Out & About Montana - Butte, my hometown  by SuzAnne Miller

     In July, Dunrovin Ranch took a horseback expedition to the Butte and Anaconda area. The goal was to ride in some beautiful and interesting country and to take in some of the best music our nation has to offer at the National Folk Festival in Butte. Yet this particular trip to my hometown also made me reflect on my childhood roots - roots entwined with nearly every aspect of Butte and the beautiful surrounding Summit Valley.

Butte was a BIG place to be from – it was built by BIG men (rich and powerful to poor and humble) doing BIG things (Butte accounted for over 1/3 of the copper used in the United State’s industrial revolution) in a BIG way (creating the world’s largest open pit mine) that had a BIG influence on Montana’s history and left a BIG environmental mess (now the world’s largest superfund site). Butte is central to what Montana has been and is now, and has been the subject of many, many books, articles, and films. Being from Butte is to personally understand and identify both the benefits and the costs of all that BIG history.

     Edwin Dobb, another child of Butte, best captures this contradictory nature of being from Butte. His 1996 article in Harper’s Magazine, Pennies from Hell beautifully articulates the sweet dilemma of those of us who have come to embrace a strong environmental conscience while at the same time recognize the many personal benefits we received from all that environmental destruction brought by years of hard rock mining. Among those benefits was a vibrant, multicultural city built by immigrants from across the world (hence the name Butte, America). To embrace Butte is to simultaneously mourn the destruction and celebrate the spoils.

     So for me, the sights, sounds, smells and music that permeated from Butte on that lovely July day brought back strong memories and images that only another Butte child would understand. To most, the huge and imposing mining head frames that marked the mine shafts were but exotic backdrops for the festival; yet for me, these were the places where I would accompany my mother in the late afternoon of a cold, cold winter’s day to wait for my father to reappear after spending 8 hours working in the dark, damp world of the tunnels, nearly a mile under the ground. The festival’s Cornish pasties, Croatian povitica, German apple kuchen, Italian raviolis, and Mexican tamales all took me back to Butte restaurants long since gone--or to neighborhood kitchen tables on Placer Street. Each old building and each mountain scene held my attention and reminded me that I could never not be part of this place.

     Why was this trip to Butte such a strong, emotional trip for me? It started with our very first stop of the day, at the Granite Mountain Disaster and Memorial Overlook high above the Berkeley Pit. These two landmarks underscore Butte’s dark side – the most toxic body of water in the world is situated at the feet of the largest hard rock mining disaster in US history, in which 168 men lost their lives on June 8, 1917. To read the names and the stories of the men and their families whose lives ended or changed forever on that day is to glimpse the human cost for all the riches that Butte produced. And, to witness over two hundred fellow Montanans performing their Cool Water Hula above the deadly stew in the Berkeley pit is to understand the impact of Butte mining on its water resources and how fundamental clean, safe water is to all life.

     Standing on the rim of the Berkeley Pit looking south through the Summit Valley to the majestic mountains beyond, my eyes fell on High Land Mountain where I worked for two summers as a Forest Service Lookout, just out of high school. My memory took me back to the nights when I would use my binoculars to see the bright lights of Butte from my lonely perch and feel very ambivalent about my solitary job. There I was, stuck between two worlds, each vying for my attention. Little did I understand that those lonely days watching for forest fires solidified in me a life of longing to be among the mountains.

     My father felt those same urges. After a week of danger, hard work, and the grimy, noisy life as a ventilation engineer in the mines, he took his family to the mountains for the weekend, to fish the clean rivers, breath the clear air, and listen to the silence. Yes, Butte left its marks all over me and I am grateful for what it gave me.

     Leaving the Berkeley Pit behind, we drove down the mountain and into the main part of the city to enjoy the festival. And what an event it was! We were treated to music that could rarely be heard in Montana. Two of my favorites were the Indian Classical Fusion by Aditya Prakash Ensemble and the Roma Nota of Gypsy Violinist Tony Ballog . Butte provided a very dramatic backdrop for listening to such different music styles and traditions. How fitting for the multicultural traditions that still thrive in Butte.

     This incredible gathering of musicians presented by the National Folk Festival occurs in a host city for three years, then moves on to a different host city. The idea is to help communities establish the organizational structure for hosting large musical festivals in the hopes that they will continue on their own when the National Festival moves on. Indeed, The National Folk Festival was such a huge success that it has prompted Butte to initiate the first Montana Folk Festival to be held in July, 2011. Henceforth, another multicultural tradition is established in Butte, and another layer of my hometown pride has been tucked into my saddle bags.