Evel Knievel
Evel Knievel, daredevil extraordinaire, died earlier this week and was laid to rest in Butte, Montana. He was born in Butte and loved the city and lived there for much of his life. Butte is called the richest hill on earth and also the glittering hill because of the mineral deposits of gold, silver and copper that were mined from it. It was ruled by the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. with an iron hand. My grandfather was a miner there and worked there during the period of great labor unrest in 1917 when the unions were struggling for an open shop and the company wanted a closed shop. The International Workers of the World sent a union organizer named Frank Little to help the unions. He was murdered by a group of unknown people shortly after arriving there. One of the people who was in Butte at this time was Daishiell Hammett, author of the Maltese Falcon, who worked as a Pinkerton Detective. He claimed that he was approached to murder Little but turned the people down. He fictionalized the story in Red Harvest