This not a Native story. I want to be especially clear with that, because it’s important. This is a “Native” story, by which I mean it does not reflect any particular tribe or culture; when writing The Trials of Solomon Parker I very deliberately set out to anonymize those elements because, frankly, I’m not a Native and those aren’t my stories to tell. That said, I’ve lived in the Western US for almost the entirety of my life, and Native stories are part of this place. I’m of the belief that anyone should be allowed to tell a type of story, if perhaps not a certain particular, so long as it’s treated with respect, and that was the goal here.
The “Native” elements of this book, then, have been picked and chosen from a variety of indigenous traditions from here in the West, and assembled into something that reflects them in the general rather than the specific. The “myths” themselves I simply made up, but are modeled on the kinds of stories that appear across all sorts of cultures, not only Native American ones. Some things that I left intact are the (translated into English) names of Marked Face, Bad Bird, and Night Announcer, which are the Blackfoot words for badger, bat, and owl, respectively, although the “Native” words I used are fabrications. I couldn’t resist keeping the Gros Ventre trickster Nihaat in, as-is, because I liked the fact that his name became the word for “whites” in that language; the rest of his role in this story, aside from his association with the Big-Bellies, is my own fiction. Raven, of course, appears as a character in a variety of tribal mythologies. The story of Rabbit Woman and Moon’s carrot is based on the Blackfoot myth of Feather Woman and the Great Turnip, which is itself of course similar to the stories of Pandora, or Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge.
The flavor of these “Native” parts of the story owes a great debt to a number of genuine Native writers, particularly James Welch; his book Fools Crow I’ve probably read half a dozen times, if not more, and is absolutely magnificent. The idea for my story about the original creation of the whites was inspired by Leslie Marmon Silko’s in Ceremony, although hers (a contest between evil sorcerers) is terrifying and, in fairness, much better.
Finally, even given the setting and cosmological framework, as the epigraph at the beginning of this book suggests, The Trials of Solomon Parker is, in some ways, a loose retelling of the Biblical story of Job. Which, again, is itself a common sort of myth across cultures, this idea of powerful beings making wagers on the actions of their own tormented people. It’s a grim sort of idea that has always fascinated me.
Moving on to some history, then.
Butte, Montana, was an amazing place during the period written about in this book. It was a classic boomtown and, at 100,000-plus people at its peak, the largest city between Denver and the Pacific coast. These days its population is a third of that, and Butte has something of a faded grandeur to it. Some fun facts: Butte was the second city in the world to have electric lighting (the first: Paris, France) and the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in America is in, you guessed it, Butte.
The hill on which Butte sits has been a mining site from the 1860s onward. First, gold and silver; then, as technology (and investment) improved and mines were able to go deeper and grow more elaborate, copper, the metal that made Butte’s fortune, and its name: the Richest Hill on Earth. Fueled in part by the new demand for electrical wiring, copper drove the boom that turned Butte from a small mining camp to a cosmopolitan industrial city. People came from all over the world to get in on the rush, and money was being made hand over fist, particularly by those at the top of the heap. Several of these titans of industry collided over power and influence, the so-called Copper Wars which included, among others, William Rockefeller, Marcus Daly, F Augustus Heinze, and the fabulously corrupt William Clark. Clark was a Gilded Age robber baron of an easily recognized type; no friend to the working man, flaunting his wealth, he used his money, influence, and lax morality to eventually purchase a position as a US Senator.
With the copper boom came some of the things that one associates with a boomtown: disposable income, vice, and crime. For a time, Butte had all three in spades. What Butte also came to be known for, however, was its important position in the nascent Labor movement during the early parts of the twentieth century. The Gibraltar of Unionism, it was called, the scene of many pitched battles of Labor against the ACM for workers’ rights and improvements to workplace safety. Life as a miner was tough and dangerous; Butte and the surrounding environs were the sites of a number of major industrial disasters, not to mention the day-to-day injuries and occasional deaths that came with mine work. Over all of that was the specter of very real health dangers posed by working conditions, including the dreaded silicosis, AKA miners’ consumption.
I’ve conflated or modified some of this history to fit the story in this book. There were in fact deadly fires at both the Pennsylvania and Speculator/Granite Mountain mines (among others), although of course the cause of the latter was not as I described it. These fires resulted in catastrophic loss of life and highlighted the dangers that miners endured every day. The broad strokes of the “Bloody Tuesday” riot here come from the “Bloody Wednesday” riot of 1920, when ACM guards opened fire on striking miners, killing two. IWW organizer Frank Little was an American labor leader who came to Butte after the 1917 Speculator/Granite Mountain fire (not the Pennsylvania in 1916) and was later abducted from his boardinghouse and killed, left hanging from a railroad trestle with a sign warning other activists to stay away. No one was ever convicted of his murder. While Little was an actual figure, I’ve fictionalized details of his time in Butte for purposes of this story.
Finally, while I tried to stay close to the actual conditions in the various mines, and the processes used to get the ore out, I’ve fudged a few details here and there or likely simply gotten some things wrong. The various mines honeycombing the hill under Butte were in fact connected to one another (later standardized), making it a maze of hot, wet, dusty tunnels that were eventually allowed to fill with groundwater when played out. This water soon oxidized into acidity and dissolved out various remaining metals like arsenic, copper, cadmium, and so forth; that toxic soup then leached into the environment. Butte has been left a very polluted and poisoned place, the home of the largest Superfund site in America. With mining petering out and largely moving overseas in the decades after World War II, Butte’s economy has largely collapsed, leaving it a shell of its former glory.
If you’re interested in more of Butte’s history, I recommend Michael Punke’s Fire and Brimstone, Janet L Finn’s Mining Childhood, and the WPA’s Copper Camp, among others. It’s still an amazing place to visit… a trip to the Mining Museum (and associated tour down a mine) and the Butte Labor History Center is a great way to pass a few hours. Maybe afterward go have some Chinese food at the Pekin Noodle parlor, and a beer and a shot at one of the bars, breweries, or distilleries… raise your glass to the Richest Hill on Earth.