A Gentlewoman’s View of Butte: Josephine White Bates’s 1888 Novel, A Blind Lead

A GENTLEWOMAN ’s VIEW of BUTTE 1 Josephine White Bates’s 1888 Novel, A Blind Lead by AARON PARRETT (background) An 1887 line drawing of Butte viewed from the southwest. The novel, A Blind Lead is a fictionalized account of the town’s society and the difficulties of operating an independent silver mine. 946-003, MHS Photograph Archives M O N T A N A T H E M A G A Z I N E O F W E S T E R N H I S T O R Y 42 B UTTE, MONTANA, got its start as a gold camp—astringofclaimsandshacksstretchingforacoupleofmilesalongasmallstream cascading down out of the mountains of the Continental Divide and meandering west into the head of the Deer Lodge Valley.The first strikes of any consequence in Montana had occurred a few years earlier, following placer gold discoveries at Bannack and Virginia City in 1862. Another rush followed in Helena in 1864, around the same time that prospectors started to seriously work the Silver Bow drainage .The amount of gold that prospectors washed out of the placers along Silver Bow Creek was respectable , but never in sufficient quantity to ­ precipitate a gold rush. Seasoned prospectors who had drifted up from Nevada and Colorado, however, recognized the evidence of other precious metals—most notably silver —augmenting the gold,which encouraged them to work their way up the creek to its source along what is now known as the Butte Hill.1 While some miners continued to recover ­ modest quantities of placer gold, by the 1870s, erstwhile miners along Silver Bow Creek began focusing primarily on silver. This required an entirely different approach, namely the sinking of vertical shafts and horizontal stopes below ground to follow the veins of metal ore, known as lodes or leads. Far more capitalintensive than placer mining, silver mining required a large outlay to purchase mining equipment such as pumping and hoisting apparatus and the hiring of experts to run the equipment and treat the ­ complex ores. Historian Ellen Crain noted that “in the early 1880s, Butte was referred to as the ‘Silver City.’” In 1884, silver boomed in the Butte area with the develop­ ment of the Independence District (adjacent to and immediately west of the Butte District). The silver mines came into play when mining was still a relatively simple affair, before the introduction of the electrical and steam-powered improvements in Butte that would make copper mining possible on an industrial scale. For example, in 1884 in the Independence District,Crain wrote,“There were well over 18 mines actively producing and an average of 15 men working each shaft.” Crain explained that in the early 1880s, the available technology limited the mines to depths of at most ­ several hundred feet. Even as late as 1896, according to Western Mining World, only fifteen of the hundreds of Butte mines went deeper than 1,000 feet, none deeper than 1,500 feet, and the vast majority somewhere between 200 and 600 feet. In 1885, a thousandminersworkingthehillconstituteda“boom year,”a figure that would be dwarfed by the estimated twenty thousand men going underground every day during the height of the copper years in 1919.2 Josephine White Bates arrived in Butte during the height of the silver boom. History might best remember Bates as a New York blueblood, socialite , intellectual, and wife of celebrated civil engineer Lindon Wallace Bates, who later achieved fame for his contributions to the Galveston Sea Wall and the Panama Canal. The family maintained an address on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and their list of close friends included luminaries such as mining engineer and future president Herbert Hoover.3 Bates’s brief time in Montana inspired her to write a unique novel about Butte’s early days,before its fame as “the richest hill on earth.”Though the novel bears resemblance to the capitalist morality tales popular at the time, Bates complicates ideas about the rewards of hard work by painting a vivid portrait of the grueling,endless labor A portrait of Josephine White Bates, ca. 1895. Born in Ontario and educated in Chicago, Josephine White Bates was an author and active in women’s literary...

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