I heard tales of Shoestring Annie, Dirty-Mouth Jean, and the old madame who beat up Carrie Nation when she took her temperance crusade to the wrong bar. But there were all sorts of stories that were told about the “old days.” Stories about the racetrack that had stood where East Junior High (now East Middle School) had been built.
When I was a child, the old tunnel mines had all been shut down, and the copper came from an open-pit mine that had eaten the suburbs of Meaderville, McQueen, and East Butte-and continued to grow until it ate the old amusement park Columbia Gardens. The mining town once had a large Chinese population as well as Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, and Greek. Butte was the third city in the world to have electricity-Paris, France, and New York City being the first two. It is a town of about thirty-four thousand people that once had a population far greater-most of whom came to work the mines that started as gold mines, shifted to silver mines, and finally produced high-quality copper just as the country (and the world) began stringing copper wires for electricity. In the turn-of-the-century Butte Montana, a young man, turned to a vampire, struggles with his nature and eventually finds a measure of redemption in an unlikely place. Mining towns are rough and human life is cheap.
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