“There is no king, no prince, no president, no athlete, nobody that has ever lived a better life than I have,” the famous daredevil said often, one of the many stock quotes he would repeat in interviews and speeches.
Was he right?
He was from Butte, Montana, and he traveled a long way, met a lot of famous people, made and spent a lot of money, kissed a lot of girls. That was for sure. He was from Butte, Montana, and he never left, no matter where he went, his horizons constructed by his point of view. That also was for sure. He was from Butte, Montana, a different kind of man from a different kind of place, a skyrocket of a character who flew across the sky, bright and dazzling, spectacular for a moment, then fell apart in full public view and dropped back to the ground, his life following the same arc as one of his many jumps.
He was from Butte, Montana, and that was the most important fact of all in understanding how everything worked. He was from Butte, Montana.
3 Butte, MT (I)
The public face of Butte, Montana, in the middle third of the twentieth century belonged to a woman named Jean Sorenson. She was called “Dirty Mouth Jean” by people who knew her well and also by people who had spent but a few minutes in her company. There was little argument about whether the name was appropriate.
Born in 1907, matronly in appearance as she moved into her fifties, sixties, yes, her seventies, Jean Sorenson turned swearing, cursing, into a personal art form. She not only cursed like a U.S. Marine drill sergeant, she cursed like the entire platoon on a ten-mile hike in inclement weather. Foul words fought each other to come out of her lips first.
She was the proprietor of the Stockman Bar at the corner of Wyoming and Galena, a low-rent drinking establishment in a city that prided itself on the number and history of its low-rent drinking establishments. A former prostitute, former madam, she was a link to Butte’s rip-roaring past, a one-woman tourist attraction. She kept a petrified walrus penis, three feet long, behind the bar for protection.
“This here is a genuine walrus dick,” she would tell patrons. “Got it from a fucking Eskimo. He was hung fucking near as good as the walrus.”
That was Dirty Mouth Jean.
She charmed even the most earnest churchgoers with her consistent vulgarity, did a great business as she filled her bar with businessmen, day laborers, visiting firemen, neckties and blue jeans, anyone and everyone in a noisy mix. She often boasted that she had had sexual relations with every miner from Alaska to Mexico during her time as a prostitute. She used other words for “sexual relations.”
Her reputation was enhanced by the rumor that she had shot her first husband dead in the long ago and the known fact that she had drilled her second, common-law husband, Ted Record, with the same result on July 1, 1959, then successfully pleaded self-defense. She was not a woman who was afraid of violence. She pretty much was not a woman who was afraid of anything. She kept a loaded, hammerless Smith and Wesson .32 behind the bar, next to the walrus penis, in case problems too large for the penis to handle might arise.
On November 8, 1978, after more than thirty years at the Stockman, that kind of problem landed. Three young men, released from the Army in Fort Lewis, Washington, were forced to spend a night in Butte in the middle of their bus trip home. They decided to spend that night drinking, a decision that eventually led them to the Stockman and Jean after a number of stops. They ordered three Lowenbrau beers. Jean said she didn’t serve Lowenbrau beer. They ordered three Miller beers. Jean said she did serve Miller beer, but wouldn’t serve a Miller to them, wouldn’t serve any beer, in fact, wouldn’t serve the three men.
One of them was black.
It should be noted that Jean’s off-color language often contained unflattering words to describe African Americans. Though Butte traditionally had been a great beef stew of races and nationalities, men drawn from all over the world to work in its copper mines, the sight of a black man walking the streets was still a curiosity. Few black men lived in Butte because black men historically were not hired for the mines.
“Are you refusing to serve me because I’m black?” the young man asked.
“If you’re looking for a reason,” Jean replied, “that’s as good as any.”
The men became agitated. Jean bypassed the walrus penis and pulled out the hammerless Smith and Wesson .32. Accounts varied on what happened next, about who pushed the issue, who was the aggressor, but the results were not debated. Jean shot one young man dead, wounded a second, and the third escaped out the door.
She eventually would be sentenced to ten years for manslaughter, would serve two, but the very next night she was out on bail and back at the Stockman, running the show her way. A drunken patron, talking about the trouble, advised her to purchase a larger gun, said she needed a .45, maybe something larger than that. Maybe a shotgun. The drunk persisted with his advice.
