Wide Open Town

The copper mining town of Butte, Montana (renamed Silver Bow in the novel) is the setting for this novel centred on the lives of two Irishmen, the young John Donnelly, a miner, and his uncle, Roddy Cornett, the spieler (town crier). Though born in Minnesota (22 December 1896), the author, Myron Brinig, grew up in Butte and much of his early fiction includes semi-fictional accounts of the town’s affairs and characters. Wide Open Town takes in the labour politics of the imposition of martial law in 1914 in response to dangerous tensions among the miners and the 1917 lynching of militant socialist Frank Little (renamed Phil Whipple in the novel). Though Brinig was drafted and saw active service in the latter months of the First World War, the only mentions of soldiers in this novel are to those imposing martial law.

Brinig sees his central characters as otherwise simple men transformed by words and captured by dreams. He affirms aesthetics and artistic imagination as strong features in the character of working men. Though depicted as tough, Roddy Cornett delighted in reading poetry:
“The only books he had read in his life were the Bible and Walt Whitman and though reading was something of a strain for him, he could read Whitman for hours at a time...and sometimes he read Walt Whitman to the Red Light girls. Within their cramped, sinful cribs, the girls did not understand Walt Whitman but they were entranced with the color and virility of Roddy's voice.”
A friend of his, Christian Weber, is a talented German pianist but without any cultured appearance:
“Passing Christian in the street, you would never have taken him for a skilled pianist. He looked more like a garbage collector, or worse, an out-and-out bum. His breath always stank of alcohol and the fumes of cheap tobacco; his fingers were stained with nicotine so that no fastidious woman would have him about. Those who shrank from him did not understand that he was truly in the tradition of great musicians.”

Whereas the context of the novel is about socialist revolution in the mining community, the liberty that Brinig envisions as the aspiration of his central characters is of a different nature. Roddy Cornett waxes lyrical:
“Free was a deep word and covered immense spaces over land and sea. To run free along a road, along a street, to climb a mountain, free! To swim a river, to stand under the sun, to lie in deep clover. Man is too much imprisoned. To travel over far countries, to talk with a Chinaman, an Indian, a Japanese. To sit and look long at a sunset, to eat by a campfire in the woods, to drive a dog sledge through the snow. To read free. To breathe free. To sit by a sick man or a woman or a child and comfort the sick and cool their foreheads. To stand under the stars...Life is so short, let us be free.” His nephew John sees freedom in similar ways: climbing Big Butte Mountain with his sweetheart Zola and looking to save enough money to move to California to live together by the sea. At the top of the mountain, John turns to Zola and asks

“Do you see that beauty down there? Look well! That's the world down there and here we are above it all... Look, Zola, how wild and beautiful it is up here! And look down there at the mines, men going down thousands of feet and never breathing the fresh air. There are men who never stood up here like we are now, men who have lived the better part of their lives away from the sun an' the air!” His is the oratory of the freedom fighter, Phil Whipple, but for a gentler kind of liberation.