1994/06/01 by Mary Murphy · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Environmental Science · #American Literature and Culture #Race, History, and American Society #American Environmental and Regional History #Butte #Archaeology #Geography
paper · doi:10.2307/2713337
openalex publication_date 1994/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/26
LATE ONE EVENING IN 1922, AS FEDERAL PROHIBITION OFFICER BEN Holter drove along Nettie Street Butte, Montana, his car broke down. He asked to use a phone at a nearby house, but his attention quickly shifted from the stranded car to demon rum. The woman who answered his knock, Mrs. Maud Vogen, aroused Holter's suspicions when she denied having a phone, although one sat plain view. Holter returned a short time later with two other police officers, and his hunch paid off-they found Mrs. Vogen and another woman tending a twentygallon still and a quantity of whiskey and mash. A few days after Vogen's arrest, police apprehended her husband Andrew, who was living at another address, on the assumption that he had been of the bootleg operation. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that Maud and Andrew Vogen had not been living together as husband and wife for some time. Maud Vogen was in sole charge of the still, and the woman with her at the time of her arrest was her mother.' In the 1920s, Butte women made, sold, and drank liquor unprecedented fashion. Decades later, a Butte woman recalled the many evenings she donned her flapper finery and headed to the dance halls where she and her friends shimmied to jazz tunes and slipped outside to share a pint of moonshine. In 1929, a Butte judge, Dan Shea, proposed a city ordinance calling for police matrons all the city's dance halls; his action was prompted by the number of women carrying whiskey flasks into the popular nightspots.2