Hell With the Lid Off: Butte, Montana

Hell With the Lid Off: Butte, Montana -- A Memoir of the "Wildest Town in the West" by 1890s Police Reporter Horace Herbert Smith

A newly discovered manuscript of an 1890s pistol-packing police reporter chronicles wild times, terrible tragedy and sudden millionaires on 'the richest hill on earth'.

Horace Herbert Smith takes you to Butte, Montana, in its copper-mining heyday to experience that brawling, big-hearted time. In a series of vivid snapshots Smith, a Butte newspaperman, describes the 1890s when, as he writes, life there "was fast and fun." Smith died before he could publish his absorbing and entertaining memoir detailing daytime gun battles and a sermonizing standoff, the high life and labor strife, scoundrels and bullwhackers and still-breathing corpses, with a cast of real-life characters so colorful as to make fiction writers despair. Fortunately for the reader, Smith's manuscript is finally seeing print. It's a rare treat.

-Gwen Florio, Journalist, author of the Lola Wicks crime series and other books

By Horace Herbert Smith, edited by William Lambrecht. Softcover, 238 pages.