Jean knocked back her favorite drink, sloe gin mixed with Squirt in a small glass. She always called the process “taking a douche.” She slammed the glass on the bar.
“When they put that motherfucker in the hearse,” the public face of Butte, Montana, said, “he wasn’t wiggling, was he?”
This was the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938.
The charm of Butte always was the fact that there was no charm. This was never one of those traditional western destinations like Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, like most of the places on the far left side of the forty-eight-state map that were wrapped up in cowboy culture with the long-ago gunfights at some old corral, with cattlemen and sheepherders, solid folk who called each other “partner.” No, Butte was more like a gritty piece of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Youngstown or Toledo, Ohio, maybe even a borough of New York City, maybe Queens lopped off its urban roots and transported to one of the highest points in the Rocky Mountains and left to try to survive in a largely inhospitable environment.
“An island entirely surrounded by land” was one oft-quoted description.
Born in greed with the discovery in 1864 of assorted mineral deposits along the Continental Divide, then called “the Richest Hill on Earth” when massive amounts of copper ore were found three hundred feet under the ground in 1882, Butte became a gathering place for young and hard men who worked hard and dangerous jobs. They came from all over the world, these young and hard men, desperation and daydreams sending them to the coldest spot in the continental United States (an average 223 days below freezing every year) to live a mile above sea level and to work as much as a mile below the ground.
The daily job, from the beginning, was an eight-hour descent into a reasonable facsimile of hell. The bulky clothes worn up on “the sheets,” the outside, the jackets and scarves suitable for the frozen streets and sidewalks of normal Butte living, were replaced underground by minimal clothing in “90 by 90 conditions”—90-degree temperatures, 90 percent humidity, a wet, nasty, tropical depression far from any white sand beaches.
Perils were everywhere. A rock could fall at any time and kill a man, just like that. Or maybe leave him a quadriplegic. So perilous were the rocks, they were called “Duggans,” named after Larry Duggan, a prominent Butte mortician on North Main Street. They also were called “widow-makers,” a noncommercial term that nevertheless brought Mr. Duggan to mind.
Floods could happen in an instant, everybody doomed. Fire was a constant possibility. Dynamite, used often, had obvious dire potential, especially when a stick or three or five would not ignite with the rest of the package and lay buried and dangerous to whoever might work in the area. These unexploded dynamite sticks were called “requiem masses,” another grim term. Normal workplace accidents brought about by a trip or fall, or perhaps the misuse of a hammer or chisel or other tool, were a worry. Especially in a confined area, dank and dark, a claustrophobic hole. A constant drip of sulfuric acid off the walls added to the discomfort, burning holes in clothing and skin. The smells underground also could be staggering, the disposal of human waste always a p
roblem.
No area of the United States ever was mined as extensively as the seven square miles directly under Butte. In 1916, the time of peak production, 14,500 men, one-fifth of the city population, worked in the mines, harvesting minerals from over 2,700 miles of excavations. The ground constantly shifted from all of this activity. The shifts brought the constant fear of cave-ins. The fear brought the name Duggan to mind again.
Every day started with a question for the miner headed to work. Every return home was a relief.
“Once you got on that cage [to be lowered into the ground], you never knew you’d come out of there,” Victor Segna, who started working in the mines in 1922, said. “You never knew it. You got on there and you got down there, you may come up and you may not.”
The mines, it was claimed, averaged one injury or one death per day in their early operation. Statistics were unreliable, downplayed because the city and mines and everything that touched them were pretty much controlled by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, a monopoly, but 559 men were listed in state records as dead from fire or accident in the mines between 1914 and 1920. A substantial part of that mortality figure came from one of the worst mining accidents in U.S. history, on June 8, 1917. The spark from a miner’s carbide lamp onto a piece of insulation started a fire 2,400 feet belowground that killed 163 men at the Speculator mine. Virtually all of them suffocated.
