Remembering Butte’s Irish On St. Patrick’s Eve

By Contributing Writer, 3-16-07

At the turn of the century no other town in Montana had as many people as Butte had Irish. Even Helena, the state’s second most populated city, had fewer residents then Butte had Irish-born. Ten thousand of Erin’s sons and daughters were already on the Butte hill and more were on their way.

And our Micks and Marys came with little in their pockets but with hearts and minds heavy with 19th century Ireland, her cause, her martyrs, her church, her songs, the unifying memory of the famine and the oppressors as well as all the spirits, ghosts, miracles, saints and rosary beads that could possibly travel from one country to another.

And in Butte the men went deep into the ground to dig, drill, blast and sometimes die while the women took in laundry, gathered coal from the tracks and hired out as domestics downtown.

But the 20th century came and went and today we find little remaining of old Butte—Irish, or otherwise.

But what does remain is a past, now more mystical then concrete, as it travels further and further away. But the trick does not lie with the past as it lies with the past as fact. The past itself, like all illusions, remains ambiguous, while the past defined and documented, poses as the fact undeniable. Undeniable facts determined by money, power and marketing.

But why should we care? Why not accept the inevitable of memory belonging to the commercial caretakers of the globe? We can then leave the text and the script to the latest fashion, the documentation and the music to the global corporations, and get on in the world as it is?

Then memory, once cleansed, will reappear, happily and efficiently consigned to the screen, the computer, the interpretive center and the time line. With historical and cultural thought and speech glossed and embalmed, the remains can then be quickly whisked into all the present and future programs and technologies of the global themepark.

Still there is a case to be made, not just for the past, but also for a new faith and a cultural heresy for global age non-believers. A heresy that proclaims the past is ours, not theirs, and that historical and cultural memory is more then corporate intellectual property, global marketing and industrial tourism.

It is a case to be made simply; to be stated free of abstraction and footnotes, and with a thoughtfulness that comes from a weariness of the anti-intellectualism and banal clichés of a noisy and empty global culture that knows neither restraint nor principle.

And one place this past can be found is at the very top of the Butte hill, in Walkerville, where we can see a now unused and forgotten church named St. Lawrence O’Toole. It was a name chosen, they said, by a long ago bishop who had visited the O’Toole shrine in Ireland in the early 1890’s.

This particular St. Lawrence (1128-1180) was a Dublin bishop forced into a deal with England’s Evil King Henry II after Henry’s conquest of Ireland. Of the hated names of Ireland, Evil Henry II ranks with a Pope, Adrian IV, the Vatican’s single English pope who just happened to deed Ireland to England and King Henry II. After the Irish deed came the conquest by an English earl known as Strongbow in 1173.  With the Irish being the Irish, none of this was forgotten. Only Oliver Cromwell was, and is, remembered with more malice.

Now what Lawrence O’Toole’s role up here at the top of the Butte hill was, no one today remembers. But how Ireland felt after eight hundred years of the tyranny is not. Thus one of my favorite Irish stories, short, yet full of the Celtic irony that we so cherish.

We go back to 1916 and the Easter uprising in Dublin was underway. There was little news reaching London and Lord Beaverbrook, the English press lord and a later member of Winston Churchill’s World War II cabinet, somehow got through to a personal acquaintance in Dublin on the telephone.  It was Tim Healy, an Irish representative at the English Parliament, who would in five years be the first governor-general of the Irish Free State.  Beaverbrook recorded the conversation. 

Beaverbrook: “Is there a rebellion?”

Healy: “There is.”

Beaverbrook: “When did it break out?”

Healy: “When Strongbow invaded Ireland,” (1173)

Beaverbrook: “When will it end?”

Healy: “When Cromwell gets out of Hell!” - Then Healy hung up the phone.

Of course Oliver Cromwell had died but no doubt Tim Healy spoke for most of Ireland which in 1916 included her scattered sons and daughters around the world. And Butte, predominantly a West Cork and Beara copper mining enclave, despite her small population and geographical isolation, supported the Irish cause with applause, money, guns, and men as no other city outside of Ireland itself. It was no accident that such Irish leaders as Jim Larkin, Hannah Sheehy- Skeffington, Eamon de Valera and the two authentic Irish legends of the 1916 uprising, James Connolly and the Countess Constance Markievicz, had already made the required pilgrimage to Butte.

Butte’s 2nd parish

The Butte mines created more Irish widows - fifty to one hundred
per year from accidents alone - then Irish fortunes. Census statistics
tell a part of the story.

In 1900 there were 135 Irish widows under fifty years of age with a
combined total of 392 children living at home; in 1910 the figures
were 434 (widows) and 1,117 (children).

-DAVID M. EMMONS
“The Butte Irish” -1990

St. Lawrence O’Toole Church was dedicated on Christmas Day in 1896. The bishop noted that “there was not a rich man in the congregation,” and that the church had been paid for “by contributions of the poor people.” The bishop then led the new parish in prayer. The parish asked only that God would protect the miners in their hazardous work.

Thus St. Lawrence O’Toole became Butte’s second parish. The first was St. Patrick’s downtown, chartered in 1879 and by the time of Montana’s statehood, a parish of 7,000. The parish would swell to 12,000 by the turn of the century. For many years the St. Patrick parish would be larger then most of the cities and towns of the state.

