P a g e 6 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r Children in Montana’s Mining Camps–continued by Ellen Baumler The Dangers Butte had a much darker side, however. Children grew up breathing polluted air and playing in filthy alleyways. Boys who had reached puberty and could chew a plug of Peerless Tobacco without throwing up were considered man enough to work in the mines. In the 1930s, a sign on the fence around the red light district read “Men under 21 Keep Out”—an acknowledgment that boys in Butte often became men long before they reached legal age.19 The intrinsic dangers of mining camps put children especially at risk. While Homer Thomas, Mollie Sheehan, James Sanders, and Frances Gilbert had parents who kept close watch on their children, this was not the case for all. Some children, as Thomas Dimsdale noted, ran wild in the early mining camps. Youngsters were sometimes left in desperate need of community charity and social services. On a frigid December day in 1864, three sisters dressed in little more than calico slips begged at the door of James Fergus in Virginia City. Inquiries about their parents revealed that their father was gambling in nearby Nevada City and that their mother could not to be found. Women in town gave the girls food and clothing before reluctantly returning them to their father, as there was no legal alternative. The Montana Post publicly chastised him for neglecting and abusing his children. The eldest girl was twelve-year-old Martha Canary, who grew up to become well known as Calamity Jane.20 During the early decades, various Catholic institutions and boarding schools sometimes took in orphans, but Montana’s first orphanage, St. Ambrose’s, was at Helena. It was established in 1881, when the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth took in three young brothers from Butte. Their mother had died and their father, a miner, could not care for them. The sisters initially named the home after the namesake of Ambrose Sullivan, one of the children, but it soon became St. Joseph’s Orphanage and was quickly filled to well over its capacity.21 Epidemics were commonplace throughout the nineteenth century and knew no social boundaries. Rich or poor, no person was immune and all children were at risk. Typhoid and cholera plagued mining camps because residents quickly polluted their water sources. Children’s diseases, such as measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria, sometimes ravaged the population. Eight-year-old Sallie Davenport traveled by steamboat to Helena with her mother, brother, and sister in the spring of 1865. They came to join their father, William Davenport, who had gone ahead to establish a claim. One younger sibling died before the family boarded the steamboat St. Johns at Liberty Landing, Missouri. There were many families with children on board. Sallie, along with her two siblings and most of the other children, fell victim to the measles, which swept through the passengers housed in close quarters. Sallie recovered, but her younger brother died as the boat docked at Fort Benton. Her older sister Anna made the final leg of the long trip to Helena in a makeshift bed in the back of a freight wagon.22
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