Digging In | 6 Meet the Foundation CEO

HOW INNOVATION AND RENOVATION ARE MAKING BUTTE NEW AGAIN

by Sherman Cahill

Butte has always been a little different. Different from the rest of Montana. Different from the rest of America.

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.

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.

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.

A concept rendering of Uptown Butte in the Uptown Butte Master Plan by DHM Design.

confection at a very affordable price, Bylo fattened his margins, and thus was born an early, if crude, form of recycling.

Ladies and gentlemen, Butte has always been about two things: innovation and renewal.

A few years later, in the heyday of the headframes, there were many places where a hungry worker could fill their belly and slake their thirst. A lunch counter had to think of something different to win over the blue-collar, pro-union crowd. Sam Kenoffel, owner of the Spokane Cafe, innovated. He promised he would never serve anything, not so much as a pasty crumb, to any loathsome scab or strikebreaker.

Sure, that was a hundred years ago.

But Butte is still different. Butte still innovates and renews.

While now it’s admittedly less about corpse ice and refusing to serve non-union blacklegs, the city of Butte has never stopped innovating. That same spirit that drove those early residents of Butte still moves in those lucky and wise enough to call it home today.

I. 1923, Film Production, and Butte Tourism

Butte’s historic uptown district has a look out of time. Even from the vantage of a vehicle traversing I-90 at 65 mph, the oldest and grandest parts of Butte are impossibly commanding.

No wonder, then, that a much-anticipated spin-off of one of TV’s most popular dramas should choose to film here, and make Butte the headquarters of their production.

Now, if you’re anything like me, Yellowstone began as a show your father (and everyone else you know over, say, 58) recommended to you over and over until you finally watched it. Then, slowly, perhaps even begrudgingly, you became obsessed with it until you’d watched every season, every episode, including the first spin-off, 1883. Not to mention the American Frontier trilogy of films from creator/director/writer Taylor Sheridan, which are Yellowstone’s spiritual predecessors.

So I guess now I’ve become a fan—first ambivalently, then reluctantly, and then with gusto.

But even better than that, I stand to benefit from Yellowstone, because 1923, the newest addition to the Dutton family saga starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, means big money for Butte.

The production will bring the city upwards of $435,000 in rent for the Butte Civic Center alone, and that’s not including the hundreds of cast and crew who will be eating at local restaurants, buying local goods, staying at local hotels, and, naturally, drinking themselves silly at local pubs, as is the local tradition. A study by the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research found that the 2021 filming of the fourth season of Yellowstone, centered in Missoula, resulted in 527 permanent jobs for Montana residents, $25.3 million in personal income for Montana households, $10.6 million in state revenues, and $85.8 million in additional gross receipts for Montana businesses and organizations.

And that’s not “gross” as in a popsicle packed in corpse ice. That’s “gross” as in “gross profit or income,” but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?

The previous Yellowstone spin-off, 1883, starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill, was another titanic success. Enough so that it is getting a second season.

Imagine that this new Butte-centered iteration of one of the most popular dramas on TV, which so far has only gathered in momentum, will also prove popular. It’s not a stretch to think that such a show, with a cast like Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, taking advantage of all the adventure and grit Butte’s history provides, might be yet another big hit. Yellowstone’s fourth season premiere, for instance, commanded nearly 15 million live viewers, and keep in mind that’s in the age of digital streaming.

Long story short: if 1923 is yet another hit, and there is absolutely every reason to think it will be, it’s going to mean a major shot in the arm for Butte’s already-growing tourism industry. You might be tempted to think that Hollywood has recently discovered Butte, but the Mining City has been a star of film since at least 1980, when scenes from Michael Cimino’s legendary epic western Heaven’s Gate were filmed here, as was 1993’s Return to Lonesome Dove, German auteur Wim Wender’s 2005 dramedy Don’t Come Knocking, and, recently, revision western Ballad of Lefty Brown.

As a matter of fact, the die may have been cast for Butte’s cinematic destiny when, in the early years of the 20th century, a young English theater performer came through Butte with a pantomime and vaudeville act led by Fred Karno, the man who, I kid you not, invented the old pie in the face gag. The 21-year-old actor, a promising upstart by the name of Charles Chaplin, would become one of the most famous men in the world within the decade, but he never forgot Butte’s working girls, remembering in his memoirs how “Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the West, and it was true.”

And while that might be one of the only compliments to Butte’s history of innovation and renewal that we’d prefer not to recapture, it’s still difficult not to hear the great master’s glowing review of Butte’s charms with at least a little pride.

But if our red-light district has dwindled, Butte’s film committee has picked up the slack. Today, the BFEC, or the Butte Film & Entertainment Committee, helps facilitate film productions in Butte and provides a “one-source stop for film-related needs.”