On that fateful Tuesday evening Mollie and Joe were in one of Butte, Montana's many saloons. It was there that the couple got into an argument. Mollie had a little room for her prostitution work directly off the dance hall. It was there that Mollie's irate husband dragged her.
Mollie Forrest Scott earned her meager money in that little room, probably with most of it being handed over to her husband. There, Joe Scott pulled his gun, ending his source of income when he fired at his wife, killing her and blowing away the side of her face and the back of her head.
Such violent incidents in Butte were more or less common occurrences, as well as many other rough towns of the early American West. , beginning not long after the first placer gold was discovered in 1864 by those who had already become known as the forty-niners. The forty-niners were men, and some women as well, who trekked westward in 1849 and the very early 1850s to California when gold was discovered there. It was many of these same hardscrabble folks that left the gold diggings of California and moved on to seek their fortune in the Montana gold fields.
Butte, Montana's gold rush was short-lived. When the loose gold soon ran out folks moved on to greener, or more golden, pastures. And for a time some silver was mined around Butte. But then in the late 1870s copper was discovered in the area and Butte sprung to life once more, becoming the biggest, and one of the wildest, mining towns in the territory. It was the copper era that brought folks like the Scotts, and a lot of worse ones as well, to Butte to ply their various trades and, in the case of Mollie Forrest, to their often brutal deaths.
Murder in Montana continued.
