Vigilante Trail to the Paradise Room 2

The civic administrators of Butte were clearly putting on a new kinder, gentler face, with just enough arsenic to let them have beautiful complexions. The ‘thousands of historic commercial and residential buildings from the boom times, which, in the Uptown section, give it a very old-fashioned appearance’ had resulted in Butte’s ‘recognition and designation in the late 1990s as an All-American City… In 2008 Barack Obama spent his last Fourth of July before his Presidency campaigning in Butte, taking in the parade with his family, and celebrating his daughter Malia's 10th birthday.’ Bill Murray owns the Copper Kings baseball team. Butte is the home of the National Center for Appropriate Technology. An EPA operation for the environmental cleanup has made Butte and environs that largest Superfund site in the country. Jack Nicklaus designed the ‘Old Works’ Golf Course, a big reclaimed championship venue ‘hole-in-one’ for the effort.
Which brought Robyn and I to the Berkeley Pit, the one big hole in Butte, and the serenity of the water, if that’s what it was. Take 5 in our beautiful picnic area. The cute little rust bucket mining cart at the entrance was full to the brim with columbines and carnations and pansies and other recent immigrants. It cost two dollars to get in to the south wall observation deck, lined with barbwire.
There were buttons to press, for information. Berkeley Pit is the largest pit lake in the You-knighted States. It is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the area. In its time, Berkeley Pit was the largest truck-operated open pit copper mine in the country. All the things you’d expect the buttons to say, but none of the things they needed to say. Like the thousands of homes that were destroyed to excavate the pit. Or like when ARCO shut down the pit in 1982, it also shut down the water pumps in nearby mines, which caused the toxic stew acidic heavy metal pit lake of arsenic and cadmium and mercury sulfate to form and rise, and like how its still rising, and like in 2020, it will overflow and start to run downhill- 30 billion gallons of poison. Or like how, for more than a century, the Anaconda smelter released 36 tons of arsenic every day, 1540 tons of sulfur, and huge quantities of lead and other heavy metals into the air; like how mine tailings were dumped directly into Silver Bow Creek, creating a 150 mile plume of downstream pollution; or like how livestock and agricultural soils had been contaminated, all the way down the Deer Lodge Valley; or like, nothing was done about the unsafe tap water in Butte and no serious effort was made clean up Berkeley Pit until the 1990s. There is now life in the pond- water striders and a new iron-eating algae, discovered in 2000… Or like the flock of 342 migrating snow geese which selected the pit lake as a resting place, and dissolved on contact. The broadcasts across the water, if that’s what it was, are designed to scare them away.
Butte is the hometown of Evel Knieval Days, but that doesn’t seem as dangerous anymore. The fourteen passengers and crew of the airplane crash into Holy Cross Cemetery, arrived at death and devastation in Butte, four years before Robyn and I did, more slowly. The books and movies about the town are telling- The Killer Inside Me, Runaway Train, Lonesome Dove, Sold Me Down The River, The Last Ride, Don't Come Knocking, Red Harvest, Empty Mansions. Robyn and I were headed south, to another kind of ghost town, but we would need to pass through one more Butte copper tragedy, on the way. The giant letter ‘M’ of Montana Tech was carved into the hillside, upstream from the highway signs leading out of town. Adam and Eve’s lingerie at next exit… Drink it. Drive it. Crash it. Can you live with it? In Whitehall we discovered that we could play Keno at the town pump. The locals were pulling weeds by hand.
“They’ve got time.” Said Robyn. A Mad Max black mariah flew by us, in the haze through which the Tobacco Root Mountains rose, on our left. Real flocks of birds flew and landed, in flocks. Rare swaths of green and the cheese wheel hay bale progeny of their nurturing, contrasted against the yellow and blue of the rest of Montana. Homesteads of dust and rust and dereliction, windmills with missing vanes, took us from earth and water to earth and fire. And water again.
The town was named Silver Star, and there was one on the weatherworn shack on the edge of it. It said ‘Open,’ and ‘Gifts,’ but we didn’t find either. What we did find were rows of massive double-spoked metal wheels, twenty feet and more in diameter, and the western script explanation along the highway.

   These Sheave Wheels from the Speculator Mine were used to hoist the
   Bodies of the 168 miners who died in the Granite Mtn Disaster, June 8,
   1917. It remains the worst metal mining tragedy in US history. The
   Granite Mtn Shaft was burned out so rescue was through the Speculator,
   connected underground.
   Photos are welcome, but please stay away from Wheels or machinery.

At the time of the disaster, the Butte copper mines were operating at full wartime production. An electric cable was being lowered into the Granite Mountain mine, paradoxically as part of a fire safety system. When it fell as was damaged, a foreman went half a mile below the surface with a carbide lamp to inspect the damage. He ignited the oil-soaked insulation on the cable with his lantern. The fire quickly climbed the cable, ignited the timbers, and turned the shaft into a chimney. Flames and smoke and poisonous gas spewed through the labyrinth of underground tunnels, including the connected Speculator mine. Approximately 168 miners died in the ensuing blaze, most from asphyxia. Some did not die immediately, but survived for a day or two. Some wrote notes while they waited to be rescued. A few managed to barricade themselves within bulkheads, and were found after as long as 55 hours later, but many others died in a panic to try to get out. The rescue effort was frustrated by carbon monoxide, which stole the air supply. A fan, used to prevent the fire from spreading, worked for a short time but, when the rescuers added water, the water evaporated, creating steam that burned those trying to escape. Most of the victims were too mutilated to recognize.
In Montana, logs and haystacks and cattle brands and ingots bore witness, to the moral supremacy of hardware. The price of extraction was Big Sky high.



                ‘And you won't make a dime
                 On this gray granite mountain mine
                 Of dirt you're made and of dirt you will return
                 So while we're living here Let's get this little one thing clear
                 There's plenty of men to die, you don't jump your turn’
                                                         The Decemberists, Rox in the Box