Accidents happened all the time. One study by the Bureau of Mines predicted that if a man worked ten years in the mines he had a one-in-three chance of being seriously injured. He had a one-in-eight chance of being killed. A poignant accident happened on September 3, 1911, at the Black Rock mine when eight children, “nippers,” whose job was to bring damaged tools to the surface, were killed when their cage went out of control and they were crushed to death.
“When the mine whistles blew in chorus,” an old-timer said, “every woman in Butte whose old man was down in the holes would throw a shawl over her head, grab a couple of kids, and hit out lickety-split for the mine he was workin’ in—dead certain that he was being buried alive.”
The long-term prospects for the miners were even worse than the treacherous short term. The average miner never lived much past fifty years of age. Many never reached fifty, dead from silicosis, a lung disease sometimes called “miner’s consumption.” The advent of the pneumatic drill brought constant clouds of heavy dust that filled the mines and began to scar lungs as early as two years on the job. Statistics were obscured for death by silicosis, often recorded as death by tuberculosis, but families knew the truth.
“Nobody had a father,” Muzzy Faroni, son of a miner, remembered at the bar of the Butte Country Club. “Everybody’s father was dead, sometime in his forties. My father was dead. His father … his father … his … I think back on my neighborhood … nobody had a father.”
None of these perils stopped the line of ready replacements. The next surge of young and hard men always arrived to take the place of the previous surge. Living somewhere on the other side of an ocean, any ocean, thousands of miles away, the newcomers had heard the tales of jobs, money, opportunity, in the mines of Butte. They purchased a one-way boat ticket and they came. The economics was what mattered, not the danger.
Mostly single men, they were stuffed close together in the vertical, tight city that was so different from other cities in the West. Homes and rooming houses were built as close as possible to the mines to keep the cold return from work in wet clothes—subzero temperatures after a day of 90 degrees underground—as short as possible. (Pneumonia and other cold-related diseases were also perils.) Businesses were built close to the houses. A fire in 1895 had destroyed most of the business district, and wood-framed buildings had been banned, so the replacements were large and formidable, built of brick and stone.
The Irish and Cornish settled in Corktown, Dublin Gulch, and Centreville, local neighborhoods. The Italians settled in Meaderville, the Finns in Finntown, the Germans in Dogtown, the Croats and Serbs in the Boulevard and Parrot Flats, the Chinese in Chinatown, and the slums of the Cabbage Patch were open to just about anyone. A survey in 1918 found that Butte residents had been born in thirty-eight different countries, merchants from merchant nations following the great rush of miners, the population estimated now at close to 100,000 people, more than Houston or Dallas or Phoenix, a major stop for the five different railroads, which sent thirty-eight trains per day through the city. The foreign smells from foreign foods, the foreign words from foreign languages, the little eccentricities of different races from different places, were woven into daily living.
Not much planning had been involved in any of this. The city almost grew by itself, built to service the needs of the young and hard men who lived day to day, taking that long trip into the ground at the start of every shift, one misstep away from a visit to Mr. Duggan. Risk-takers every one of them. Butte was a city built for risk-takers from the beginning. Yes, it was.
This was the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938.
The life outside the mines in Butte was fast, as fast as any fast life in any big city in the country. Faster. If the population was tilted heavily toward young single men, and if young single men were the people with money, well, the services offered were services that young single men might enjoy. Whoopee.
Butte not only was a wide-open place—212 drinking establishments were already listed in the 1893 city directory—but reveled in being that way. Prostitution was legal, the sites ranging from plush parlors to Spartan, anonymous rooms called “cribs,” often located in basements. Gambling was illegal, but tolerated everywhere without repercussion. The drink of choice after a day in the mines was a Sean O’Farrell, a shot of whiskey backed by a beer chaser. The fun proceeded from there. If tomorrow should be the bad day in the mines, well, tonight would be a wonder.
Novelist Gertrude Atherton, who wrote a 1919 best-seller about Butte called The Perch of the Devil, said that an hour was only forty minutes long in the city. That was how fast life seemed to fly. When the mines employed three shifts, work around the clock, the parties also never stopped. The owner of a new bar would throw the keys down the toilet or into the street in celebration of the grand opening. There was no need for keys, no need for locks. The bars also were open twenty-four hours.
