Creating a Reality for Ourselves where the Bleeding is (1994)
Creating a Reality for Ourselves where the Bleeding is (1994)
Looking at the entire Northwest Montana Emergency from the vantage point of the early 2020s, it is the strange four-year interlude between the First and Second Northwest Montana Insurgencies that has attracted the most abiding popular interest. In a fundamental sense, the active insurgencies were unique only insofar as all of the participants were Anglophone. The First Insurgency had been prefigured almost exactly by insurgencies in multiple African and Middle Eastern theatres in the 1970s, some of which had ended in more comprehensive victories for the insurgents, and some of which had ended in their pacification by government forces, but all of which had followed similar trajectories, constrained by the internal logic of counter-insurgent warfare and the significant advantages enjoyed by the insurgents. The Second Insurgency, if countered using somewhat different tactics (albeit to no more lasting success) could again be made to fit a recognised pattern of counter-insurgent warfare in the twenty-first century. The interlude, however, is recognised more and more as a moment of flux heralding a sea change in the nature of warfare: the theatres in which it was fought; the goals of the combatants; and their methodology.
Given that the first few months of this interlude, which saw the temporary and ad-hoc coalition between the provisional council of the North-West Front and the leadership of the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion transform, as the Northwest Republic, into a government which had asserted a shaky but sustained authority throughout the entirety of Northwest Montana by the beginning of 1995, most prominently involves the Siege of Butte, it is unsurprising that this episode has been responsible for a wide array of literature. These records of the siege range from Barbara Ehrenreich’s wistful meditation on the town of her birth and its transfiguration through shared suffering, through Robert Fisk’s fascinating if deeply unreliable accounts of Northwest Montana between 1994 and 2002, to Susan Sontag’s solipsistic yet oddly compelling description of her experience of the Butte Autonomous Zone.
The most radical interpretation of the Siege of Butte, however, was unquestionably produced in the late 1990s by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, whose overriding fascination with the Northwest Montana Insurgency and its aftermath fuelled his most ambitious output in the period. In a series of essays published in Liberation, Baudrillard evaluated the siege as an overall phenomenon, taking as his starting point the simple fact that the Butte Autonomous Zone had remained independent of the Northwest Republic for about five months longer than it should have been capable of on paper.
By any objective standard, the situation facing the defenders of Butte in early April of 1994 was untenable. In possession of fewer than one hundred rounds of ammunition per man, utterly dependent on the importation of about forty thousand pounds of food per day once the fortnight or so of food which could be stockpiled had been consumed, and cut off from any plausible relief expedition, Butte would have been lucky to survive under a conventional siege until May – regardless of the inherent unpredictability of a direct assault and its inevitable degeneration into chaotic building-to-building fighting, the NWF could simply have rendered Butte’s water treatment plant inoperable, waited seventy-two hours and then offered the defenders a choice between surrender and dehydration.
That Butte not only managed to survive through the summer but that its eventual absorption into the Northwest Republic was conducted on surprisingly favourable terms points to the importance of a different series of factors governing the conduct of the siege. The collapse of any meaningful CSA military presence in Northwest Montana, followed in short order by Haig’s abortive coup, fundamentally changed the equation faced by the besiegers and defenders: on a fundamental level, both sides benefited from the indefinite prolonging of the siege.
Baudrillard’s landmark essay on the siege begins in media res, with the first landing of a Red Cross-chartered aircraft carrying medical supplies and intended to evacuate Butte’s youngest, oldest and sickest residents to Idaho (the product of an agreement hashed out between a representative of the BAZ, an emissary from the RNL and a high-ranking Idaho National Guard officer in the conference room of a Coeur D’Alene Best Western) at the BAZ-controlled Butte Regional Airport: Baudrillard notes in passing that actual aid workers on the flight were outnumbered about two to one by an array of journalists.
In reality, this flight, touching down in late May 1994, was merely the most visible result of a much wider-ranging effort conducted by both sides to spread the immediate impact of the siege as widely as possible, with an eye to achieving broader aims not immediately related to control over twenty or so square miles of Montana real estate. To the extent that such an effort can have a definite beginning, it was precipitated towards the end of April when Robert Fisk, assigned by the Associated Press to Seattle to cover a bilateral trade conference between Canada and the PSA dull even by the standards of bilateral trade conference, happened to notice a brief item in a local newspaper about a potential syndicalist rebellion in Butte. Scenting a story, and infuriated with himself for having arrived in the area slightly too late to witness the collapse of SATPO first-hand, Fisk abandoned his reportage of the conference: bribing his way past the thoroughly demoralised border guards with several packs of cigarettes and penetrating the thoroughly leaky cordon around Butte with ease, he was able to compile a lengthy report, the gist of which was wired to sympathetic media outlets on his arrival in Boise a week later.
It is at this moment, Baudrillard asserts, that the siege ceases to be a military struggle and becomes two separate interactive performances in which a strange sort of parasocial relationship is formed between the outside world and each of the participating factions. Regardless of exactly how far the reader is willing to go along with his thesis (it’s important to remember that while these “performances” were ongoing, militiamen on both sides were fighting and occasionally dying on the outskirts of Butte, in an – admittedly desultory – struggle for physical territory) it is clear that the siege, while it continued, filled a deep need for a portion of its observers.
