mile Deep, marked a turning point and after decades of literary injustice, "Butte was in the hands of a real writer."

Swain Wolf, a Missoula author, read from his new book The Boy Who Invented Skiing, an autobiography that includes his days working in the Butte mines. He wrote about the human experience that unfolded within the mines. Especially the attitude of the miners who were so consumed by their work they became like "a gathering of Buddhist monks with headlamps."

Introduced as "the state's finest living poet," Butte native Ed Lahey took the stage. Before beginning his reading he made an announcement, "If you don't mind I'll remove my dentures they're new and they feel like a shoe in my mouth," the crowd roared. Then, in a voice growling like a grizzly bear he read dirty poems about his hometown. Welders, miners and prostitutes were among his characters. Blind Horses is the poem he is best known for and as he said "it's also the one that makes me the most money, those two don't always go together."

Editors Ellen Crane and Janet Finn talked about MotherLode , the book reviewed here by panelist Edwin Dobb earlier this week. "The story of Butte tends to be a masculine story," Finn said. The book seeks to tell the stories of the strong women behind the strong men of a mining town. Finn and Crane depict their months of research sifting through Butte's archives and interviewing the women as a treasure hunt of sorts. "We get into these dusty boxes and find the vitality inside," Finn said. "We sit around kitchen tables and hear beautiful stories."

After intermission former U.S. Representative Pat Williams took the helm from Driscoll as the Master of Ceremonies. He told his own stories of growing up in Butte as the grandson of Irish immigrants and friend to "Evel" Knievel.

Michael Punke, author, of the book Fire and Brimstone, is from Missoula but felt compelled to write the historical account of the 1917 Butte mining disaster. Disasters have the power to capture our attention, he said, because they strip away everything else and leave just the raw humanity of the people who are involved. His book follows the stories of three groups of miners who fought to survive in the Granite Mountain tragedy.

Mark Gibbons is a Montana poet whose Grandparents also immigrated from Ireland. He read his poem "Ghost Town" which he dedicated to his grandmother who did not love Butte.

The evening closed with a preview of Pam Roberts' upcoming documentary The Richest Hill on Earth: The Saga of an American Mining Town. Author Edwin Dobb, a contributing editor to Harper's magazine and the head writer of the film was a reluctant presenter , saying "this is exactly what I would not do as a writer, basically we're showing you a draft." The audience did not seem offended by the rough draft. Although it was pushing 11:00, most lasted to the end.

As the layers of Butte being mined by these authors were exposed through the night, the wealth was distributed to all in attendance.

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