Introduction - Ellen Crain and Mary Murphy

Welcome to Mining City Reflections, a series of podcasts that explore the contributions of women in Butte, Montana using excerpts of their oral histories. Mining City Reflections is one of three series of the Verdigris Project, a collaboration between the Butte Archives and the Butte America Foundation. I’m your host Marian Jensen.

Without the careful stewardship of Ellen Crain, the Butte Archives’ director, over the past thirty years, these irreplaceable recordings might no longer exist. In this introductory podcast, we talk about the Archives oral history collection, its origins, development and impact.

Gathering and maintaining actual historical records are the heart of the Archives’ work. However, Crain believes the stories around the facts are what bring those details to life. Growing up in Butte herself, she learned this at an early age.

“You know my grandparents came here with their families in the 1890’s, and they had all this memory of all of these events that I knew and understood as how my family participated in Frank Little’s funeral. I know how they did that. I had an uncle shot when there was a riot in front of the Miner’s Union Hall that actually found the Hall blown up. Well this is our history, it’s America’s history, and then I have this individual history that relates to all of these incidents. So I know these incidents at a personal level, rather than at a factual Level. And it’s interesting to me that so many people in our community also share those family histories of those incidents. I loved history all my life and when I got this position, I was able to touch the facts. It really was inspiring to me. It has always been a gift I think to be able to call on people in our community to tell us the story that is surrounding those facts. And those are treasures.”

In fact, love of those stories motivated one Butte man to begin documenting them. The start of the Archives’ collection, now numbering more than 500, began in the 1970’s as a community project.

“Oral history collection at the archives was really started by a man named Ray Caulkins who is a Butte guy with a deep history in Butte and he felt it was imperative in the late 1970’s to start to capture oral histories and peoples first accounts of their lives and activities at that time because he realized that some of the people who had experienced really major activities in Butte’s history would be dying soon. So he began an effort of collecting about 110 oral histories at that time. He did a little book called Looking Back From the Hill and while he was doing that Dr. Mary Murphy, who’s a professor at Montana State University in history, had come to Butte to do a project for her masters’ thesis and she helped Ray do the collections. That was the very first effort to gather oral histories, and there were some marvelous oral histories captured at that time. Perdita Duncan was captured, and she tells the story of her mother serving biscuits at Appomattox to both generals Lee and Grant. That is a very powerful oral history about how as a black woman coming to Montana and being in Butte in the very early part of the history. It’s a wonderful story. He captured those great early stories where people could actually reach back to the very beginning of our state.”

Professor Murphy describes the importance of oral histories as a contribution to the expanded historical record, not only in Butte, but all over the United States.

“So, you know the 1970’s and early 80’s were a real boom in oral history because it came out of social history and that ordinary people’s voices had been left out of the historical record and oral history was a way to do that. So the National Oral History Association got going. One of the oldest and most important oral history programs in the country had been at Columbia, but they interviewed Secretary’s of State etc. So that use of that method, to get ordinary peoples voices came really out of the 1970’s.”

Murphy’s own academic interest in women’s history in the west drove her to use oral histories in her own research, and brought her back to Butte once again.

“Mary built a collection of women’s stories and that’s been a real gem for all of us. She wrote her masters’ thesis on the red light district and prostitution in the American West, and it’s great academic look at the role of prostitution in the West. Mary then went on to build on her women’s history efforts by reaching out to organizations and clubs and women who had really built organizations themselves to really further the efforts of women and I have always loved Mary’s oral histories because they really capture people’s hearts. She built on Ray’s work and it is a really stellar collection. Ray started in the late 70’s, Mary came in the early 80’s and helped Ray finish up his oral histories and then started to build her own over the next five years.”

In the 1980’s the drama around the closing of the Anaconda Company, once world’s largest copper mining operation, drew the attention of another historian.

“In 1983 a very impressive oral historian came to Butte in Theresa Jordan. She came at that very critical time when mining was just ending as we knew it and she started to gather oral histories about that change that we were right in the middle of recognizing that the mining shutdown was going to happen. Theresa’s work really was remarkable because it’s rare in a crisis that somebody comes in and captures it as it’s happening be sure to have it documented. She did about 110 oral histories that have been used over and over and over again because it really was a shift in work, family life, the future of Butte at that time and it really is a remarkable collection.”

In the early 2000’s, once again the community took interest in documenting the observations of Butte citizens through one of the local college’s history classes.

“Then Jim Harrington reached out and had his students do oral histories which was a wonderful and eclectic collection because you got everything from granddaughters interviewing grandparents to some higher level interviews with people in our community. It’s a great collection as well. In that Butte history class there were some non traditional students and some community members, like Joan Porter took that course and she has a masters degree in social work and Is a pretty impressive person herself and she took that Butte history course. Her interview was with Patty Buckley, who was a bar owner here and really a pretty fascinating man. Her oral interview has that deeper questioning which is really wonderful. So there are a number of students like Joan and a number of young college students as well. So that’s where you get that sort of eclectic collection where some of it’s deeper into the feelings about things and some of it is really capturing that history plus those wonderful stories.”

