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SKY BLUE WATERS PRESS Working with prisoners: A personal story
By Eileen Sexton Poe
During the early 1950s I worked in the Registrars Office which was in a building located across the street from the old prison.
About half of the staff was made up of prisoners who did the filing. I worked in the basement on a graphotype machine and one day on my way downstairs I was stopped on the stairwell by an older prisoner who was serving time for having murdered his wife. He told me I reminded him of his wife because I had a twitch on the left side of my face, just like his wife had. He must have had a great imagination because I have never had a twitch. He scared me half to death and after that I would not go down those steps unless someone was with me.
Smoking was not allowing in the building so during break time many of the employees and prisoners would go out the back door to the alley and smoke. One day two of the prisoners lagged behind and when everyone was in the building they took off down the alley toward the business section of town. As luck would have it they came across a pickup truck with the keys in the ignition. They helped themselves to the truck and took the route to Anaconda and then over the Skalkaho Pass and headed south.
Somewhere along they line they broke into a high school and stole typewriters. They proceeded south and attempted to sell the typewriters to an individual who recognized them as stolen because the keys on these typewriters were blank. He reported it to the police who apprehended the “escape thieves” and soon after found themselves back in the old prison.
About Deer Lodge, western Montana's prison town
Even though the state prison houses far more inmates in 2006 than it did in 1959, the town's civilian population is smaller. People wonder how this can be. Wouldn't the prison have many more employees as a result?
The answers lie with the demise of trains and a shift of the workforce. Thirty years ago and more, when the Milwaukee Road was in business, Deer Lodge had a roundhouse and car shops for maintenance. Much of the area employment fell into three arenas: railroad, prison and farming/ranching. When the Milwaukee Road disappeared, so did hundreds of people.
The prison, meanwhile, moved to a new structure west of town. Over time more and more guards came from Butte and Anaconda. Although Deer Lodge appears to have more commerce than in the 1960s, the growth is near Interstate 90 where travelers stop. High school enrollment fell by nearly half (now Class B in sports) since the 1960s, when the school competed in Class A. For all the years gone by, Deer Lodge remains much the same -- a small town with a big heart.
Where is Deer Lodge?
It's in the western end of the state in the heart of the Rockies. It's about 40 miles northwest of Butte on I-90, and about 80 miles southeast of Missoula. To the southwest about 25 miles is Anaconda. To the northeast about 60 miles is Helena. Bozeman, Kalispell and Great Falls are farther.
Ever been to Deer Lodge, Montana? It's a small town in a big mountain valley along Interstate 90. The first thing anyone notices is Old Montana Prison, which looms out of the landscape like a movie set.
In fact, it's been used for just that: Fast Walking (1980), Runaway Train (1984), Diggstown (1990),The Last Ride (1994). The state ought to work harder to get more movies filmed there, because Old Montana Prison is a beautifully preserved relic of prisons past. The first you'll notice are the turrets, then the gray walls. In the last years of the old prison's life, electronic doors replaced some of the key locks. Otherwise, the prison is much like it was many decades ago.
When I researched Jerry's Riot, I was able to reconstruct what happened in 1959 as I walked through the prison grounds. With the exception of the 1896 cell house, all the infrastructure from the 1959 riot remains. The museum staff at Old Montana Prison has done a marvelous job bringing the old prison to life again. It closed as a functioning prison in 1979 (the big house west of town houses more than two times as many inmates as the old one did).
Visitors to Old Montana Prison can still visit Cell House 1, see maximum security, and even inspect the tunnel that allowed guards to watch inmates in the dining room.
Years later, scars of 1959 riot remain at Old Montana Prison
By Kate Schwab, Silver State Post, Deer Lodge, Montana
This year [2008], April 16 is Easter Sunday, a day when many people think of life and rebirth. To those who remember 1959 Deer Lodge, however, April 16 also represents the first of several long-ago days filled with death, tension and painful memories.
"Guards in 1959 had little training," Kevin Giles, author of Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana's 1959 Prison Disturbance, wrote after interviewing Victor Baldwin (now deceased), a former prison guard and a '59 riot hostage. "They had no special armor to protect themselves. Cell houses had no telephones, and guards had no means of communicating with one another except in face-to-face conversations." Until late 1958, Giles wrote, the prison had no classification system: Violent inmates mingled freely with white-collar criminals, and some inmates actually had more power than guards thanks to the con boss system, an arrangement in which convicts were responsible for managing industry operations within the prison. Guards feared a prisoner riot more than anything else.
It was summer 1958, and inmate Jerry Myles, a con boss, was responsible for the prison's garment shop. He was also a burglar, a psychopath and "a student of prison riots," Giles wrote. Myles had already led a mutiny at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Ga. and participated in a later uprising at Alcatratz. "He lacked a conscience, and because of his torn and shattered childhood, was always trying to make a name for himself," Giles said, adding, "Above all, he wanted publicity."
