"Butte may be the most unplastic place in America." Molly Ivins "Butte was mercurial .... The wicked, wealthy, full-blooded little city welcomed me with wild enthusiasm of the most disorderly kind." Theodore Roosevelt In the town that produced Evel Knievel, a plane that attempts to land on a city street is not a surprise, unless the pilot disappears and leaves a dead man in his place. When a Cessna 180 crashes into a miner's cottage in historic uptown Butte, two men flee the plane, leaving behind a third who isn't talking. He's dead. Did the victim, a high-profile ex-con, deserve this fate?...

"Butte was our mythical touchstone and standard of authenticity....When anyone in the family did something heroic, criminal or just plain self-destructive, my Aunt Marcia would credit 'the Butte in him or her].' It wasn't a place, this Butte that lived on inside all its children, it was a condition of permanent defiance." Barbara Ehrenreich in Living with a Wild God. "I've been all over the world and done things that most don't have the guts to try. I've met and talked with people from every place on the planet and when it comes down to the best character on earth, you never have to go any...