Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 14 • • • The picture painted of Butte (or Person- ville, in the novel) by Hammett, or rather the Continental Op, protagonist of Red Har- vest, do not make it sound like a pleasant place: "[T]he smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked 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 a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelter's stacks." As someone who correctly recognizes that Butte is the greatest city in the world, it's hard not to find that a bit harsh. But not without a kernel of truth, especially when you con- sider that those 'ugly mountains,' now green and pretty (not to mention adorned with a giant virgin), were at that time almost stripped of timber. There are other analogs as well. The crooked magnate Elihu Willsson more than resembles William Clark—both of their houses are on a "grass plot on a corner," and both had sons who married French (or French-Canadian) women; the mention of a nearby resort called Mock Lake would seem to be Gregson Hot Springs (now called Fairmont), at which Ana- conda Company executives and workers took the waters, drank, and on at least one occa- sion, brawled. There are descriptions of trolleys on the streets and International Workers of the World representatives. Notably absent, however, is a Frank Little figure. Though dozens of people meet their end by the resolution of Hammett's two-fisted tale, there is no obvious analog for Little's savage murder. Why, then, did Hammett change the name of the city from Butte to Poisonville née Personville? Probably for the same reason he changed the name from the Pinkerton agency to the Continental: because the Pinkertons were notoriously li- tigious and guarded their trade secrets well. A former agent named Charlie Siringo who, as a Pinkerton, rode against FRANK LITTLE!

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