Watering hole up in flames
Another landmark in the "last best place" bit the dust when the Blue Moon Saloon in Divide burned to the ground July 22.
It joins a long list of iconic sites that have disappeared off the face of the Big Sky landscape — the Anaconda smokestack in Great Falls, which was toppled by ARCO when it decided copper wasn't oil, and the Million Dollar Mine in the Pioneer Mountains south of Wise River, whose timbers were shipped to a gentrification project in Boston, are two prime examples.
During the late 1980s, I regularly traveled to Divide for the saloon's annual summer fling. Folks traveled down from Butte to join a contingent from Missoula, and fly fishermen on the Big Hole River stepped in to take in the local flavor.
(One fly fisherman, a Washington, D.C., speechwriter with insider connections, told us why a certain Arkansas governor had spoke for what seemed like hours at the recently concluded Democratic convention — the hard drive on the Teleprompter had crashed, taking his speech with him. The long-winded governor, of course, later went on to the White House.)
A Wise River-area fur trapper often catered the affair, roasting a pig on a spit. Some gals from the Silver Dollar Bar in Butte would join other volunteers on the stage. Tents were set up all around the bar, between the motorcycles, vans and other pre-SUV vehicles.
The road trip to Divide through the Big Hole Valley was spectacular — sweeping vistas of ranch land bordered by jack-leg fences, hedge rows and gently meandering river banks. To the north, snowcapped Goat Peaks towers 10,000 feet in the Anaconda-Pintlar Range.
With a quarter century of experience as an electrician, perhaps I could have helped prevent the Blue Moon Saloon's destruction — preliminary evidence indicates an electrical overload caused the blaze, a not uncommon malady of restaurants and drinking establishments. But I didn't come to Divide to work, and bad wiring was the last thing on my mind.
There is another Montana icon worth mentioning here, an unusual collection of steam engine-era antiques sitting alongside hard-working modern equipment less than a mile upstream of the Blue Moon Saloon on the Big Hole River.
From Highway 43, look north at a black cylinder a quarter mile back from the road — a riveted cast-plate smokestack for a 19th century boiler. This is the city of Butte's water source. More than a century ago, Big Hole River water was pumped up over the Continental Divide to Butte, a city that is a mile high and a mile deep and needed water for its thirsty miners and smelters.
The pump station is well landscaped, with shade from cottonwoods and manicured lawns. When I knocked on the door back around 1989, the mechanic who kept the pumps running took me inside for a look-see. The original steam-driven pump was still there — about 40 feet long, with a steam cylinder on one end, a pumping cylinder on the other, and a 20-foot diameter flywheel in between.
Nearby are the steam pump's successors, each smaller than the first, like the famous cartoon depicting the first fish climbing out of the primeval soup and evolving into an erect human being. The final pump — the one then providing water to Butte — was driven by a high-voltage electrical motor not much bigger than a garbage can.
Butte doesn't need that big ol' black smokestack anymore, and with the price of steel as high as it is, I wonder if the city would consider selling that clunky ol' steam pump for scrap?
On the other hand, maybe they could charge admission to tourists who want to see a piece of "last best place" history. I know, with the saloon gone, they could sell beer.