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 93 LET US CELEBRATE MONTANA'S most dogged women en- trepreneurs—I'm not talking about women who homestead- ed and proved up. No, I'm talking about women who saw a need and filled bottles and jugs to satisfy it. They are the lady bootleggers and this is their story. But first, let's take a look at the law they broke. THE 18TH AMENDMENT Montana voted in Prohibition in 1916, in part due to the persuasiveness of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. They had whipped the voters up into a frenzy over the evils of alcohol. In late 1918, Prohibition under the 18th Amendment began in Montana—at least on paper. Saloons became soft drink parlors, ahem, until the law walked out the door and it was back to business as usual with moon- shine and beer supplied by locals. Those tasked with enforcing Prohibition expected to have a hard time in wide-open Montana—a state with abundant ingredients and lots of territory to cover. Dozens of boot- leggers joined the fray, many of them women who made moonshine in their kitchens. Mind you, before Prohibition, respectable women weren't allowed in saloons to drink. They drank, just not in public. Moms sent their children to the saloons' back doors with pails in hand to fetch the brew. Ladies gathered to politely sip liquor in their parlors. Prohi- bition changed all that as they brewed beer, made wine, and distilled moonshine for themselves and for a wider audience. SILVER BOW'S BUSINESSWOMEN Before Prohibition, Butte alone had more than 200 saloons. Silver Bow County was the most populous, and drinking was part of the culture. If you worked a risky job like so many of the men in Butte and Anaconda did, emerging from the mine shaft or smelter unscathed was cause for celebration. It's no surprise Butte and Anaconda had their share of bootleggers. Dozens were women. Few business opportuni- ties existed for women in the early 1900s before this. They were mainly home-based—taking in boarders or doing laundry. Clever women dovetailed their existing businesses with bootlegging. Some, like Nora Gallagher, had noble intentions. The Butte widow started bootlegging to outfit her five children for Easter. Mary Ann McGonigle combined bootlegging with her laundry business quite successfully and enlisted the help of her daughter to deliver clean clothes and hooch to her customers. Call it an apprenticeship, if you will. And then there was a Butte grandma, Lavinia Gilman. She had petitioned to divorce her mean-drunk husband years before but jumped on the bootlegging bandwagon at the age of 80. When she got caught with a 300-gallon still, the judge believed it belonged to her son and summoned him to court. He didn't show. Lavinia got off with a warning. I found a birthday party notice in the 1948 Montana Stan- dard society pages for Lavinia "Auntie Vine" Gillman. Was she the same woman? The birth years don't jive, but maybe the judge was expected to be more sympathetic toward an 80-year-old than a 60- or 70-year-old. Her kind face and grandma status probably did the trick. by TERESA OTTO

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