HOW INNOVATION AND RENOVATION ARE MAKING BUTTE NEW AGAIN by Sherman Cahill
Butte has always been a little different.
Different, when it comes to it, from everywhere else in the galaxy, most likely. Find me a better city in either of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, and I’ll cook and eat my hat. A hat that reads “‘Montana Tech Orediggers,” by the way. And I’d really prefer not to have to eat it because it’s my favorite hat.
Different from the rest of Montana. Different from the rest of America.
Butte has been different from the very beginning, even as far back as the 1890s, when the Holy City, as I’ve come to know it, was little more than a confused jumble of rickety shacks.
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Even back then, there was something about Butte that seemed to breed innovation in those who lived here. Take, for instance, Bylo. Bylo, according to Copper Camp, the classic Works Progress Administration history of early Butte, was a “rotund individual”
who sold “hokey pokeys” out of a hand cart. “Hokey pokey,” evidently, was turn-of-the-century slang for ice cream. Every summer, Bylo’s operating costs swelled as he bought dozens of pounds of ice. Bylo evidenced Butte’s genius for innovation, or at least an early manifestation thereof, when he happened on a scheme to secure a steady supply of ice for free, or next to it. Again, we’re talking innovation here. Sometimes innovation is messy, and progress means making choices that can seem, in the light of today’s, shall we say, more progressive views on sanitation, macabre.
He bought ice from the mortuary. At that time, wakes were vitally important to the culture of Butte. They may, in fact, have been at its center. Though you see them less often than you used to these days, wakes were when scores and scores and scores of people, friends and family and loved ones and friends of friends, and strangers, and neighbors from a few blocks over, certain representatives of the clergy, the police and, of course, the mining union, and, finally, strangers, would show up to drink, all while the corpse of the dearly departed rested in a huge trough of ice. Ice that, were it not for Bylo’s innovation, would otherwise wet a patch of mucky street. Neighborhood children got their creamy MNews Fall 2022
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