What do you think?
Rate this book
Hell With the Lid Off: Butte, Montana
Hell With the Lid Butte, Montana is the lost manuscript of Horace 'Bert' Smith, who arrived in the West as a teetotaling 21-year-old adventure-seeking reporter. He later went on to publishing successes in New York as part of a salon that included Zane Grey and Upton Sinclair. With his reporter's eye and access to characters on both sides of the law, Smith chronicles wild times, terrible tragedies and sudden millionaires on 'the richest hill on earth'. His granddaughter, Melissa Smith FitzGerald, discovered the manuscript that Smith was finishing and trying to sell to Hollywood when he died suddenly in 1936.
236 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2021
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 8, 2025
Being from Butte, I enjoyed reading some history from a news reporter who actually lived through the 1890s in Butte. Not very well written, making it difficult to read at times. My grandparents migrated to Butte during this time era.
December 2, 2021
What can I say but wow? I only publish books I like, and this one has a special place in my heart.
I've been involved with Hell With the Lid Off since before it was a book, prowling the rich mines of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives with Bill Lambrecht back in the zero-days of February, 2019, when we visited the old mining town over his week as a journalist-in-residence through the Montana Standard and the Mining City Writing Project. Horace Herbert Smith's papers had just arrived, and in them was the manuscript for this book, which the old reporter was working hard on up to his death in 1936. Titled by him, it was to be the story of Butte in its 1890s' heyday, when it was the richest and wildest town in America's unruly West.
Smith caught Bill in his story-telling net, and Bill wrote a story about Smith and his project for the Montana Standard. All that led him back to granddaughter Melissa FitzGerald, who had donated the papers to the archives and dearly wanted her grandfather's book published. Interested as we were, back then we were both full-time journalist with not a minute to spare.
Yet by the beginning of 2020, by a surprising turn of fate, I had sold my newspaper, Bay Weekly, and turned to book publishing. A year later, Bill—retired from decades in daily journalism and the pandemic year as "visiting professional" at University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism—joined me.
We spent much of 2021 wrestling the manuscript into a book, with Bill jumping deep into Smith's life and work for research and fact-checking. My job was line-editing and proofreading. We left the story much as Smith told it (tho I would have made some changes had Bill let me) as a memoir of his wild youth and the place where anything—except dishonesty and pretension—goes. Smith wrote a fine sentence, so we had little work to do at that level. Artist and book designer Suzanne Shelden made the manuscript a get-up-and-grab-you book that Smith himself would have loved.
What I got from all that was the best history lesson of my life, a true, irresistible story of people, place and time.
I've been involved with Hell With the Lid Off since before it was a book, prowling the rich mines of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives with Bill Lambrecht back in the zero-days of February, 2019, when we visited the old mining town over his week as a journalist-in-residence through the Montana Standard and the Mining City Writing Project. Horace Herbert Smith's papers had just arrived, and in them was the manuscript for this book, which the old reporter was working hard on up to his death in 1936. Titled by him, it was to be the story of Butte in its 1890s' heyday, when it was the richest and wildest town in America's unruly West.
Smith caught Bill in his story-telling net, and Bill wrote a story about Smith and his project for the Montana Standard. All that led him back to granddaughter Melissa FitzGerald, who had donated the papers to the archives and dearly wanted her grandfather's book published. Interested as we were, back then we were both full-time journalist with not a minute to spare.
Yet by the beginning of 2020, by a surprising turn of fate, I had sold my newspaper, Bay Weekly, and turned to book publishing. A year later, Bill—retired from decades in daily journalism and the pandemic year as "visiting professional" at University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism—joined me.
We spent much of 2021 wrestling the manuscript into a book, with Bill jumping deep into Smith's life and work for research and fact-checking. My job was line-editing and proofreading. We left the story much as Smith told it (tho I would have made some changes had Bill let me) as a memoir of his wild youth and the place where anything—except dishonesty and pretension—goes. Smith wrote a fine sentence, so we had little work to do at that level. Artist and book designer Suzanne Shelden made the manuscript a get-up-and-grab-you book that Smith himself would have loved.
What I got from all that was the best history lesson of my life, a true, irresistible story of people, place and time.
January 23, 2024
The reporter certainly tells how wild life was in Butte in the 1890s. Round the clock mine work, round the clock restaurants, and round the clock bars were filled with men who were always ready for a drink or meal, and often, a fight. Famous and infamous people were written about by this reporter. He also carried his own weapon and sometimes was not always as honest as I thought he ought to be. It was interesting book.
December 30, 2021
This (recently found) memoir by a newspaperman working the police beat in a frontier town is a hell of a read. Trust me, you want to hear these stories.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews