Arthur Rothstein: Butte, Night

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It was Sunday night, I had hoped the saloons would stay open long enough for me to see them. They never even closed. In a great old-time saloon I had a giant beer. On the wall was a big electric signboard flashing gambling numbers ...What characters in there: old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen! Groups of sullen Indians drank rotgut in the john. Hundreds of men played cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spittoons. It was the end of my quest for an ideal bar...

Exhausting or not, there's no better way to see the West than to take a good old bus and go batting along on regular roads and come to all kinds of towns and cities where you can get out and walk sometimes a whole hour and see the world and come back to your bus and drive on. When I bought my ticket from San Francisco clear to New York City via the Pacific Northwest the clerk thought I was crazy. I started back all the way across the continent with my ten sandwiches and a couple of dollars...

Jack Kerouac, on a stop in Butte during a 1949 cross-country trip, in The Great Western Bus Ride, Esquire, March 1970

Night street scenes, Butte, Montana: photos by Arthur Rothstein, 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)