In the post just below, a couple of the regulars opened an interesting discussion about Helena, one of them referring to it as his favorite Montana city, the other as his least favorite of the major cities in the state. I can t resist weighing in, though I won t do so decisively. At the risk of sounding like a wishy-washy, fence-sitting, objectivity-preserving reporter, I have to say that I don t have a favorite.
I ve lived in Billings for the past 18 years, so I ve developed a liking for this town that only comes from familiarity. In other words, I love Billings because I know it so well that it would be hard to leave, hard to imagine moving somewhere fresh and starting the whole process of learning a town from scratch. I ve learned to love the Yellowstone River more than I ve ever loved any body of water, even more than White Bear Lake, in which I seem to have spent half my childhood.
And I love the Rims and the river parks and Montana Avenue and the nearly perfect neighborhood around Pioneer Park, where we were lucky enough to have settled. I could go on, but you probably get the picture.
As much as I like Billings, though, on occasion I feel a strong need for a Missoula fix, or a Butte fix.
Missoula is a great place for me because I lived there, most of the time, between the ages of 18 and 25. That s a good age to be just about anywhere, but being that age in Missoula back in the 1970s was close to paradise. And Missoula has those fine rivers, too, the Clark Fork, the Blackfoot and the Bitterroot.
In Missoula I lived so closed to the Clark Fork that when I d get off work at the airport in the summer, pouring sweat and stinking of jet fuel, I d run into my apartment, throw on a pair of shorts, dash out the door, sprint a few hundred yards and dive in. It s still a great town. Some of its glory has faded in my mind, but you can t beat it for live music, good food and good bars.
Did I never grow up? So sue me.
And Butte.
Butte is like Chicago for me, except that I never lived in Chicago. But when I wanted to go to Chicago, no other city would do. I assume most people who ve been around this state at all know what I mean.
If you don t, my words won t quite convey it, so bear with me. Butte is a cold dose of reality, a slap in the face, but at the same time it s the most magical place in Montana, where the past is so powerful that you feel it on every crooked street and steep winding alley. You could be walking around feeling down in the dumps and then you d pass five houses in a row, each of them five or 10 feet from the next, each of an entirely different order of architecture, each on an entirely different level, with crazy little wrought-iron railings or an exotic cupola or off-kilter porch and suddenly, without warning, you d feel like a million bucks without quite knowing why.
And if by chance you spent too much time in Butte and all its polyglot, crazy-quilt charms started to grow stale, why, all you had to do was proceed up the hill to the even more exotic and inexplicable burg of Walkerville. Damn, I feel the need for a Butte fix coming on right now.
Miles City affects me in somewhat the same way as Butte.
It s got a world of history on it, too, but maybe of a more normal, understandable kind. Miles City had its immigrants from many countries, but it was basically a cow town that squeezed all those newcomers into the cowboy mold pretty quickly. In Butte, for some reason, the separate nationalities retained their distinctness for generations.
But Miles City is still a hell of a town, with almost as many characters per capita as Butte. Billings might have been like Miles City once, but I doubt it. In Billings the tradespeople got the upper hand early on.
In Miles City, the wild and woolly cowboys ran the joint, or at least set the tone, and it still shows.
As for Helena, the city that started this line of thinking, I still don t know it well enough to have an opinion. I always love the grand old buildings on and around the gulch, and I like the hills, but I ve never felt the spark here that I feel in the towns mentioned above.
Maybe I need to spend more time here. I don t know. Ditto with Great Falls, which I barely know.
Last fall, after all these years, I felt I finally got past the hideous facade of 10th Avenue and explored the interesting parts of town. I saw just enough to make me believe that Great Falls has much more to recommend it than I ever dreamed. But I still don t know that for sure.
And Bozeman? I ve been there plenty and feel I know the town a little, but if it has a soul I haven t found it yet. I do know I liked it best when I first encountered it more than 30 years ago, when it was still pretty much a big ag town, a cowboy-and-engineer town that didn t have any pretensions.
It s not an ag town any more, but its pretensions are many. I think it attracts so many people from out of state because it is a blank slate on which they can sketch their own fantasies of Life in the West. Well, I m generalizing too much and getting pretentious myself, so I d better quit.
All I have left to say is that I think at this point in my life, the ideal situation would be to live in Billings and be able to visit all the Montana towns I like, and to explore the ones I don t yet know. Which possibly is another way of saying I m too lazy to think of changing my situation.
on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 9:26 pm and is filed under .
