The Weekly Miner

DEER LODGE,

Our county town is enjoying its full share of the prosperity with which Montana has recently been blessed. The visitor from Butte will miss the vast street crowds to whose appearance we have grown so familiar in this city; but their absence at Deer Lodge is explained by the wide difference that exists between the industries of that town and those of our young mining city. At Deer Lodge the local industries furnish employment to busy workers during the day-time only; and this in connection with the further fact that it has industrious citizens who are continually at work will explain the "deserted streets" concerning which the Butte man has always something to say. In this camp however, work in the mines and in the mills is prosecuted quite as vigorously during the night as in the day-time, the night-shift giving employment to fully as many men as the day-shift. Owing to this unceasing character of the work going on about Butte a very large proportion, nearly one-half, of our laboring men are unemployed and apparently idle during the afternoon of each day. The Butte man, then, who describes Deer Lodge as "dead" because he sees no great crowds on the streets, and the Deer Lodge man who describes Butte as a place populated principally by rounders and idlers, because he finds large crowds of unemployed men on our streets every day—both are wrong. Deer Lodge looks quiet and its streets deserted because its industrious citizens are all busily at work. Butte has the appearance of being peopled in the main with idlers because half its working population, the best miners and hardest workers in the country, are at work only at night, passing the afternoons in apparent idleness strolling about the streets. In proportion to its population Deer Lodge is fully as lively as Butte, the great superficial difference between the two towns being fully explained by the circumstance that one town has a very large and constantly employed corps of night workers, while the other has not even a single establishment of any kind in which a night-shift is employed.

But Deer Lodge is prosperous, even more so than Butte. Here, when help is needed, there is not much trouble in finding unemployed men even in our busiest season, but in Deer Lodge one of the greatest inconveniences experienced by the citizens is the impossibility of finding an unemployed hand to take charge, at short notice, of any piece of work to be done. Another very healthy sign of prosperity is the great scarcity of dwelling houses, or apartments to be had under rent. This want of house room has made itself so distinctly felt of late that after a much longer rest than there was any occasion for, building has revived, and several dwelling houses are either already under way, or else will soon be in process of construction. Those who have been absent from the city for a year or more will be pleasantly surprised at the substantial and permanent nature of the improvements made during that time. These consist principally of two fine brick business houses, built by the go-ahead firm of E. I. Bonner & Co.; an elegant brick dwelling house belonging to Mr. Bonner, senior member of the above firm; and last, but not least, the institution which Butte patronizes so liberally, to wit, the new county jail, also of brick. The last is a well built and handsome edifice, but for all that its location is a matter of regret to many Deer Lodgers. It stands in the court house square, and in that situation no matter what its architectural merit may be, the prison cannot be otherwise than a blot and deformity to the square, which, had the jail been located elsewhere, would have served admirably the purposes of a city park, albeit of rather small size. Deer Lodgers, proverbial for their hospitality, are well pleased with their town, and exert themselves to the utmost in the endeavor to make the stranger who tarries within their gates as well satisfied as they are themselves with the Garden City of Montana. Free from the feverish excitements, as well as from the deadly depressions, of a mining town, Deer Lodge has before it an assured future of steady, healthy growth, and is decidedly a town which any home-seeker can tie to with the utmost safety.