And on top of the hill, a St Lawrence rectory was built in 1899, a four-room school with 300 pupils opened in 1900 while a home for the Sisters of Charity was built in 1903.  A newspaper article called the school the “handsomest and most convenient and best equipped school building in the city.” The article also noted that the “teaching sisters were housed in a pretty cottage between the church and the school,” and that the parish itself is “in a most flourishing condition and counts 500 families.”

Records say Father Francis Xavier Batens was pastor and assisted by a Father Ryan who had been assigned to the parish in 1900. To raise money for the convent, Father Batens and two of the teaching sisters, whose names are unknown today, attended a meeting at the Miner’s Union hall where they were given permission to collect at the mine gates from the miners.

But that was yesterday and today no doubt many members of the old St. Lawrence O’Toole parish now lie in the cemeteries at the bottom of the hill, on what we in Butte call the “flat.”

Which means the modest and simple people of St. Larwence parish are still a long way from the celebrated “Copper Kings,” Marcus Daly, Senator William Clark, Fritz Heinze, John D. Ryan, and Con Kelley, all buried in New York City. It is only my guess but I would bet that Daly, Clark and company rest far better knowing they are as close to Wall Street as they can get.

Some things never change.

While it is St. Patrick we honor now but another day the departed parishoners of St. Larwence O’Tooe would have known just as well came on November 22. It’s roots were the liberation of Ireland and Robert Emmet Day it was observed in America by clubs known at the Robert Emmet Literary Society (RELA) or “Clan na Gael.”

Let no man write my epitaph

Murdered in 1803, Robert Emmet was another Irish rebel whose fame would increase in the years after his death. 

One reason was Emmet was brutally executed, the thinking of the English hard-liners being such a spectacle would send a message to the Irish insurgents.

So Emmet was drawn and quartered. Which meant he was first hung by the neck and slowly strangled till near dead, then cut open and the finale came when his body torn into four parts by four horses going in four different directions.
The remains were then burnt and maybe the foolish English thought they were rid of Emmet.

Instead the event further fueled the insurgency and 19th century Ireland and Irish-America formed Robert Emmet clubs and societies espousing Irish freedom.. It also became common practice to name new baby boys Robert Emmet.

Today all that remains of the Robert Emmets in Butte can be found down on South Montana Street, just off the main road of St. Patrick’s cemetery where a century old fence encloses the weathered 1891 monument, a flag pole and five headstones.  The only reference to Emmet found here is the R.E.L.A. initials at the base in accordance with Emmet’s wish that until Ireland was free:  “Let no man write my epitaph.”

On the monument are the names of 29 men, followed by date of birth and death, the first of which are Myles Burke and Daniel Noonan followed by typical Butte names like Shields, Mooney, Doyle, Farrell, Mahoney, Egan, Murphy, Ryan, Hannifin and so on.  A dozen of these men, much like the population of the cemetery itself, were born in the 1840’s And these men must have thought themselves fortunate living to adulthood as a million and a quarter Irish men, women and children starved to death between 1846 and 1850.

So when I come to this place, I may wonder and silently ask, and if you are heard out here it is no matter how loudly or quietly you talk, my question being who of you came by sail and who came by steam ?

A fair question for well into the 1890’s. The Irish traveled to the United States by sailing ship,

And I also ask so what was “going day” like for those that sailed? 

What were the emotions of these rural and traditional people upon leaving a land, certainly a poor land and one on which they had no property rights, but still the place where they had lived for centuries and all the people they had ever known lived?

Riobard O’Dwyer, in his chronicles of the Irish leaving the Beara copper mining district of Ireland for Butte, came across an old man in 1985 who told him the stories he had heard as a lad of “going day.”

Rather then walk, a lucky man might catch a ride on the local butter wagon.  With a bag of spare clothes he would travel up to Cork City, a grateful passenger in a horse and cart that brought the home made butter of the villages to market. To board the sailing ship the immigrants would have to bring their own food for a journey that could last two or three months, time depending on the weather.  This food consisted of a half-sack of potatoes, coarse fish and a big jar of sour milk. The men would wear coarse wool trousers, strong hobnailed boots, long flannel underwear, a shirt, a wood pullover, and a heavy cap.  From Cork City it would cost about 3 or 4 pounds to cross the Atlantic to Fall River, Massachusetts.  And in Fall River and other New England cities, the men, if needed, could make a little money digging and shoveling or breaking ice to continue on to Butte.

Five of my earliest Butte ansestors made this trip, three of them being orphan girls, 12, 10 and 7 years old. Now they lie here. And now, in St. Patrick’s cemetery, Butte, Montana, I ask “is this how you came here?”

But the sailing ships are no more - as are the days in Butte when you might hear stories of “American wakes” of the west of Ireland. When “going” meant a time of last good-byes to family and friends and so began a habit to wake on the evening before “going day.”

So there is good if melancholy reason to walk out here on any day; where you will be uncrowded and unhurried and where the Emmet monument attracts little interest and you might say that surely a day will come when the letters R.E.L.A will be a puzzle to the stray passerby.  . .

But out here in this cemetery you may sense that Ireland was their cause and well as Butte’s cause.

It was the Irish poet Yeats, who wrote the epitaph for the Easter Sunday, 1916 martyrs and the “Clan na Gael, “ and even maybe for those men and woman from the poorest part of Ireland who lie beneath this ground in far away Montana:

We know their dream: enough / To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?