Uncorseted Wench

The lights of Butte, Mont., when seen from the Continental Divide, have a strange, haunting beauty. But in the daytime Butte is anything but beautiful to look at--"by dark a diamond set in jet, but by day ... an uncorseted wench dissipated from the night before." Last week Butte (pop. 37,000) had a book all to itself. The book (Copper Camp; Hastings House; $2.75) is the latest of the series compiled by the late Federal Writers' Project of WPA.

Few memories in Butte are long enough to go back to the hot day in July 1864 when G.O. Humphrey and William Allison struck gold on Butte Hill a few years before the hill's true wealth--copper --was discovered. But more than one Butte citizen could recall the icy December day in 1881 when an old-fashioned locomotive huffed & puffed up the newly completed Utah & Northern narrow-gauge railroad to connect Butte with Ogden, Utah (and the outside world) by rail.

Thenceforward Butte grew, its local economy joined in unbreakable wedlock to the price of copper, its pioneer past forever coloring its psychology, its rough-&-tumble legend becoming part of the legend of the U.S. Some of Butte's legend:

>Saloons with such names as the Alley Cat, Collar and Elbow, Pick and Shovel, Graveyard, Pay Day. >Waitresses with such names as Skip Chute, Mag the Rag, Hay ride, The Race Horse, Take-Five Annie, Ellen the Elephant, Little Egypt.

>Sporting "girls of the line" who made Galena Street one of the most notorious wide-open districts in the U.S., ranking with San Francisco's Barbary Coast. Wrote one observer: "I've often seen it on the old line with the girls late in the evening walking up the street, their stockings so weighted down with silver dollars that it was all they could do to navigate." Added another: "There were some sprightly-lookin' lasses down there. . . . But there was plenty of tough-lookin' blisters too. A man could have got hydrophobia from even lookin' at them."

>Butte's oldtime motto, "Spend it while you've got it and don't cry when it's gone," and the hell-roaring characters who lived up to the motto. Among them: Larry Mullins, a mine shoveler, who inherited $3,500 and spent it by installing a public harem in a hotel suite where he played host for a riotous three days.

>Callahan the Bum, who whiled away most of a summer afternoon trying to hang himself on one of the main streets and gave up in disgust because nobody would notice him.

> "The Centerville Bull," a coal-black animal with uncontrollable mating instincts, which roamed the streets "causing consternation as he smashed down fences and led cows away from their paths of rectitude. ... A Mrs. Sullivan, tiring of the depredations, decided to take matters into her own hands. She scored a bull's-eye, hitting the bull in a spot that measurably reduced his virility."

> Dynamite, Butte's own dog, whose tax was paid by the city each year, which got its food at restaurants, became so spoiled it would eat only T-bone steaks and turkey and chicken scraps.

Last week Butte, like other U.S. communities, was busy about its bustling, wartime present. The mines were going at their fullest blast since the depression, Butte's 300 saloons still worked nightily to quench its thirst, the girls of its ' Venus Alley" still sat in front of their cribs as did those of oldtime Galena Street, its cuisine still ranged from fried bear steak to Cornish pastries, its inhabitants still quarreled in some 30 different languages and dialects. In war as in peace, Butte was still a mining camp, still one of the rowdiest towns in the U.S., still a U.S. legend out of which new legends would grow.

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