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Very perceptive analysis on Miles City and Butte, Ed, and on how they started so seemingly alike and ended up being so opposite from each other except for the common denominator of hard-partying.
Great Falls is an acquired taste. I lived there for seven years, didn t much care for it at first, and around the fourth or fifth year realized that I had grown to love it there.
I could easily have stayed the rest of my life if not for what at the time seemed to be a major career opportunity. I was also in Missoula for seven years, counting college. It was a great place to be young.
Now when I go there I just feel old and out of place (probably because I AM old and out of place).
I was probably unduly harsh toward Helena. The Cathedral, for example, is a magnificent building, and I m not even Catholic.
Still, the winters I spent in Helena, with day after day, week after week, of unrelenting gray skies and cold temps, made me wonder if I were coming down with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Never having been west of Cleveland before in my life, I took a job in Butte sight unseen in 1979. Flying in on a DC-9 out of Salt Lake on Western, the stewardess told the already innebriated cowboys on the back of the plane that they could not serve beers until they cleared Utah s airspace.
When we touched down, there was a loud YEE-HAHH from the back of the plane. Welcome to Butte!
A couple weeks later, I had a conversation with a woman running the cash register at a grocery store.
This conversation lasted about 10 minutes and there were about 5 people behind me and they did not gripe they joined the conversation! I enjoyed Luigi s and Charley s New Deal Bar, where I commiserated with Mike Judd on the night John Lennon was murdered,
Circumstances took me back East, but when I turned 40 I knew I had to get back here, So I did.
But Luigi s is gone, as is Tony the Trader, and the sheriff wants to ban open containers in Butte.
KXLF-AM used to play John Phillip Sousa music for the 4th of July parade and a bunch of teenagers would march in formation with radios on their shoulders, That doesn t happen any more either.
Well, it better than Bozeman. The Bozeman bashing is ubiquitous, from the hatred of our high school competitive teams to our soul-less community, isn t it fun to bash Bozeman?
It s true we have out of staters moving here; many, though, maybe even most, are come-backers from other towns in Montana who have gone out of state and are now moving back once they ve acquired some savvy and experience in their various trades and professions. Be sure to hammer them hard for picking Bozeman instead of somewhere else.
They come back for all the things we can offer: our thriving retail center commerce that includes a rapidly improving hospital and our growing small manufacturing sector.
They join our incredible Community Food Co-Op; they support the fine arts and the k-12 music system; they flock to the functioning and successful downtown, drive the 17 miles to community owned Bridger Bowl, participate in the running clubs and the hiking clubs and the garden clubs, work in the volunteer organizations that do so much in every sector of the civic life, form tight neighborhood organizations, drink at the homey and homely little brew pub Senator Tester and I visited a couple of weeks ago and support other local businesses that prosper despite the growing presence of national retail and restaurant chains.
I moved here three decades ago, and what I found Bozeman offered then, as it does now, is the chance for outsiders to become a welcome and vital part of the community. Entrpreneurs can grow successful businesses, young families can grow and prosper, outdoorspeople can create new adventures for everyone, even those interested in politics can be elected Mayor even if they aren t real, genuine Montanans .
There s not that acid test of you ain t from around here are ya, boy here in Bozeman. As a result our elementary schools are overflowing, and we are a young, vital community.
I realize saying something bad about Bozeman is a good segue into what s right with your community, but I can brag about Bozeman without saying anything bad about any other towns.
I love the center of the state. Billings is really getting it together. Havre s got so many problems but such a can do attitude and I really like their university on the hill.
We re not bad mouthing anyone down here, just accepting people for what they offer and turning that resource into community. For little towns with staying power AND character, you should come visit the revitalized Philipsburg, located in southwest Montana between Anaconda and Drummond. The residents of P Burg have taken great pains to make this one of the most attractive old mining towns in the West.
Helena does nothing for me. When I was working, I had to travel there once per week for meetings, and the place never caught on with me. PLUS, the heat in the summer is awful.
And I concur that this is one of the best short columns I have seen on City Lights, thanks to Ed. A little surprise here..
No mention of Anaconda from Ed, the street lights, bars without a phone, bib overalls and white dress shirts, Smelterman s Day at Washoe Park and the still haunting Sladich sign.
I have always thought Anaconda as the most distinct town in Montana, the one place where you might find Charles Dickens wandering at night - how many other places in Montana would you say that about?
