Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 51 the turn of the twentieth century, Mary MacLane took long walks day and night through the city. It was a place where she felt entrapped, misunderstood, and maligned—feelings that were not misplaced, considering the fraught relation- ship with Butte that her later notoriety would engender. I AWAIT THE DEVIL'S COMING Had she still been alive when dubbed a "Montana" writer, MacLane would have been horrified. The typical fare of Western literature—rugged landscapes and stoic people— inspired only boredom and disdain. MacLane does not pres- ent nature as a nurturing, restorative place from which she benefits spiritually and creatively. She instead implies that she succeeds in expressing herself, in envisioning another future, despite her environment. She writes, "I have reached some astonishing subtleties of conception as I have walked for miles over the sand and barrenness among the little hills and gulches. Their utter desolateness is an inspiration to the long, long thoughts and to the nameless wanting." MacLane revels in Butte's ethnic diversity, noting that "there are not a great many people—seventy thousand perhaps—but those seventy thousand are in their way unparalleled. For mixture, for miscellany—variedness, Bohemianism—where is Butte's rival?" She mentions the Irish, the Cornish, the Africans, Italians, Finns, French, and Native Americans: "A single street in Butte contains people in nearly every walk of life—living side by side resignedly, if not in peace." But this does not excuse Butte's shortcom- ings. For all that it bustles with activity, it's not the kind of activity that appeals to her. Mere pages later, MacLane puts it frankly: "The souls of these people are dumb." The bone she has to pick with Butte, and with people in general, has to do with the tyranny of middle-class mores. Her humor is so cutting and dry that it's no wonder people felt insulted. "From wax flowers off a wedding-cake, under glass; from thin-soled shoes; from tape-worms; from pho- tographs perched up all over my house; Kind Devil, deliver me […] From people who persist in calling my good body 'mere vile clay'; from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own; from fools who tell me what I 'want' to do: Kind Devil, deliver me." A DIVIDED RECEPTION The local media lambasted her on a regular basis, even after the proceeds from her bestselling memoir enabled her to leave Butte for more cosmopolitan pursuits on the East Coast. Butte's public library even banned her book from its shelves. Some editorials denounced her for her immoral conduct; others went so far as to call her a fraud who was out to make a quick buck by capitalizing on the public's appetite for sensational material. While Butte refused to acknowledge MacLane's literary integrity, the rest of the country lauded her for her creative genius and honesty. With the release of a second memoir in 1917, the Daily Missoulian ran a reprint of a Kansas City Star editorial wherein MacLane's critics were essentially accused of lacking moxie and imagination: "Critics and such who have not the courage to say just what they mean find ready refuge in the handy word, 'erotic.' [...] Frank- ness is [MacLane's] stock in trade. As was said of a famous revolutionary orator she dares to say what others scarce dare to think." It is this last trait of hers that fueled a resurgent interest in MacLane among feminist scholars in the 1970s. In a 1977 article in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, archi- vist Carolyn J. Mattern cites early twentieth-century literary critic Barrett Eastman, who wrote that "all women feel, but few know what or how or why. Mary MacLane knows and is not afraid to say." Although she read feminist literature and was acquainted with members of the Butte suffrage club, MacLane was not an active feminist. Being the misanthrope she was, she eschewed group activities, including politi-

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