Old jail, new tour

By Erin Nicholes of The Montana Standard - 06/04/2006

Mike Byrnes leaves one of the arched brick cell blocks of the old City of Butte Jail on East Broadway Street. The Butte jail is now part of the Old Butte Historical Adventures tour of Uptown landmarks.

Scribed in pencil on the cold gray wall was one prisoner’s tried-and-true formula for landing behind bars.

“Wine + Women + Song = Jail,” he wrote.

Little did he know, the equation would make history. It is part of the story of the old Butte jail, located in the dark, damp basement of the former City Hall on East Broadway Street.

The dungeon is new to Old Butte Historical Adventures tour circuit, now open for summer and offering walking tours of Uptown landmarks.

“Everybody in Butte’s got to see the jail,” spokesman Mike Byrnes said.

Local people will recognize names scratched on the walls, from drunken rabble rousers to convicted killers.

And everybody will recognize a name on the May 9, 1956, jail roster: Robert Knievel, arrested for reckless driving at Dewey and Oregon. Local lore has it that Knievel earned his famous nickname “Evel” in the Butte jail.

“The legend was born here,” Byrnes said.

Those information gems have been locked away in the old jail, which was built in 1890 for $30,000 and closed in the early 1970s.

City Hall building owners Toni and Dr. Dixon Robinson, who operate Advanced Dermatology at that location, recently allowed Old Butte Historical Adventures to use the jail to help tell the Uptown’s story.

“We saw what they could do with the Speakeasy and the barber shop and decided it would be a really positive thing,” Toni Robison said. “They have done a ton of work to clean it up and straighten it up.” The jail had to be cleaned, lit and patched up for visitor safety, but is otherwise unchanged.

A short, steep, staircase leads to a dark hallway that runs past a row of cells. Inside each cell are steel bunk bed frames and a toilet.

The walls are covered in graffiti, some sadly desperate, the rest darkly humorous.

“My dog lives better than this,” one man wrote. “Blind justice, “the ‘pieps’ leak,” and “more books,” wrote others.

In the back of the jail, opposite a crude shower, are two dim, heavy-doored rooms.

One was the interrogation room; the other was “the dungeon,” Byrnes said.

“When they’d give someone a beating, this is where they’d throw them,” he said.

The back of the dungeon door is marked with black streaks from the boots of angry prisoners, he said.

The jail wouldn’t meet human rights requirements for a modern jail; it closed after inmate suicides, said Butte-Silver Bow Sheriff John Walsh.

“The way that the standards are in the new detention facilities, it would be very, very limited use,” he said.

But, it makes a fine museum.

“All the old-timers have a story about the jail,” Toni Robison said. “I think it’s really nice that they can go down and revisit it and relive memories.” Erin Nicholes may be reached at erin.nicholes@mtstandard.com.