The Verdigris Project is expanding the Archives’ oral history. collection. An additional one hundred oral histories are currently being recorded, focusing on events in the city’s history over the last 30 years. Overseeing one of only a handful of city archives in the country, Crain ably explains the importance of oral histories along side the many other records they collect.

“People don’t write any longer, we have manuscripts in our holdings from the 1860’s that look like they were written yesterday. Of course they are written in cursive and that might be a hieroglyphic in the coming generations. We have photo documentation of most major events that occurred in Butte-Silver Bow. In Montana history, we’re the Mecca. We had all the major activities going on here and it really is an important series of records that captured the building of a metropolitan city in the American West and the growth of industry and labor and all of those wonderful things that make America great. We love having those manuscripts because we know how essential they are in documenting things at a primary level, but the oral histories wrap the context around those. They talk at a personal level of how these things evolved to get a document written or to get on a train and come west. What it looked like or how terrifying it may have been for a new immigrant to arrive here. Or a woman who is coming here to build a family and not really understanding what the west would be or how remarkable her experiences would be. We find that when women and men tell those stories it puts history in the hands of people in a different way. People realize that these are real human beings making decisions and participating in activities that are dramatically changing. The historical path of a city or a country or a labor movement. Without that that first hand account in someones voice, I don’t think it captures people without that voice.”

Crain provides the context for personal recollections in support of the known historical record in Butte. Acknowledging that everyone’s memory collects information in a different way, she knows dates often fade while an incident of high drama remains. She illustrates her point using records of a Butte strike in the 40’s.

“Because your memory doesn’t remember , “Oh it was March 5th of 1952 that this occurred.” Those things fade but the incident always remains in their head. Oral history is great because they start to tell the story of how something evolved. I’ll use the 1947 strike, when there was all that violence in the street and there were mobs of men. It was post WWII and a lot of men were not necessarily back to work and that strike was such a critical strike in our history. There was that violence where people went into a man’s house, they destroyed the house, they threw the piano out of the window. The woman who was a child in that home wrote us a letter, maybe five years ago, paling about how terrifying that was. She did not know the date but she did know everything about that incident and what it was like to be a child in that incident. She starts to tell that story and you have a completely different understanding of that violence and how it evolved and it makes you look at that incident in a different way. You know if you’re a pro-labor person you saw that man in that household as a scab. But, really what it was was that the man was brought here to do a temporary job, he was renting this house, he had this family and… he didn’t know. And his family certainly didn’t know and they were terrified. After all the outcome of that, I can never look at that newspaper article again without the voice of that child coming through loud and clear. When you see that lying next to the facts as they are presented in the documentation, it completely colors the facts in a different way. So I think if you look at oral history in that way, that you have the facts; there was a strike, these were the strike issues, this is what the labor said, this is what the industry said… But this is what the child said.”

One of the goals of the Verdigris Project has been to assist the Archives in making its oral history collection accessible to the public. Crain talks about how the digitizing of the collection is helping to make that possible, making connections across the country and across decades.

“All of our oral histories have been digitized and the new oral histories are digitally collected and they go on our website, through our catalog. Certain oral histories have a soundbite that you can pop on and listen to. Then if you feel that it’s a voice that you want to capture for your project, you can call us and we will send you the entire tape. Because we have those snippets in our catalog online, to promote that we put those on Youtube, and we had a remarkable experience. We had a gentleman named Murphy who’s oral history was collected by Ray Caulkins and he talked about going underground. He had the softest voice for a man, I mean his voice was just very soft and soothing and it’s a wonderful tape. We use that in our promotional piece and put it out there. One day his daughters were googling Butte, the tape popped up, and they hadn’t heard their father’s voice in thirty years. It overwhelmed them, they sent us letters telling us what that meant to be able to hear their father talk about his work and what a joy that was. That made me realize that being able to access these oral histories is critical for people whose parents may be gone and their story. It’s interesting.”

The Butte Silver Bow Archives welcomes hearing from any individuals, family members, writers and researchers who wants to explore its digital catalog of oral histories.

“I have to say that all the projects we’ve worked on in the last five years, which have been many, we’re prolific here at the archives and do a lot of great things, but the Verdigris project is the project that I am most pleased that we have our name attached to. I listen to the podcasts, I get on there and read the transcripts of the oral histories and I am so thrilled that is promoting Butte in such a marvelous way and such a deep way. I am delighted to have the archives name on that project it’s really been remarkable.”