“I have never seen a town as wide open as Butte!” famed reformer Carrie A. Nation declared when she arrived on January 23, 1910. “I have never seen so many broken hearts! I have never seen so many homes consumed to keep up the saloon! If I could touch a button and blow all the saloons in Butte to hell, I would do it in a minute.”
She and members of her Women’s Christian Temperance Union had taken hatchets to bars and houses of ill repute across the country. If she planned on doing that in Butte, she was mistaken. Two days after her arrival, as she tried to convince bartenders, half-dressed working girls, and patrons at the Irish World, a saloon, brothel, and dance hall, to give up their lives of sin, she tangled with owner May Maloy. Carrie said some Jesus words and wondered how May could not have some compassion for those young girls whose lives she was ruining. May said a bunch of those Dirty Mouth Jean words and said that Carrie had to leave. There was some pushing. Carrie A. Nation’s bonnet was askew as she left.
“It’s a shame you should attack an old woman,” the sixty-one-year-old reformer shouted.
She never took the ax to another establishment. Butte was known forever as her Waterloo, sending her to retirement. Bigger and more well-known sinful districts might have existed in bigger and more well-known cities—in San Francisco, say, with the Barbary Coast, or on Bourbon Street in New Orleans—but Butte was tough to top, “an island of easy money surrounded by a sea of whiskey,” in the words of Jere “The Wise” Murphy, the police chief from 1893 until 1935.
The whiskey was poured in places named the Bucket of Blood, the Graveyard, the Cesspool, the Good Old Summer Time, the Pick and Shovel, the Alley Cat, the Beer Can, the Open All Night, and on a
nd on. The Atlantic, which was huge, ran for a city block from Park to Galena Street and boasted that it possessed the longest bar in the country. Fifteen bartenders worked that longest bar at the same time. Stanley Ketchel, who became middleweight champion of the world, started his boxing career at the Casino. That was how big the Casino was.
The bars offered food, entertainment, conversation, and definitely games of chance, starting with keno, a game invented within the city limits. A man could play cards, bet on the ball games back east, bet on the ball games at the high school, bet on what color horse or car might come up the street next. The get-rich-quick mentality that had founded the town in the first place took a walk every night.
The Butte bar scene was memorably described by Jack Kerouac in his novel On the Road, written in 1951. He expanded on that description in “The Great Western Bus Ride,” an article published in the March 1970 edition of Esquire magazine five months after his death at age forty-seven in St. Petersburg, Florida, from cirrhosis of the liver. This was a night in Butte:
Arriving, I stored my bag in a locker while some young Indian cat asked me to go drinking with him; he looked too crazy. I walked the sloping streets in super below-zero weather with my handkerchief tied tight around my leather collar and saw that everybody in Butte was drunk. It was Saturday night. I had hoped the saloons would stay open long enough for me to see them. They never even closed! In a great old-time saloon, I had a giant beer. On the wall was a big electric signboard flashing gambling numbers. The bartender gave me the honor of selecting a number for him on the chance of beginner’s luck. No soap. “Arrived here twenty-two years ago and stayed. Montanans drink too much, fight too much, love too much.” What characters in there: old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen! Groups of sullen Indians drank red rotgut in the john. Hundreds of men played cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spittoons. It was the end of my quest for an ideal bar. An old blackjack dealer tore my heart out, he reminded me so much of W. C. Fields and my father, fat, with a bulbous nose, great rugged pockmarked angelic face, wiping himself with a back-pocket handkerchief, green eyeshade, wheezing with big asthmatic laborious sadness in the Butte winter night games till he finally packed off for home and a snort to sleep another day. I also saw a ninety-year-old man called Old John who coolly played cards till dawn and had been doing so since 1880 in Montana … since the days of the winter cattle drive to Texas, and the days of Sitting Bull. There was another old man with an aged, loving, shaggy sheepdog who ambled off in the cold mountain night after satisfying his soul at cards. There were Greeks and Chinamen. The bus didn’t leave Butte till dawn. I promised myself I’d come back. The bus roared down the slope and looking back I saw Butte on her fabled Gold Hill still lit like jewelry and sparkling on the mountainside in the blue northern dawn.
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