Butte Smoke Eaters
The Butte Smoke Eaters, based in Butte, Montana, played the 1900 season in the Montana State League and finished 30-40, fourth in a four-team circuit. They played home games at the Mt. Columbia Grounds, behind the first-place Great Falls Indians at 39-32, the Helena Senators at 39-33 and the Anaconda Serpents at 34-37.
The nickname was a mining reference, and the Anaconda Standard spelled out the reasoning in a column that spring. The paper reported that smoke eaters had already been attached to earlier Butte ball clubs and to Butte football teams, so it arrived with a running start. The alternatives under discussion were all drawn from the same well: miners, judged too tame and commonplace, along with coppers and millionaires. What the papers wanted was a name that captured Butte as the greatest mining city in the world, and the smoke pouring off its smelters supplied it.
Butte had been in on the ground floor of professional baseball in Montana eight years earlier. The city was a charter member of the 1892 Montana State League, a Class B circuit that opened play on May 30 and ran a split-season schedule. Butte finished 26-22 under manager Jim Powell, a former major leaguer who had settled in the city to run Maguire's Opera House. Butte took the first-half title, Helena won the second half, and the two met in a five-game championship series that they split two apiece. The fifth game was never played. Butte withheld the $176 owed to Helena as its share of the gate from two games in Butte, refused a $1,000 bond offered to guarantee Helena would appear, and finally offered to pay only on the condition that the money come back if the game were rained out. Helena went home and Butte claimed the title by default. Butte spent that season presenting itself as the one club honoring the league's $200 monthly salary limit, carrying just two paid men at $100 each while Philipsburg, Helena and Bozeman ran between $500 and $700. The Great Falls Tribune advised readers to take that with a large amount of salt, on the grounds that Butte had just signed two professionals named Colgan and McVey.
From 1902 the franchise carried the Miners name and became the most well-traveled club in the state, passing through the Pacific Northwest League, the Pacific National League, the Montana State League, the Northwestern League, the Inter-Mountain League and the Union Association across parts of sixteen seasons. Butte won league championships in 1902 and 1903 and was a charter member of the Union Association when it formed in 1911.
Hall of Fame pitcher Joe McGinnity was Butte's player-manager in 1916 and 1917, still taking the mound in his mid-forties. He had already won 246 major league games and earned the nickname Iron Man, a reference both to his durability and to the foundry work he took on in the off-season.
The Montana State League itself ran in scattered seasons between 1892 and 1925 and was made up entirely of Montana clubs in every year but 1909, when teams from Idaho and Utah joined. Butte last appeared in it in 1925, the league's final season.
