Teddy Roosevelt's visit to Butte, 1903.

Teddy Roosevelt recalls his May 1903 visit to Butte, in a letter to his Secretary of State, John Hay, later that year. Quoted in My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, by Corrine Roosevelt Robinson (1921).

Theodore Roosevelt, 1904.

From Washington [State] I turned southward, and when I struck northern Montana, again came to my old stamping grounds and among my old friends. I met all kinds of queer characters with whom I had hunted and worked and slept and sometimes fought. From Helena, I went southward to Butte, reaching that city in the afternoon of May 27th. By this time, Seth Bullock had joined us, together with an old hunting friend, John Willis, a Donatello of the Rocky Mountains,—wholly lacking, however, in that morbid self-consciousness which made Hawthorne's 'faun' go out of his head because he had killed a man. Willis and I had been in Butte some seventeen years before, at the end of a hunting trip in which we got dead broke, so that when we struck Butte, we slept in an outhouse and breakfasted heartily in a two-bit Chinese restaurant. Since then I had gone through Butte in the campaign of 1900, the major part of the inhabitants receiving me with frank hostility, and enthusiastic cheers for Bryan.

However, Butte is mercurial, and its feelings had changed. The wicked, wealthy, hospitable, full-blooded, little city, welcomed me with wild enthusiasm of a disorderly kind. The mayor, Pat Mullins, was a huge, good-humored creature, wearing, for the first time in his life, a top hat and a frock coat, the better to do honor to the President.

Seth Bullock (from Wikipedia)

National party lines counted very little in Butte where the fight was Heinze and anti-Heinze, Ex-Senator Carter and Senator Clark being in the opposition. Neither side was willing to let the other have anything to do with the celebration, and they drove me wild with their appeals, until I settled that the afternoon parade and speech was to be managed by the Heinze group of people, and the evening speech by the anti-Heinze people; and that the dinner should contain fifty of each faction and should be presided over in his official capacity by the mayor. The ordinary procession, in barouches, was rather more exhilarating than usual, and reduced the faithful secret service men very nearly to the condition of Bedlamites. The crowd was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey, and in their desire to be sociable, broke the lines and jammed right up to the carriage. Seth Bullock, riding close beside the rear wheel of my carriage, for there were hosts of so-called 'rednecks' or 'dynamiters' in the crowd, was such a splendid looking fellow with his size and supple strength, his strangely marked aquiline face, with its big moustache, and the broad brim of his soft dark hat drawn down over his dark eyes. However, no one made a motion to attack me.

My address was felt to be honor enough for one hotel, so the dinner was given in the other [The Thornton]. When the dinner was announced, the Mayor led me in!—to speak more accurately, tucked me under one arm and lifted me partially off the ground so that I felt as if I looked like one of those limp dolls with dangling legs, carried around by small children, like Mary Jane in the 'Gollywogs,' for instance. As soon as we got in the banquet hall and sat at the end of the table, the Mayor hammered lustily with the handle of his knife and announced, 'Waiter, bring on the feed.' Then, in a spirit of pure kindliness, 'Waiter, pull up the curtains and let the people see the President eat';—but to this, I objected. The dinner was soon in full swing, and it was interesting in many respects. Besides my own party, including Seth Bullock and Willis, there were fifty men from each of the Butte factions.

In Butte, every prominent man is a millionaire, a gambler, or a labor leader, and generally he has been all three. Of the hundred men who were my hosts, I suppose at least half had killed their man in private war or had striven to compass the assassination of an enemy. They had fought one another with reckless ferocity. They had been allies and enemies in every kind of business scheme, and companions in brutal revelry. As they drank great goblets of wine, the sweat glistened on their hard, strong, crafty faces. They looked as if they had come out of the pictures in Aubrey Beardsley's Yellow Book. The millionaires had been laboring men once, the labor leaders intended to be millionaires in their turn, or else to pull down all who were. They had made money in mines, had spent it on the races, in other mines or in gambling and every form of vicious luxury, but they were strong men for all that. They had worked, and striven, and pushed, and trampled, and had always been ready, and were ready now, to fight to the death in many different kinds of conflicts. They had built up their part of the West, they were men with whom one had to reckon if thrown in contact with them. . . . But though most of them hated each other, they were accustomed to take their pleasure when they could get it, and they took it fast and hard with the meats and wines.

Roosevelt photo (1904) from Library of Congress.

Booker T. Washington comes to Butte

By Richard I. Gibson

In Butte in 1913.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was a prominent leader and spokesman in the African-American community from 1890 until he died in 1915, traveling the country to promote the cause of education and schools for African-Americans. He gained support from and became friends with a long list of prominent backers, including William Howard Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Sears Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald, and Standard Oil’s Henry Rogers—the co-founder of the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which evolved into the Anaconda.

Washington came to Butte on March 6, 1913. He arrived as the white supremacist governor of South Carolina, Coleman Blease, was announcing that Negroes in that state would not be tried for alleged assaults on white women (conviction would be automatic), nor would those who lynched them be punished. He also famously advocated beer over Coca-Cola as a refreshing drink—in his inaugural address as governor. In Butte, Washington tactfully refrained from saying “what I think of Governor Blease,” but he lauded the good works of Alabama Governor O’Neill: “My race is getting a square deal in his state.” Alabama was (and is) home to the Tuskegee Institute that Washington made famous.

A welcoming committee from the Colored Progressive League met Washington’s train in Butte. He was given an automobile tour of Butte (including a surface visit to the mines) that ended at his hotel, the Thornton, where he expressed surprise that all of Butte’s people were not covered with icicles—this was his first trip to the Northwest. Introduced by former Montana Lieutenant Governor W.R. Allen, Washington delivered his speech that evening at the Auditorium in the old Butte Public Library on West Broadway Street to “a large audience about equally divided between the white and black races,” according to the Butte Miner. The presentation was followed by a banquet in Washington’s honor at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Shaffer Chapel at Platinum and Idaho.

Shaffer Chapel, built in 1901, still stands today; it was reportedly a gift to the African-American community from W.A. Clark. It was the second home to the AME congregation in Butte. That group built its first church at Idaho and Mercury (where the fire station is today) in 1892, but after they moved to Shaffer Chapel, the original building became home to the Baptist Bethel Church which also served African-Americans.

Shaffer Chapel, Platinum at Idaho, in 2013.

Resources: Butte Miner, Anaconda Standard (including photo of Washington), March 1913; W.R. Allen, 1911, caricature scanned by Butte Public Library; Methodism on the Richest Hill on Earth 1873 – 2007, compiled and edited by Mike Parr; 2013 photo of Shaffer Chapel by Dick Gibson.