Poisonville is the town figuring in Dashiell Hammett’s 1927 thriller “red harvest”. Poison stands as a synonym not only for the situation in the town, lawlessness, gangs, labor wars and filth, but also for the environmental damage done by its main industry, mining.
Poisonville is the literary image of the town of Butte, Montana. At its height, Butte was the richest town west of the Mississippi – Missouri. The name stands for the reason of its wealth, the hill full of copper-silver ore which was mined from the late 19th century on and called “the richest hill on earth”. The butte was and still is perforated with a maze of mine shafts up to a mile deep. The mines and its wealth brought a building boom of equally rich architecture. The influx of miners gave Butte a reputation as a wide-open town where any vice was obtainable. Each mine has its story and its victims. The regular mining disasters caused frequent riots, which were crushed with severe violence by bringing in the national guard. The shaft mining was abandoned and replaced by open pit mining, leaving abandoned one of the world’s largest open mine pits which now is filled with a highly poisonous heavy metal rich lake 800 meters deep which threatens to spoil the ground water all around. A new pit was opened close to it, but the mining already declined after 1917 and is a shadow of its former self.
Today Butte is an half abandoned town full of majestic typical American brick buildings, former mining company director mansions and Victorian villas, which all figure in Hammett’s novel. Most of the shops are empty, restaurants, hotels and brothels closed, and a traffic jam will never occur any more on the deserted streets. The villas are crumbling, the paint fading, and only the satellite dishes and the stars and stripes hanging listlessly in the breeze indicate those still occupied. And above all still tower the around 30 preserved mine rigs….
The morbid beauty of the town is far from undiscovered. Wim Wenders, known for his melancholic and scenic movies and always searching for exceptional locations with his big format camera, has published several photo books also including Butte and it is the scene of his movie “don’t come knocking”.
Butte, a paradise for the photographer….
Great Story!