Perhaps they could call it Poisonville National Park. Poisonville. That's the name Dashiell Hammett, America's hardboiled Dante, gave to Butte in Red Harvest, his strange nocturnal novel of corruption and corporate filth. "The city wasn't pretty," writes Hammett on the opening page of Red Harvest. "Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks struck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smudge everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks."

so when are you going to come and check it out?
- deborah (guest) 1-07-2003 7:50 pm [add a comment]

Some have already been, though Jim never did get around to posting pics of the Pit.
- alex 1-07-2003 8:22 pm [add a comment]

Hey Deborah!
- jim 1-07-2003 10:24 pm [add a comment]

• hi jim! i escaped the deep snow in upstate ny for a drought in south western montana. it's nice and sunny here! please say hi to marybeth.
  - deborah (guest) 1-09-2003 5:55 am [add a comment] [edit]