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from Copper Camp: Stories of the World's Greatest Mining Town - Butte,
Montana from the Introduction - Butte is unpredictable. Yesterday, today and probably tomorrow she is a city of paradox - virtuous yet wanton, vindictive and forgiving, hard headed or charitable, kind, cruel, religious, agnostic, sordid, exalted, gay and tragic. Magnificent when viewed by night from the Continental Divide, Butte has been likened to a diamond set in jet, but by day she is an uncorseted wench, dissipated from the night before. "Perch of the devil," she has been called by some, and "merciful mother of the mountains," by others. This is the city where in 1902, a ghost, haunting the environs of adjoining Centerville shared space in the nation's press with Mary MacLane, a precocious young writer who was then communing with the devil at a cemetery on Montana Street, southern extremity of the camp, while writing her sensational autobiography, The Story of Mary MacLane. About the same period, Callahan the Bum spent the better part of a summer afternoon trying to hang himself from an awning rope on one of the main streets of the business district. When no heed was paid by the passing throng, he finally gave up in disgust, remarking that he would have succeeded but for the fact "the damn rope liked to choke him to death." Two sparrows in a fight to the death in front of a newspaper office caused a crowd of several hundred to gather and urge on the tiny gladiators, the newspaper holding up its presses so as to announce the victor in its afternoon edition. Butte boasts of suburbs called Nanny Goat Hill, Hungry Hill, Seldom Seen, Dogtown, Chicken Flats and Butchertown. The society pages of the daily papers often feature side by side the likeness of a West Side society matron and that of a promised bride, whose address might be the kitchen of a Finnish boarding house on the "wrong" side of town. Her saloons have been named The Alley Cat, Bucket of Blood, The Water Hole, Frozen Inn, Big Stope, The Cesspool, Collar and Elbow, Open-All-Night, Graveyard, The Good Old Summer Time, Pick and Shovel, The Beer Can, Saturday Night, and Pay Day.
The year was 1905 at the old Butte High School. The second year English class was in session. It was near the end of the school year and the pupils, with visions of vacation just ahead, were in hilarious mood. Their teacher made little attempt to curb their boisterous spirits. She, herself, was thinking and planning for the happy months ahead. But there was one pupil who did not join in the merrymaking. A frail, flower-like wisp of a girl who scarcely looked her seventeen years. As her pencil flew over the manuscript before her, a strange look came over the child's odd, sea-green eyes. The girl was Mary MacLane, and the manuscript over which she worked was The Life Of Mary MacLane, which in two years was to make the pale, fragile student famous the world over. This, her first story, written at odd moments in the classroom and during long evenings at her home on West Broadway in Butte took the nation by storm. In reality, it was nothing but thinly veiled sexuality, handled in a precocious manner, but superbly written. It was essentially the same, if not as crude, as the confession stories which became popular a generation later. The critics were divided, but the book was condemned by church and school. It sold by the thousands and edition after edition was printed. Mary MacLane became overnight a world figure, and was lionized throughout art and literary centers. She moved East and remained there where she wrote several other novels which had a slight success on the reputation of her initial effort. And then, years later, disillusioned, she came back to Butte, a world-wise woman of thirty-five, attempting to recapture the spark that was present when she was eighteen. It was then that Mary MacLane showed that she was a showman of ability. She saw to it that her every move was news. She lived alone. She took long walks out on the Flat in the middle of the night. She spent many nights in the Butte cemeteries "communing with her spirit" as she told reporters. The book, I, Mary MacLane, was finally finished. Advance ballyhoo made it another sensation. A motion picture was made of the story and Mary acted the title role herself. The picture had only slight success - and Mary MacLane never again wrote a line that caused more than passing interest.
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