By Kevin S. Giles

Three boyhood memories about Butte, Montana. Stay with me.

First, the uptown shopping district. Its crowded sidewalks and tall buildings impressed me as a big city. The first escalator I rode (and probably saw) was in Hennessy’s, the department store at Main and Granite. A later rash of fires left gaping holes in uptown. I’m thankful for remembering the district when it was more complete.

Second, the restaurants. Whenever my parents announced that we were headed for Butte to eat, it was a big deal. It was an outing. Like many families in those days, we rarely went to restaurants. I recall Martha’s Cafe on Front Street and Red Rooster on Harrison Avenue, specifically, and several cafes and coffee shops uptown.

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Being an out-of-town kid, well …

Third, basketball games at the Civic Center. Teams from outside Butte drew gangs of local kids who rocked buses and sometimes attacked anybody from out of town. I remember our pep squad being caught in a brawl. Our teenage imaginations probably magnified the trouble. Or not.

Here I am outside the famous M and M bar in Butte, Montana. I spent time inside, too. Photo by Don Bob Sundberg.

I grew up in Deer Lodge, 39 miles to the northwest. Other than sharing blue collar economies, Deer Lodge and Butte had little in common. Deer Lodge was a small ranching, railroad and prison town (even smaller now), slow to go about its business. Butte, seven or eight times larger, thundered with vitality. (Notably, history shows that the Butte I knew as a boy already was in steep decline from its mining heyday.)

Long before I thought of writing Mystery of the Purple Roses, my crime novel that takes place in Butte, I lived in a Granite Street four-plex in uptown Butte. The cavernous rooms of this old building sat in the midst of rooming houses once stocked with underground miners. A woman living upstairs in my building had cats, too many of them. The man next door, an Iranian, played Middle Eastern music at night, prompting visions of belly dancers.

Butte, a city of ghosts

I borrowed a friend’s couch to furnish the living room, which was big enough to accommodate six or eight more couches. The spacious back bedroom went unused. I took the bedroom in the middle of the apartment. It stayed warm except near the window where, in winter, I hung towels around the window to block the draft.

The Butte I saw those days, in adulthood, bore no resemblance to the roaring city I had witnessed when I was young. When underground mining ceased, and the Berkeley Pit closed, changing times stranded Butte with a pile of history but clear evidence of abandonment. It felt like being the last man to leave the party.

I’ll quote from one of my earlier stories about Butte:

Where did the Butte of lore go?

‘Headline: FIRE!” is the third book in the Red Maguire mystery series, by Kevin S. Giles.

“Snow fell heavy one night, softening Butte’s rough unshaven face. I trudged through the drifts down Granite Street, east toward the lights of what remains of the business district. The Hill was silent. Those deep mines were closed and sealed. Big rooming houses loomed dark.

“I was alone on the street, or so I thought. Ahead of me I heard yelling. Profane belligerent yelling. There in the storm of swirling snow, in the middle of the street, sat a man in a wheelchair. I saw nobody else on the street, not even a passing car. He informed me he was trying to get to jail but his chair was stuck in the snow. Being the helpful type, I pushed him through the drifts while he ranted and cursed. Then it hit me. He was old Butte, but a remnant of it, and I was his only witness.

The Atlantic had a bar a block long

“I rang the bell, waiting for a jailer. She swung open the big door. ‘Oh, him,’ she told me. ‘He’s down here every night wanting a place to sleep.’ Then, when I didn’t leave, she offered, ‘We’ll take care of him.’ I walked away, seeing the wheelchair’s tracks already disappearing in the flurry of flakes. ‘Thanks, buddy!’ the man called after me.

“Hadn’t I just read that uptown Butte once embraced the rowdiest wide-open swarm of characters in the West? Gambling houses going all night, miners streaming off shift, Venus Alley whores, bars never closing? (The Atlantic, I hear, had a bar a block long.) Did all those people fold like yesterday’s newspaper and blow away in the winds of change? Where was the cackle and the clamor, the vice and vitality, the Butte of lore?”

That’s what I wrote a few years ago. Here’s what I think now:

I found a home for ‘Mystery of the Purple Roses’

I rediscovered Butte in recent years as a place where memories line the streets like gold. Ask anyone from Butte what they know of it and they spit out a thousand stories. No city in Montana can brag as much as Butte. Maybe Helena, going way back, and Anaconda in the boom days when Marcus Daly reigned over his smelting empire. Butte’s flamboyance, its irreverent flaunting of truth and consequence, its bars and bordellos stocked with characters of every nationality, that’s what history shows. Butte pulled mountains of copper ore and other precious metals from far below its torn surface. What happened above the mines was at least as titillating as what went on deep in the earth.

A few years ago, when I started thinking about writing a mystery novel, I had no doubt where it would take place. I could have set Mystery of the Purple Roses in Deer Lodge, or Helena, or Anywhere USA.

It fit best in Butte.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.