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CHAPTER THREE West of Éire: Butte’s Irish Ethos MATTHEW L. JOCKERS In 1891 a front-page article in the Denver Sun declared Butte, Montana, the liveliest town in the United States. By 1900 26 percent of Butte’s “lively” and cosmopolitan residents were Irish. Most were miners drawn to the city by the promise of steady work and good pay in the mines of the Anaconda Company, a company owned by one of their own, native Irishman Marcus Daly. For the Irish,Butte was unique among American cities.Butte historian David Emmons points out that in Butte the Irish did not“encounter ...[a] hostile and entrenched society upon their arrival”(63). Unlike their countrymen in cities such as Boston and New York, Butte’s Irish quickly established themselves in all levels of society. One byproduct of this relatively easy assimilation was the development of a body of Irish American writing remarkable for its singular and consistent emphasis on ethnic and community pride. In terms of Irish American writing as a whole, Butte represents both a geographic and thematic point of difference. In the East, especially from 1914 to 1935, Irish American authors were tending to either avoid ethnic themes, as was the case with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, or to write what Charles Fanning has characterized as“green-tinged”Irish romances (Voice 241). Those writers who worked against these trends, writers such as Jim Tully from Ohio and James T. Farrell from Chicago, wrote a brand of “ethnic realism” that focused on the struggles of individuals growing up Irish in America. In the West, particularly in Butte and to some extent in San Francisco, the general sentiment is not lament but excitement.Rather than concealing Irishness,these western authors celebrate it. Throughout the early twentieth century, both in Butte and in San Francisco, Irish Americans were routinely writing of good fortune, ethnic tolerance, and the advantages of being Irish.1 For Butte’s Irish authors, this exuberance manifests itself in a body of literature that takes success for granted while largely ignoring the fact that the mining lifestyle was anything but easy. 38 Does Place Matter? Indeed, the consistency of the excitement and enthusiasm about Butte and its Irish community is downright paradoxical given the historical reality that “Butte’s mines were arguably the most dangerous in the world”(Emmons 148). To better understand Butte’s Irish American writing, we need to recognize that despite, or perhaps because of, dangerous working conditions and a high death rate, the Irish of Butte were socially and emotionally different from their counterparts elsewhere in the country. They were different not simply because they held steady, good-paying jobs, but because Butte’s Irish were largely “in charge”of the city.Emmons points out that by the turn of the century the Irish in Butte had a greater proportion of the population than any other U.S. city, Boston and NewYork included.The great majority of Butte’s Irish were miners, but when compared to other cities there were a disproportionate number of Irish and Irish American bankers, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and professionals as well. Butte was and remains today a city of contrast, and the literature of the city reflects this; it is characterized by irony and contradiction. Here Irish writers yoke optimism with fatalism, treat death and danger in stride, and depict characters more likely to celebrate catastrophe than cry over it. In the early part of the twentieth century when Irish American authors elsewhere in the country were focused on the struggles of individual Irish characters, Butte’s Irish were keen to explore and celebrate what it meant to be part of a collective Irish citizenry; there are no character studies but only community narratives . There are no stories of rugged individualism: no cowboys, no outlaws, no mountain men. There is no equivalent to Shane or Huck Finn in the Butte Irish canon. Instead there are works reflecting and illustrating a community, works with broad, macroscopic titles such as The Glittering Hill; Mile High, Mile Deep; Butte Was Like That; and Copper Camp. Joseph Duffy’s book, Butte Was Like That, begins with the admonition that the reader should not expect to find stories about individuals: “real names,” he writes, are “reserved for . . . obituaries”(Duffy 11). And so the stories told are the stories of a people; of types,not of individuals. Many of these stories began life beneath the surface where the miners would...

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