Enter Warden Floyd Powell and Deputy Warden Ted Rothe, prison administrators fresh from work at Wisconsin State Prison. Like other progressively minded 1950s-era prison wardens, they decided to eliminate the con boss system, Giles wrote. This upset the prison's balance of power and deeply offended Myles.
Myles talked his teenage boyfriend, convicted murderer Lee Smart, and another inmate, George Alton, into helping him take over the prison by telling them he could get them out. In addition to glory and control, Myles had revenge on his mind, Giles explained, his hit list consisted of Powell; Rothe; prison sociologist Walter Jones, Jr., who had suggested he be kept separated from other inmates; and Elmer Erickson, business manager.
"The riot began about 3:30 p.m. on April 16, 1959, when afternoon shift guards started rotating out of the prison to the guard's dining room at the back of what is now the museum gift shop," Giles wrote. At that time, the prison had two cell houses, in the northeast and southeast corners of the yard. In Cell House 1 (the northeast red tower, which is still standing), the inmates took guards hostage, then swooped over to Cell House 2. Smart seized a 30-30 rifle and ammunition belonging to one of the catwalk guards and went over to the Inside Administration building (the white structure between the two cell houses), where he killed Deputy Warden Rothe. In an hour's time, Giles wrote, the three men had rounded up 26 hostages, including Powell, one of his office assistants, guards, two teachers and a cook. Powell escaped several hours later, but the other hostages stayed locked in cells near a door that led into the northwest corner tower of Cell House 1. Alton, who disliked Myles anyway, soon quit participating and moved to a cell in Cell House 2, Giles said.
The governor put Powell in charge of stopping the riot and called in National Guardsmen from Helena, Deer Lodge and Missoula to help.
"On the second day, April 17, guard commanders reached the conclusion that Powell had lost control of the riot," Giles explained. Because they were afraid Myles and Smart would kill the guards, Giles wrote, the National Guard commanders were working to free the hostages before dawn on April 18.
Somehow, they knew where Myles and Smart had entrenched themselves.
"They fired three rounds from a rocket launcher at the (northwest) corner tower of Cell House 1, where Myles and Smart hid. Teams of riflemen then stormed the cell houses through the door that now leads into maximum security (then, the women's unit) on the west wall," Giles wrote.
Myles and Smart had planned to murder all the hostages before killing themselves, but they were prevented from exiting their corner tower by both the quick-acting National Guardsmen and Robert Zaharko, a highway patrol officer, Giles said. Zaharko stood on the north wall of the prison and kept machine-gunning bullets straight through Cell House 1's windows. The leaden spray stopped Myles and Smart from opening their tower door; that meant they could not reach their prisoners. While his hostages were busy escaping out the back of the prison, Myles stayed in the corner tower where he killed both Smart and himself.
In 1962, Gov. Babcock fired Powell and replaced him with Ed 'Bus' Ellsworth, one of the National Guard officers who planned the successful raid on the prison during the riot, Giles noted. George Alton, the only one of the three ringleaders to survive the riot, was imprisoned in maximum security for two years, paroled in 1966.
Giles, himself the son of a guard who had worked at the prison the day the riot began but escaped being taken hostage, believes the riot could have been avoided if the prison administrators had known more about Myles' history and burning desire for power and control.
"It's fair to say that prison staff in Deer Lodge didn't know his background or inclinations," he said. "Myles came to Deer Lodge by deliberately committing a burglary in Butte. He heard it was a prison he could run. Therefore, he had no intention of escaping."
An empty space in the old prison yard is all that is left of Cell House 2, which was demolished four months after the riot because of earthquake damage. But Cell House 1 still stands, and in its west window, bazooka scars remain, silent witnesses to the ghosts of Deer Lodge past.
(Published with permission from Kate Schwab.)
Old Montana Prison is located in the Old Montana Prison Complex, which houses five unique museums inside its historic prison walls. The complex, in Deer Lodge, includes the Old Montana Prison, Powell County Museum, Frontier Montana Museum, Yesterday's Playthings and the Montana Auto Museum. One fee covers all five museums. Convicts build the walls and cellhouses after the prison became the first territorial prison in the western United States. The prison was built by convict labor in the late 1800s. The gray sandstone walls of this immense structure are 24 feet high and buried 4 feet deep to prevent escape by tunneling. The prison became a museum when inmates were moved to a new prison west of Deer Lodge. To see the old prison's website, CLICK HERE.
A place where movies are made
Sky Blue Waters Press copyright 2005 Kevin S. Giles
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