Boomtowns like Virginia City sported a wild assortment of miners. They sought relief in taverns, brothels, and opium dens. In Butte, Montana, miners frequented bars with such colorful names as “Bucket of Blood,” “The Cesspool,” and “Graveyard.” They boarded in houses run by characters nicknamed “Mag the Rag,” “Take-Five Annie,” “Ellen the Elephant,” and “The Racehorse.” A folk tune described Butte’s annual gala event, the “Hopheads’ [drug addicts’] Ball”:

All the junkies were invited

Yes every gink [skinny man] and muff [prostitute]

Not a single one was slighted

If they were on the stuff [opium].

Invitations were presented

To every hustler and her man.

They even sent up invites

To the hopheads in the can [jail].

As early as the 1880s, gold and silver discoveries had played out in the Comstock Lode. Boomtowns, which had sprung up almost overnight, now became ghost towns as gold and silver deposits dwindled. Even more substantial places like Virginia City, Nevada, experienced a severe decline as the veins of ore ran out. One revealing sign of the city’s plummeting fortunes was the drop in the number of prostitutes, which declined by more than half by 1880. The mining frontier then shifted from gold and silver to copper, lead, and zinc, centered in Montana and Idaho. As with the early prospectors in California and Nevada, these miners eventually became wageworkers for giant consolidated mining companies. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Amalgamated Copper Company and the American Smelting and Refining Company dominated the industry.

Mining towns that survived, like Butte, became only slightly less rowdy places, but they did settle into more complex patterns of urban living. Though the population remained predominantly young and male, the young men were increasingly likely to get married and raise families. Residents lived in neighborhoods divided by class and ethnicity. For example, in Butte the west side of town became home to the middle and upper classes. Mine workers lived on the east side in homes subdivided into apartments and in boardinghouses. “The houses were almost skin to skin,” one resident described the area, “and boy, there were kids all over in the neighborhood.” The Irish lived in one section; Finns, Swedes, Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes in other sections. Each group formed its own social, fraternal, and religious organizations to relieve the harsh conditions of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and discrimination. Residents of the east side relied on one another for support and frowned on those who deviated from their code of solidarity. “They didn’t try to outdo the other one,” one neighborhood woman remarked. “If you did, you got into trouble. . . . If they thought you were a little richer than they were, they wouldn’t associate with you.” Although western mining towns retained distinctive qualities, in their social and ethnic divisions they came to resemble older cities east of the Mississippi River.