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What better place for a genuine daredevil,
a legitimate death defying type with a lifestyle to
match, to wrap it up? For I can't think of one good
reason that Evel Knievel did not die in 1969, at the age of 30,
in the parking lot of the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas.
So it is a fitting home again for the guy on the motorcycle
whose preference was once shots of Wild Turkey. But time
is quickly running out and home again is a town with
a history of young men dying young and violently. Bob Knievel
may consider himself one of the lucky who dodged that bullet.
When a aspiring labor leader named "Big" Bill Haywood
first visited here in 1899 he noted "the toll of death
in Butte was abnormal." Thirty years after
that visit, Haywood could recall that just the funeral benefits paid
by the Butte Miner,s Union "staggered me." As
far as Butte itself, he saw its cemeteries
as, "the city of the dead, mostly young miners, and
almost as large as the living population, even in this very young
city." Of course this is also the city where Haywood's pal,
Frank Little, met a violent end.
Nearly a half century later, in 1946, author John Gunther echoed
Haywood, describing Butte as a place similar to an
old European town where the cemetery population was far
larger then the living population. At the time of
Gunther's writing, 2,500 miners had died violently on the Butte
hill.
Other deaths from other reasons such as miners consumption took
an even heavier toll. And, as one who has looked at many of
the coroner's reports, I was struck by the matter of factness
of the record keeping. While many of the reports, especially
when multiple deaths were involved, are quite detailed,
the greatest number were simply summed up in three words. "fall
of ground." And from time to time I came across
another description of a death underground, words that
would reach out at you from the old pages and then grab you.
The report simply said "blown to bits" and
nothing else.
And we can find no shortages of descriptions of a day
and a night in June of 1917 when twelve off-shift miners
of a rescue squad crammed into a cage and dropped down to
the 1600 level of the smoking shaft of the Speculator mine.
As they stepped out of the cage, they were met with blasts from
mine gas and the dozen men were instantly "blown to
bits." In another attempt, two miners tried again
to enter the mine in a double-decked padded cage. Failing
in their effort, they signaled up to the hoist room and
were quickly pulled to the surface. But it was too
late. Above ground and in sight of hundreds of horrified
miners, the ghastly cage came to a stop and slowly spun on the
cable. It held only the smoldering remains of the two miners.
And all night and until early into that June morning in
1917, the sirens wailed on the hill and thousands of Butte
residents crowded the streets and mineyards. Later the crowds
were moved to a public morgue where many men women and children
broke down completely. The tragedy of Butte's Speculator-Granite
Mountain mine today remain America's greatest hardrock mining
disaster.
Then there were scribes and scribblers describing the Butte
feeling of death as "if it were in the air like the sulphur."
Two of the titles Dashiell Hammett considered for his Butte novel,
Red Harvest were The City of Death and The Black
City while Gertrude Atherton called Butte in her novel so
titled The Perch of the Devil. For you see there
was once an era when the grim news coming off the Butte
hill was received as stoically as other lands greeted the news
of combat casualties in wartime. And with little or no notice in
the daily papers. As as far as working conditions went, Hammett
noted in 1929 that when "the last skull had been cracked,
the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Butte was a used
firecracker. "
Forgotten now, but like Evel Knievel, there was another famous
young man from Butte with a controversial lifestyle. He was not
as lucky, being shot to death a few days after his 24th birthday
in 1911. A daredevil with a life style to match, but of a different
sort, his name was Stanley Ketchell. A century later, this
ragtime red-light Butte roustabout is still considered
one of the greatest boxers that ever climbed in the ring.
And this Ketchell guy crossed into myth despite the fact that
he was a heavy drinker, gambler and womanizer. And if that wasn't
enough, he smoked cigars and had a well know taste for opium,
the old Butte vice. Even Hollywood couldn't have invented Stanley
Ketchell.
As the old Anaconda Standard remarked on his
passing: "for a long time Stanley Ketchell hung around
the bad lands making his living in as easy a fashion as he could,
but always ready to fight. He lived by taking on other fighters
at resorts in the lower part of town where a prize fight was
an added attraction to the varieties and the liquor."
And finally dear reader, we have reached a point where I
must close and you might ask a fair question and that is just
what does this all mean?
Well many years ago, they seem like a thousand now, Knievel
and I were both in Butte grade schools Knievel went
to the Webster Garfield and I was at St. Patrick's where I learned
the rosary and that Ireland must be ridden of the English and of
course, to always vote the Democratic ticket. And like Knievel, I
also grew up with the stories, tales of the mines on the
hill and dynamite and gangsters as well as wandering a town surrounded
by big cemeteries while the lving city was littered with mine
yards with mine whistles, massive ore dumps, railroad tracks
as well as saloons mostly open to all ages and a couple of blocks
of brothels or what we called "cat houses."
In other words, as far as Evel Knievel and Butte go, there
is no disconnect.
Butte's Evel Knievel Days, featuring motorcycle jumps by Robbie
Knievel and world-record holder Ryan Capes, takes place July
27-29. For details, see http://knievelweek.com/
Jackie Corr lives in Butte, Montana. He can be
reached at:jcorr@bigskyhsd.com
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