Report the First

Rows of Big John's port-a-potties line the uptown streets. White tents rise up like the circus has come to town. Seven stages erected at strategic spots on streets named after states and rocks promise a lot of loud entertainment. Butte is ready for the National Folk Festival for the third and last year.

Butte and the surrounding area sit on 10,000 miles of underground tunnels where miners risked their lives to bring America copper, silver, and other precious metals. Want more historical and urban trivia about this unique American town, once called "the richest hill on earth"? Best place to look would be George Everett's two books on the city: Champagne in a Tin Cup and Butte Trivia.

Escaping the 100 plus degree heat of Baltimore, I landed at the Bert Mooney airport in Butte on Wednesday, July 7 in the early afternoon to a temperature of 65 degrees. After getting settled in my lodgings at the Capri Motel, a two story cinder block structure, which has a fifties feel to it, I headed out to get the lay of the land.

Butte, like most American cities has two faces. Next to the empty store fronts and boarded up buildings are the bright and successful enterprises struggling to overcome economic decline. The Capri itself is undergoing a complete renovation and painters are putting a fresh new face on the old girl and cleaning up visible surface areas with a pressure washer.

But, just as all humans share similar characteristics so too are they individuals, and Butte and its inhabitants developed their own unique character that is equal parts, geography, history, and experience. Today, eating breakfast I overheard a cafe owner and regular customer joking about the obituary of a local resident. The customer could not believe that the person portrayed in the obit was the same one he was familiar with. "And I don't know what kind of camera they used to take her picture, but I don't remember her ever looking like that."

"Yeah, I want one of them cameras," the cafe owner responded as she dipped her hands into a bin of chicken breasts she was breading.

Down the street, a sign in a window, written on the top of shopping bag that had been torn off, read: "To get a bag of Candy Please Enter in knife store." Pure Butte.

Many of the people here are descended from those who climbed a mile high to dig thousands of feet into the earth to bring back its treasures until they extracted all they could and poisoned their own lives. In Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Butte serves as the novel's setting renamed Personville but referred to as Poisonville. But like the phoenix, one of the town's inspirational symbols, it is trying to rise from the ashes.

Last night, at an event held at the World Museum of Mining to honor the Robins family, whose story could fill an entry ten time longer than this one, that sense of hope filled the air. The Robins are a mining family with Irish heritage. They like to say the English spell "Robins" with a second "b" and it stands for bastards.

Not even the mosquitoes, which were as big as sparrows and more plentiful, could dampen the enthusiasm and spirit that pervaded the atmosphere and seemed to rise above the Orphan Girl headframe, a 100 foot steel symbol of the city's past that shadowed the memorial wall listing the names of all the miners who died to give this town its life.