And from the old cemetery on the hill, one of the most striking, if not melancholy of views anywhere in the world.
And some of the best people I have known live there and without the attention Butte gets.
Of course, there is Butte where I was born and will die and I may have become too familiar with it to be as observant as I once was.
Being born in 1940 I remember the foreign lanuages spoken in Butte when I was a kid , but in Anaconda, there seemed to be much more of those lanuages and the ethnic enclaves always seemed deeper and more formidable I should have known this was dangerous ground.
How could I forget Anaconda, the first town where I worked as a reporter? Well, see the criterion mentioned in my comment above. But still, I should have mentioned it as a great place to visit at least, because I loved a lot of things about Anaconda.
And Jackie s right about the ethnicity really hanging on there. Old Mr. and Mrs.
Monaco, who lived next door to us in the center of Anaconda, had a house that looked, on the inside, like it could have been in Italy 50 years ago. That was a town crawling with characters, but the sad thing is how much was lost to fire (arson?) and so-called urban development.
As for the cemetery on the hill, I believe that would be Mount Olive, and a melancholy view it was.
And Philipsburg? Another swell town, of course.
I first spent time there during a couple of Flint Creek Valley Days celebrations, which were some of the rowdiest street parties I d ever been to up to that point. I understand people are discovering P Burg now for its incredible beauty and the way it s tucked in so far off the highway. The valley between P Burg and Drummond is one of the best drives in the state.
And Bozeman? Did I mention that the people there were touchy, too? I just said I hadn t discovered a soul yet, not that it didn t exist.
Who knows, if I moved there I might grow to love it. Before I moved to Billings, it was a town we loved to hate, especially since I used to come here only to play hockey and we deeply disliked the Billings team. Red Menahan, an Anacondan whom I ve seen up here in Helena numerous times this week, called after the birth of my third daughter 17 years ago to offer his condolences.
She was the only one of our kids born in Billings. Jesus Christ, he said. I d rather have a daughter born in a house of ill repute than Billings.
I just laughed, because at the time I wasn t so sure I d made the right decision in moving to Billings. Some things take time. I lived so closed to the Clark Fork that when I’d get off work at the airport in the summer, pouring sweat and stinking of jet fuel, I’d run into my apartment, throw on a pair of shorts, dash out the door, sprint a few hundred yards and dive in.
Ed: For so many years now the controversy surrounding the sudden and total extinction of native fishes in the Clark Fork near Missoula during the early seventies has remained an unsolved mystery. Glad you could clear this one up for me.
PS- You don t need to print this Ed.
I was bored as hell and thought it to be semi- amusing. Next thing you know the EPA will be knockin down yer door. Thanks for the mental tour of the state, Ed!
I think Helena is a bit clique-y because it s the seat of government. My recollection is that reporters have no clique. OK, we had the Rialto on 25 cent beer night, but that was about it.
Maybe not fitting in makes it hard to like the place as much.
Still, I think the town is visually interesting. Certainly the drive to Butte is nice, as is most of the drive to Great Falls.
And the bald eagles that gather in throngs nearby in late fall/early winter are a sight to behold. Back in the 1890s, Helena won a hotly disputed referendum to become the permanent capital, primarily because the citizens didn t want to give the honor to a Company Town (Anaconda; Marcus Daly built his hotel there for the express purpose of housing the legislators). But now Helena is just as much a company town as Anaconda ever was the company is the state government, and any other business that is there is either to serve the people who work in government, or to sponge off of it (much like DC it s amazing just how many corporations are either based or have major offices in Northern Virginia).
Fifty years ago this January, my dad picked my up from the Shodair Children s Home in Helena, three months after I emerged from the womb of a woman unknown (at least to me; I never really had the urge to find out, as I was afraid I might rattle some skeletons in somebody s closet).
Here in AZ, there are no real places that say AZ, primarily because very few people who live here actually come from here. And the places that might have some character (Bisbee, Tombstone, Globe, Sedona) have pretty much morphed into trappes de touristes, and are almost as phony as Old Tucson Studios (where they filmed many a Western in John Wayne s day; after most of it burned down several years ago, it was rebuilt with more false front buildings, most of which sell priceless objets d art).
And anything north and east of Flagstaff is Navajo Country (imagine, if you will, the entire southeast part of Montana being the Crow Reservation, and you get the idea of what Winslow, Holbrook, Tuba City and Window Rock are like), with what I call Navajo Strip Malls (a series of shacks on the roadside, selling turquoise jewelry).
