JACK Kerouac knew as much about drinking as Jack Nicholson knows about beautiful women. And when a career boozer like the beatnik legend dubs a dive joint in the middle of Montana “the end of my quest for an ideal bar,” it’s like Nicholson giving his personal endorsement to the newest Miss World.
That was 1949. Sixty years after Kerouac lauded the M&M Café in downtown Butte, the joint is still bustling on a Friday night. A huge neon arrow points to the entrance for anyone too boozy to find it alone. Inside, one wall is lined with diner stools and a stainless-steel kitchen. Its counter is filled with families and grizzled old-timers gorging on crispy french fries.
There’s a pool table and tiny stage out back; the hordes rim a bar plastered with a mishmash of posters: “Hunters Welcome!” “Happy St Patrick’s Day”, “Obama: Change We Can Believe In” and even “Godspeed Evel,” a nod to Butte-born stunt-cyclist Knievel.
The M&M was first opened in 1890 by namesake duo Martin & Mosby. The owners flushed the keys down the toilet when they set up shop, promising to serve 24/7. And they’ve kept that promise — aside from a brief hiatus for a couple of years in the 2000s — for almost 120 years.
Today, the M&M is the spirited, spiritual center of Butte, the western Montana city that seems to be aiming for the title of dive-bar capital of the USA. The working-class, Irish-American mining town is still dotted with dozens of the kind of pool-and-pint joints that Kerouac so admired.
Butte started life as a mining town, and where there are miners, there are bars. Apart from downtown, the city still boasts neighborhood joints aplenty. A residential street in the Walkerville district on the north side boasts a bar like the charmingly monickered Pisser’s Palace. The bar is open until the early hours, a dog padding around the pool table and chatty barflies striking up conversation with strangers.
On the eastern fringes stands The Helsinki, a Finnish social club now in the middle of nowhere since much of its surroundings were engulfed by the mines that once brought prosperity here. The men’s room is marked Buoys, and “Please Tip Your Bartender” is scrawled in marker on the scratched bar top. Drinkers linger out back on the porch and spill onto the lawn, taking shelter in the makeshift marquee when Butte suffers one of its brief, freak summer hailstorms; pellet-sized ice arhythmically pelting the earth like fingers tapping on a keyboard.
It’s no surprise that Butte can still sustain so many watering holes — this is a region that likes to kick back with a beer. Until 2005, you could drink while driving in Montana — and the open-container law that passed then was much battled over. Years before, Prohibition-boosting, pun-minded crusader Carry A. Nation killed fun Pretty much everywhere she went. Not in Butte, though. Locals here continue to gleefully take credit not only for ejecting her (local brothel madam May Moloy drove her out of town in 1910) but also for shocking the harridan into dying only six months later. (One much-reprinted locally produced sign barked “All Nations Welcome. Except Carry.”)
Though Prohibition was enacted here in 1919, a year before it was nationally adopted, the booze ban was also revoked seven years earlier than anywhere else. And, according to local historian Sara Rowe, FBI statistics found that more alcohol was consumed per capita in Butte during that time than anywhere else in the country.
Of course, that love of liquor when booze was verboten led to several speakeasies in Butte, a few of which still exist.
Dick Gibson is a dapper geologist who, decked out in suspenders and boaters, gives historic tours of Butte’s steel-framed downtown. He ushers visitors past a false wall in a basement barbershop to an illegal drinking den that was only discovered five years ago. The origins of the shoebox-sized space are murky, though locals vividly remember fathers and grandfathers getting plenty of haircuts back in the day.
Nearby, the Rookwood Speakeasy, named after the grand building in whose basement it was hidden, is far fancier. It’s got a blackboard for betting on baseball games, a bunch of whisky barrels and a vintage lamp that was discovered when the joint was unearthed, as well as a small stage and a dozen or so tables.
“The History Channel says this is the best preserved speakeasy west of Chicago,” Gibson chuckles.
But why was and is Butte such a boozing mecca?
For the answer, look one hundred years back. While much of the west was still the middle of nowhere, Butte was proudly urban, its bright lights and skyscraping buildings fueled by the money that spewed from the rich copper deposits here.
At its peak, 110,000 people thronged through Butte’s streets; “Copper King” industrialist William Andrews Clark had a mansion here in addition to his pad in Manhattan; and while East Coast boldfacers would hole up in sunny Florida, early Angeleno celebrities would often come to Butte to party. Those residents and visitors needed plenty of places to socialize, both before and during Prohibition, and Butte’s cluster of bars sprung up in response.
Mining, of course, is another reason that bars proliferated here. Like any industry town, there were plenty of single men thirsty for entertainment once their shift was finished. Butte, if you think about it, was a more butch version of San Francisco. Like the early eateries there that catered to Gold Rush miners (and birthed the city’s foodie snobbery today), Butte was and is the sort of place where lunch might be of the liquid variety — to make no mention of dinner.
The wealth-producing mine is essentially closed now — all that’s left is a huge, gaping hole filled with toxic water known as the Berkeley Pit — but 14 head frames still dot the landscape, half of them illuminated after dark with wreaths of red lights like twinkly, spindly spaceships landed in the middle of town.
The fact that Butte’s most heady days may be behind it helps keep the old traditions alive; as Montana continues to evolve, Butte seems to cling to its bawdy past. This isn’t Billings, which recently boomed thanks to its low cost of living, neither is it tony Bozeman, with its gourmet pizza and snowboarding enthusiasts and enough California refugees to earn it the unflattering nickname of Boz Angeles.
This isn’t a major university town, either — the most nerdy things get around here is up at the blue-collar Montana Tech, also known as The School of Mines. Today’s Butte is a proudly working-class union town, so much so that a McDonald’s couldn’t open here until 1985 since there was such protectionism for local burger joints. It’s no great secret that working class union towns like bars, and plenty of them.
Butte’s mining-powered ethnic diversity also amped up its bar quota. There’s long been a tradition of ethnic immigrant enclaves in America brewing up illicit moonshine to their particular palates; each community wanted its own watering hole. One 70-something former miner proudly explains that the part of the city where he grew up was once called Little Flatbush; his Italian-American neighbors made their own grappa and red wine at home.
It’s most likely, though, that Butte’s booze-soaked culture is a product of its location in leave-me-alone Montana. This is a state with no sales tax, with less than 1 million people living in 147,000 square miles. It’s literally and psychologically isolated. There are just two flights daily into the tiny airport that sits in the crook of the craggy hills of the Continental Divide behind it. The freeways out of town meander through those same hills, making journeys longer and less enticing. Butte is the ultimate Montana town: There’s a rugged individuality to this place, a refusal to fall in line with what’s accepted elsewhere.
No wonder Kerouac felt so at home.
Learn more at butteamerica.com and visitmt.com.