Tag Archives: Montana books

A Montana writer’s view of Butte, Montana (better yet, it’s Butte America)

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Photo shows Butte, Montana

Uptown Butte in its heyday was a happening place, full of stores, bars, movie theaters and, as this photo shows, a shop that sold furs. Mining kept the crowds coming, although this looks like a quiet day, possibly a Sunday.

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s a temptation to build novels around Butte. Anyone who asks “Butte where?” hasn’t been listening.

Butte, Montana. Butte, America. Butte, for crying out loud.

Mile High City. Mile High, Mile Deep. The Mining City. Richest Hill on Earth. You know.

Once home to Italians, Serbs, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finns and a dozen other nationalities who converged on the city, way back, when the mines ran dark and deep and coughed out copper by the ton. Right?

Today Butte is a lesser place, shorn of many of those characters that made it one of the strangest, naughtiest, more daring cities in America. Back then, of course, when men mined tunnels a mile underground and died of accidents, fires and explosions or, later, the lung disease from the poisonous dust they inhaled. Back then.

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Postcards from a Montana town named Deer Lodge, where history lives on

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Photo shows historic Montana theater

The Rialto Theater in Deer Lodge, Montana, was built in 1921 with 720 seats. The Beaux Arts theater featured extensive painted murals, artistic plaster designs, and a painted stage background. Fire destroyed much of it in 2006. The community rallied, restoring and reopening the Rialto in 2012. Here’s an early view.

By Kevin S. Giles

Everyone has a hometown, or should, because it figures strongly in matters of the heart.

Mine is Deer Lodge, a dab of humanity in a seam between two rambling mountain ranges. Deer Lodge is a dwindling place, even smaller than my long-ago days there, but it stands proud before a mighty promontory known as Mount Powell in western Montana. It’s here, in a town with a real Main Street, where memories sleep and the fictional Summer of the Black Chevy takes place.

My favorite postcards show the downtown district through the years. It’s less robust now, but the buildings remain much the same, like history stood still.

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Montana memory: Confessions of a little girl drug store shoplifter who tried to make amends

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Photo shows old building

This early photo shows the Masonic Temple building in Deer Lodge, Montana. In later years it housed a drug store on the ground floor behind the corner pillar.

By Suzanne Lintz Ives

As a child, I’d definitely have been on Santa’s “naughty” list. I stole candy when I was little, and then went on to a larger crime that haunted me for 50 years.

First Steps

Photo shows Suzanne Lintz Ives

The author, Suzanne Lintz Ives

If your moral compass is spinning, I ask: Did you ever commit a minor childhood infraction, maybe telling a little fib or swiping a cookie? Crime is crime!

It began in Deer Lodge, Montana. We were scared at first.

Three of us bored seven-year-olds would innocently enter the store. Two of us would distract the clerk by dropping cans on the floor — and one of us would pocket bubble gum, penny suckers, and jawbreakers.

In three tries, we weren’t caught.

Believing we had refined our craft, we were ready for Main Street and Ben Franklin. We even named our gang, “The Egdol Reeds” (Deer Lodge spelled backward).

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‘You can read (or watch) Shawshank Redemption forty times and learn less of real prison life in the era than in a chapter of this book.’

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Jerry’s Riot is a nonfiction account of Montana’s notorious 1959 prison riot. It is the only accurate and comprehensive book written about the disturbance because journalist Kevin S. Giles interviewed nearly 100 people who witnessed it.

The book captures the conflict that ensued between career convict Jerry Myles, who had done time at Alcatraz Island and other federal and state prisons, and Warden Floyd Powell. Both men were new to Deer Lodge, Montana. Myles wanted to run the prison. Powell wanted to reform it. Guards and prisoners were caught in the middle.

True crime reviewer Laura James said Giles, a Montana author, joined a national echelon of writers who have written convincing and haunting works in the true crime genre. James wrote in her review:

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Wife of a prison hostage recalls details from Montana’s deadly 1959 riot

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Photo shows former prison hostage

Everett “Guff” Felix and his wife Amy Lee shown in the Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana where they lived after the 1959 riot. Guff was a captain and taken hostage. He never went back to Montana State Prison. (Photo by Kevin Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

Recently I discovered that Amy Lee Felix had died. In reading her obituary I remembered, in some detail, visiting her home in the mid-1990s in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. I was there to interview Amy’s husband, Everett “Guff” Felix, who had a remarkable story to tell about being held hostage during the 1959 prison riot in Deer Lodge.

Guff would be remembered as the highest-ranking officer taken hostage when the riot began on April 16. He was a captain then, just a few years after he closed his restaurant and began looking for work, hardly prepared by his own admittance to deal with rioting prisoners.

I took the following from a letter Amy wrote me in 1996. It shows what Guff faced as the prison’s new captain: Continue reading →

Writing Jerry’s Riot: Eyewitnesses recalled danger, intrigue, even a bit of compassion

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By Kevin S. Giles

Readers often ask how I found the high level of detail that appears in Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance.

The short answer is this: from people who were there. The longer answer is a bit more complicated.

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