Rebecca Sullivan Photography, Landscape Photography, Fine Art Photography, Fine Art Prints, Iceland, 

I WANT US TO GO WEST

Butte, Montana Wide Open Town

Shot from the Miner’s Bank Building looking west toward the Montana Tech School of Mines. My hometown was/is hardscrabble, a mining town, big-hearted and fiercely attached to an upbeat definition of the collective. Forever optimistic. I could never completely understand the how or the why of this eternal optimism, given some of what I know about the place. It’s not a beautiful town, but there are interesting ways to see it. The sunlight in the Rocky Mountains encounters very few atmospheric particles, thus the wavelengths that reach a person’s eyes or a camera lens are almost of equal intensity, creating a lovely and alluring experience of light that is simultaneously revealing and soft. Butte is the birthplace of the Wobblies. I confess that as a child roaming all across town, the soles of my shoes becoming coated with the toxic runoff from the mines and the giant open pit - cadmium, arsenic, and nickel, I kept my eyes open at every turn and dreamt of escaping to a more beautiful world. The title “Wide Open Town,” comes from a 1931 novel about Butte by the Jewish author Myron Brinig. He writes lovingly of his hometown.


Historic downtown of the mining city of Butte, which is built on the edge of the Continental Divide. Settled in western Montana during the late 1800's, Butte grew rapidly into a prosperous rock mining town as immense deposits of silver, gold, and copper were discovered under its soil. The town's mining familes benifited from an organized system of labor unions and a history of labor-oriented politicians, including a Socialist who was elected in the early 20th century. Though during WWI Butte was one of the most prosperous towns in the country, it has stagnated and struggled like so many other communities that were built on labor demand.