Hell With the Lid Off

A Memoir of the

"Wildest Town in the West"

by 1890s' police reporter 

Horace Herbert Smith

Horace Herbert Smith take you to Butte, Montana, in its copper-mining heyday to experience that brawling, big-hearted time. In a series of vivid snapshots Smith, a Butte newspaperman, describes the 1890s when, as he writes, life there "was fast and fun." Smith died before he could publish his absorbing and entertaining memoir detailing daytime gun battles and a sermonizing standoff, the high life and labor strife, scoundrels and bullwhackers and still-breathing corpses, with a cast of real-life characters so colorful as to make fiction writers despair. Fortunately for the reader, Smith's manuscript is finally seeing print. It's a rare treat.

-Gwen Florio

Journalist, author of the Lola Wicks crime series and other books