Champion of the World (46 page)

In urbanized settings like Butte, saloons played an important multifaceted role prior to Prohibition. For a city populated largely by immigrant mine workers, the neighborhood tavern often doubled as the bank, post office and employment agency. In Butte's many Irish, Slavic, German and Italian enclaves, the saloon was the place to hear news from home, and many stocked foreign language newspapers. Bars in poor neighborhoods often kept a pot of stew or soup bubbling, so men gathered there not only to have a drink after work but to get a hot meal.

Likewise, drinking provided the bedrock of many social
activities for Butte's wealthy elite. The city's exclusive Silver Bow Club, founded by copper king William A. Clark in 1882, charged its members a $50 entrance fee and $60 in annual dues. The club's four-story location, built in 1905, featured opulent furnishings, a cigar lounge and a full-service kitchen, but most members went there for the bar. Considering the local tavern's central place in society, it's no surprise that cities like Butte did everything they could to sidestep new alcohol regulations. Some of the city's saloons closed or were converted into “soft drink parlors,” but many merely changed their names and continued selling booze on the sly. The uptown Crown Bar, for example, became the Crown Cigar Store and kept right on serving.

As the need for liquor grew and in-state stockpiles dwindled, Canadian border towns like Lethbridge, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat and Govenlock became the sites of large export houses. American rumrunners ferried loads of liquor over the border by car and truck, traveling roads that were little more than glorified horse trails, often at high speeds, in all weather, sometimes at night. Hijackings were common and occasionally deadly, especially for independent bootleggers operating without the protection of larger crime syndicates. Locals cooked liquor to supplement family incomes and a handful small-town businessmen—like C. W. “Shorty” Young of Havre—ruled their communities as homegrown organized crime kings.

By the time the whole country went dry in 1920, many Montanans already believed the laws were unenforceable. The state was just too big and too wild to adequately police. Federal Prohibition agents joined the battle with state authorities, and some Montana counties hired Pinkertons or Burns International Detective Agency operatives to help corral bootleggers. Yet still the illegal liquor flowed, while the state government reported significant revenue losses in 1921 and 1922.

Shorty Young's Havre gang eventually grew into nationwide suppliers. At one point they bragged that they'd ferried liquor to every
state except Maine—where there were too many toll roads. They imported alcohol from Canada as well as illegal merchants all over the American west and stockpiled it in perhaps dozens of locations around northern Montana. Their stash spots included abandoned coal mines, remote cabins, dilapidated barns, the basements of schoolhouses and secret rooms in businesses they owned in town. They commandeered ranchlands and hid their vehicles inside hollowed-out haystacks, and Havre's daily newspaper reported they even used the airplane of a local war veteran to fly the stuff in and out of state. Young himself owned both a hotel and a secret brewery, which produced beer he adorned with phony Canadian labels.

In 1923, federal Prohibition agent Addison K. Lusk wrote Montana governor Joseph Dixon about the problems he faced enforcing the alcohol ban in the state. Lusk commanded a force of around a dozen men, and the 550-mile border between Montana and Canada featured only two customs stations. Two major rail lines ran into Canada, and Lusk wrote that railroad workers showed little interest in trying to sniff out alcohol shipments. The same may have been true of many city police forces, where officers sometimes sympathized with local bootleggers over federal interlopers. Corruption and payoffs were common among both state and federal officers, and newspapers reported that bootleggers serving time in the Silver Bow county jail paid off jailers to let them run the place like a social club, complete with liquor, food service and jazz records.

By the mid-1920s the previously powerful state chapters of the WCTU and Anti-Saloon League began to lose steam. Membership declined, along with fund-raising efforts and lobbying power. In 1926, voters repealed the statewide prohibition law—in Butte, seventy-three percent voted for repeal—and in 1928 voted down an effort to reinstate it. By the early 1930s, federal prohibition enjoyed next to no support in Montana. A poll by the
Literary Digest
reported that eighty percent of state residents favored repeal. When Congress
passed the Twenty-first Amendment to undo the Eighteenth in December of 1933, most Montanans likely responded with sighs of relief.

Concerning Montana history during the 1920s and the Butte/Silver Bow area specifically, Montana State University professor Mary Murphy and University of Montana professor emeritus David Emmons remain the authoritative sources. Murphy's book
Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–41
is indispensable and provided many of the details for this note. Emmons's books
The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an
American Mining Town, 1875–1925
and
Beyond the Pale: The Irish
in the West, 1845–1910
both provide fascinating expanded reading. In addition, Gary A. Wilson's book
Honky-Tonk Town: Havre's Bootlegging Days
gives rollicking insight into the wild, lawless times of Prohibition in northern
Montana.

So many people worked minor miracles to see
Champion of the World
into print. From the start, Nat Sobel and Judith Weber showed the book tremendous care and support. Their notes were invaluable. They were right about everything. The rest of the staff at Sobel Weber Associates were equally wonderful at shepherding a nervous first-time author through the chute and into the performance ring.

Any writer who lands with Sara Minnich at G. P. Putnam's Sons has already hit the jackpot. She's everything you want in an editor—smart, perceptive, kind, patient. I need a lot of help in all those departments. I'm indebted to her and Ivan Held for giving a quirky little book about wrestling a chance. The Putnam copyeditors saved me from a scatter-gun blast of mistakes. Any bullet holes still visible in the walls are mine alone.

Todd Robinson and his fine noir journal,
Thuglit,
published my short story “The Rightful King of Wrestling,” which first caught the attention of Nat and Judith. Todd published the story when he said he would and paid me right on time. He'd probably bristle at the notion, but he's all class. Support his work.

There's no better crew of writers, readers and critics in Missoula, Montana (or anywhere else, I'd wager), than Sarah Aswell, Dan Brooks, Erika Fredrickson, Ben Fowlkes and Jason McMackin.
They all suffered through early drafts of the manuscript and the finished novel wouldn't exist without their input. You'll be hearing more from each of them, I promise you.

Kate Gadbow read an early version of the book and her critique made it instantly better. Her positivity gave me the courage to start querying agents.

Courtney Ellis read and read and read. She talked me off the ledge about a hundred times. She was brilliant, insightful, and she believed.

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