And Phoenix (and it s enormous suburbs, one of which I am an inhabitant), could well be called The City Where Strip Malls Go To Die. Well, I would agree with what some have said here that we are all Montanans, regardless of which town or city we roost in.
I did say that Helena was just about my favorite town. How s that for a hedge.
Heard a phrase a while back that really works for me: Montana is a small town with a very long main street.
I like the idea of being from Montana as opposed to any specific town.
Didn t hear any mention of Livingston. Now how about that city?
When we first moved to Montana we spotted a house right downtown, across the street from the Yellowstone River. Unfortunately there was a sign outside that said sale in progress , and someone had beat us to it. Looked pretty affordable, too - but that was fifteen years ago.
Looks like Livingston may have been discovered since then. Great downtown, though.
I also like that I can go most anywhere and run into someone I know, or someone once removed.
Since moving here, and visiting relatives in Seattle, the Twin Cities, and the Boston area, I feel very fortunate to live in this state. I audibly sigh with relief when the plane touches down on the Rims. To Anonymous: I said Helena was hot, not Philipsburg.
And Anaconda should have been included in your tour of great Montana cities. I remember when both Ed Kemmick and John McNay were but young reporters employed by the Montana Sub-Standard, as it was (sometimes) affectionately referred to. Did you know that one of America s greatest writers, humorist, and speaker also made Anaconda a stop on his storied circuit about the nation?
I am referring to Mark Twain. He graced Anaconda with his presence in 1895 and made quite an impression:
Anaconda also needs to be remembered for the Owl Bar, the Galloping Goose streetcar that made the twice daily trip to Opportunity and back, Washoe Park, the beautiful Deer Lodge County Courthouse and Jail which was built in the late 1890s for $90,000 and some odd dollars. We now have a new jail, but the Courthouse was an eye-popper in its day, as Marcus Daly had expected Anaconda to become the capital of Montana, and wanted an appropriately stately courthouse to be built.
We can only hope that the monies will be found to restore it to its original grandeur and stabilize some of its exterior. And, although the famous Montana Hotel, built by Daly, was gutted and decapitated, as described by author Patrick F. Morris in his book, Anaconda Montana: Copper Smelting Boom Town on the Western Frontier, I am pleased to say that a local pediatrician has worked diligently to track down the original AND famous Montana Hotel backbar and light fixtures and return it to Anaconda.
It was found in Seattle, and after having been put to use there in a couple of bars, it was disassembled and stored in a dank and damp warehouse. It will be necessary to refurbish the beautiful old mahogany back bar to restore it to its original beauty (the patina of age will, unfortunately, be gone).
So, lets all work to preserve and appreciate what we have in our own backyards, and let others know about the things we care deeply about in these communities.
Missoula used to be the arm-pit of Mt. with all of the tepee burners and stink from the pulp mill and inversions. Its better now but is still one big traffic jam with all of the people moving in to the Western valleys.
Never did care for Helena except the RR Show in April. Its outstanding..
Froze my rear off one New Years eve in Anaconda when it was something like -30° that fine evening. But Jim and Clara s was nice and warm and packed with bodies.
Butte America says it all !
!
And I wouldn t leave Billings for any of those towns now!!
! and early 1960s, I remember when much of
the shopping was done in the downtown area.
trees.
On nice days, one could see many senior
in the city.
Even at that time, Tenth Avenue South was
strictly a utilitarian-type street, but it had yet
the city. It meant that there was much,
sees forty or fifty years later.
time in twelve years, I was stunned. Tenth
Avenue South had become a disaster area.
South during the last few decades, it is
at the beginning.
Paris Gibson, the founder
of Great Falls, must be spinning in his grave
The Club Moderne is a wonderful place for a cold one, met with Jim Gransbery there for a beer or two a couple of Christmas breaks ago.
Miles City is a terrific town; in 1992, when Pat Williams was running to be Congressman of all Montana, I spent about 20 minutes during the Bucking Horse Sale talking about what Butte and Miles City have in common.
P Burg is great, with a beautiful drive to Drummond, and until you ve spent St.
Patrick s Day in the Two Dot Bar, you haven t had a good time.
Helena is probably the least friendly of Montana s towns.
Great thread, Ed, and your description of Butte architectual was spot on, especially about uplifting your spirits.
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