Work Song - Ivan Doig [1]
“You definitely have left me in want.” I reacted to the agent’s news with honest dismay, equipped with only the battered satchel that accompanied me everywhere. “The bulk of my worldly possessions are in that trunk.”
Squinting at me, he tossed aside his agent’s cap and donned a businesslike green visor. “Possessions like that do tend to bulk up when the claim form comes out, I’d say.” He slipped the pertinent piece of paper onto the counter in front of me, and I filled it out as expected, generous to myself and not the railroad.
The most precipitous chapter of life always begins before we quite know it is under way. With no belongings to speak of, I gathered what was left of my resolve and stepped outside for my first full look at where I had arrived.
Everything about Butte made a person look twice. My train journey had brought me across the Montana everyone thinks of, mile upon hypnotic mile of rolling prairie with snowcapped peaks in the distance, and here, as sudden and surprising as a lost city of legendary times, was a metropolis of nowhere: nearly a hundred thousand people atop the earth’s mineral crown, with nothing else around but the Rocky Mountains and the witnessing sky. The immediate neighborhood on the skirt of land out from the depot, as my gaze sorted it out, seemed to hold every manner of building from shanty to mansion, church to chicken coop, chop suey joint to mattress factory, all mixed together from one topsy-turvy block to the next. Butte stood more erect as the ground rose. In the city center, several blocks on up the slope, lofty buildings hovered here and there waiting for others to catch up, and the streets also took on elevation, climbing the blemished hill until workers’ cottages mingled with mines and dump heaps along the top of the namesake butte. Up there, the long-legged black steel frameworks over the mineshafts populated the skyline like a legion of half-done miniatures of Eiffel’s tower.
So, in some ways Butte appeared to me to be the industrial apotheosis of that proverbial city built upon a hill, and in other aspects the copper mining capital of the world showed no more pattern than a gypsy camp. I have to admit, I felt a catch at the heart at how different the whole thing was from the solitary homesteads and one-room school I had known the last time I tried my luck in this direction. Everything I knew how to part with I’d left behind in a prairie teacherage. But an urge can spin the points of a compass as strongly as the magnetism of ore, and in spite of all that happened back then, here I was once more in that western territory at the very edge of the map of imagination.
While I was busy gazing, a couple of bull-shouldered idlers in the shade of the depot eyed me with too much curiosity; somehow I doubted that they were sizing me up for any family resemblance to J. P. Morgan of Wall Street. With barely a glance their way, I squared my hat and hastened past as though I had an appointment. Which could be construed as the truth of the moment. The Richest Hill on Earth and I—and, if my hope was right, its riches—were about to become acquainted.
FIRST THINGS FIRST, though. I set out up the tilted city streets in search of lodging. In the business district ahead, proud brick buildings stood several stories above a forest of poles and electrical wires, another novelty I had not encountered in earlier Montana. But the world of 1919 was not that of a decade before in hardly any other way either; the Great War and four years of trenches filled with mud and blood had seen to that.
“Red-hot news, mister? Can’t get any newer!” A boy with a newspaper bag as big as he was came darting to my side. I handed him a coin and he scampered off, leaving me with a freshly inked Butte Daily Post. The front page could barely hold all the calamitous items there were to post. ATT’Y GENERAL WARNS OF DOMESTIC