Empty Mansions

was still a French girl. Ten-year-old Huguette followed, signing below her sister’s name in a distinctive, metronomic hand, each letter precisely the same height, and ending with a ditto, indicating her home as Paris, too. Both girls still spoke with a slight French accent.
    Photos from one of these trips show the sisters, always together, inbathing caps and knee-length swimming dresses on a pier, in matching hiking dresses, and with matching Kodak Brownie box cameras in the woods, and posing in fancy dresses and high-laced shoes. In two of the photos, Andrée is looking directly at the photographer, while Huguette is examining her own camera or looking shyly at the ground.
    A highlight of these annual trips to Montana was a return to Butte. They rode W.A.’s streetcar east to Columbia Gardens, W.A.’s gift to the people of Butte in 1899. The brightest spot in a depressing town, the amusement park featured a dance pavilion, lake, and picnic area. With obvious pride, W.A. showed the girls his flower gardens. Wearing a black bow tie and a bowler hat, he had his picture taken with the girls, who stood in embroidered dresses, white gloves, and matching broad-brimmed hats.
    More than eighty years later, Huguette recalled putting on a hard hat and taking a ride down into one of her father’s mines in a four-man steel cage. At the height of copper production, around 1917, the Butte-Anaconda area had fourteen thousand men working underground, an amalgamation of Irish, Italians, Chinese, Serbians—the story was that immigrants looking for work were told, “Don’t stop in America, go straight to Butte.”
    In hard-rock mining, the men had the most dangerous occupation in America. Deep in Clark’s Belmont mine, workers wore long underwear and bib overalls to protect themselves from the 135-degree heat. Men rigging sticks of powder dynamite were warned to “tap ’er light,” but it wasn’t unusual for a finger to be found still sporting a wedding ring. Diggers were crushed by falling timbers. Motormen and swampers were suffocated when trapped by underground fires. Rail benders stood in acidic water so strong it would eat anything metal. Because drilling produced black dust, the drills were called widow makers. “We were,” as one old miner named Tom Holter put it, “damn close to hell.”
    In August 1917, the same summer that the Clark girls took a sojourn in Butte, a union organizer named Frank Little was working for the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, speaking out against U.S. entry into World War I. Relations between the union workers and the mine owners were complicated. In 1892, men at W.A.’s Original mine gave hima walking stick with an engraved silver top as a sign of their affection. Yet the mine yards were surrounded by ten-foot electrified fences in case of union trouble.
    IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

 
    On June 28, 1998, Huguette and I spoke of my recent tour of Butte and her memories of the town. She said that she had not been to Butte for years, explaining that it was “too sad for me, with memories of my father.” She sent me a photo of herself, at about age four, on the porch of her father’s mansion there. She is sitting on the railing, wearing an enormous white hat, and is surrounded by a dozen of her dolls.
    She told me she understands that Butte is not a healthful place to live.
    Early on the morning of August 1, 1917,Frank Little was found hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. On his chest was a note with the words “First and last warning” and the numbers 3-7-77, an obscure code used by the Montana Vigilantes. With copper prices and demand at record levels, the war was going to make a lot of money for Butte, its workers, and its mine owners.
    • • •
    The following year, the girls’ vacation in Montana ended in tears. The parting had gone badly, with a quarrel between Anna and sixteen-year-old Andrée, who wrote her mother this letter:
    Mowitza Lodge, Aug. 27, 1918
    My Dearest Little Mother
,
    I know that you will not answer me nor do I think that you will read this letter, but if you do, you will know that you are the best friend that I ever have had, or will ever have. We all had a most beautiful, wonderful time at the Lake, and we regret so much that it is all over!!! And we are all indebted (especially me) to you for this lovely summer we have had. We had a very sunny, windy, incidental trip to Butte and we arrived hereat quarter to seven. We all had