The function that the existence of the Butte Autonomous Zone fulfilled in the eyes of its sympathisers is more easily definable. For much of the half-century subsequent to the Second Weltkrieg, the Combined Syndicates of America had been the body from which the industrial syndicalist tendency within the global Left (maybe not quite as dominant as it had been prior to 1939, but still outweighing any other faction, at least among the intelligentsia in the developed world) had drawn much of its moral and intellectual support. The vast majority of its self-described syndicalist companion states over that period could be safely disregarded: Deat’s France and Shinwell’s Britain, prior to their comprehensive military defeats, as degraded Bonapartist dictatorships maintaining an increasingly threadbare popular legitimacy via appeals to revanchist sentiment; Brazil (where collectivised peasants, compelled to melt down their iron tools in backyard furnaces to support official figures on steel production, had starved en masse during the late 1950s) as a cautionary tale about the inapplicability of syndicalist thought to agrarian societies; the deranged hermit state of Patagonia as essentially a gas station for the CSA, whose money enabled the mad excesses of Homero Frasnelli (the mass declassification of the Bureau of External Security’s files in the late 2000s revealed that millions of American dollars had been used to fund Frasnelli’s investigations on whether syndicalism could be taught to dolphins). It was in the CSA and in the thirty-year apogee of its prosperity that overseas sympathisers had placed their hopes: the slow withering of its promise throughout the 1980s and its final, embarrassing collapse had hit them hard. In the Butte Autonomous Zone, people accustomed to making excuses for state failure could finally vicariously experience the earliest and most optimistic days of American syndicalism.
A similar tendency existed for the NWF’s external supporters. From the early 1990s onward, the sanitised picture of the NWF which a series of embedded reporters had presented to the outside world had struck a genuine chord with much of the rural Pacific States, who saw in their own, smaller-scale, struggles with central government (personified by the Bureau of Land Management) echoes of the insurgents’ fight for freedom. While this identification was less absolute outside the participants in the Sagebrush Rebellion, an at least vaguely pro-NWF sentiment was typical throughout the Commonwealth. This conception of the insurgents had been shattered by the last nightmarish weeks of Operation Mountain Lion: although little could be verified at this stage, lurid rumours of flayings and mass murder of civilians were percolating throughout the PSA. The NWF was, by mid-1994, desperately in need both of supplies and international recognition – anything whatsoever which could restore enough of their image to allow some sort of free flow of goods from the PSA would be invaluable.
With the first mercy flight into Butte Regional Airport, the parameters of the siege became clear. Butte itself, for the remainder of the siege, would be entirely dependent on what supplies could be flown in on Red Cross aircraft, transported by rail from the Homeland Republic-controlled Three Forks, or, in extreme cases, smuggled in by foot. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that NWF and RNL were careful not to impede the flights (of limited value in any case other than for medical supplies) and largely disregarded the handful of smugglers willing to run goods into Butte. It is perhaps stranger, given that the railway route ran through twenty miles of NWF-controlled territory, that about two out of three trains supplying food to Butte reached their destination intact, with the remainder generally being turned back without the benefit of incident. It was only later, with the benefit of hindsight, that it became clear that the NWF was prepared to allow just enough food into Butte to allow two weeks of storage at any one time, but not enough for a larger stockpile to be produced.
It was the summer of 1994 which saw the full flourishing of the Siege of Butte purely as spectacle: with active fighting over the outskirts of the city increasingly rare, the Autonomous Zone was swarmed with journalists: permitted a virtually free hand by what passed for the Zone’s ruling authorities (bizarrely, Susan Sontag was able to mount a full production of Fidelio in the middle of Butte using a local choir), they provided a steady stream of local colour which, however briefly, captured the interest of a surprisingly large proportion of the Pacific States’ citizenry.
The scale of financial support available to the nascent Butte Autonomous is illustrated by the well-publicised trial in 1995 of half a dozen scammers who had posed as an official relief organisation to extract close to a million dollars from well-heeled Seattle radicals: by the time anyone noticed that their organisation was entirely fictional, they’d converted these funds into high-grade MDMA. For people with fewer financial resources available and more time on their hands, the frayed NWF/RCL cordon around Butte provided an opportunity for more direct involvement: by late July, a steady trickle of foreign volunteers was crossing over the border to join one side or another. With its history both of labour radicalism and its status as the heartland of Klassenism, Portland alone provided more than a hundred volunteers for each side.
It was these volunteers which indirectly led to the end of the Siege of Butte. Although a few volunteers were to prove of genuine value for their factions (by far the best of these was Russell Bentley, a middle-aged arborist from San Antonio impelled to join the Butte Autonomous Zone from genuine ideological sympathy: rapidly discovering a genuine talent for guerrilla warfare, he would remain an important figure within Northwest Montana for the next decade, adopting the soubriquet of “Commander John Bunyan”), the volunteers were generally petty criminals with a lengthy history of violence, many of whom could have just as easily fought for the faction they were opposing. With the advantage of an extensive command structure, the NWF was able to spread its volunteers throughout more regular units: Butte, however, was incapable of exerting any real authority over their newcomers, often already arriving as a group and entirely uninterested in maintaining the sedate pace of the siege thus far.
To break what they perceived as a deadlock, these groups launched a series of unsupported and spontaneous raids on the surrounding countryside, penetrating the cordon around Butte and descending on the remaining farming collectives in the region to demand supplies. Any resistance on the part of the farm workers was met with a brutality more associated with the end of Operation Mountain Lion. Initially wrongfooted by Butte’s change in strategy, the NWF and RNL were able to call upon enough manpower to reduce the collectives’ exposure somewhat. With slimmer and slimmer pickings available on their side of the Line of Truce, an increasing proportion of these raids were launched in those poorly-patrolled areas still under the de jure authority of the Grangeland Republic, while desperation ratcheted up the brutality of the raiders still further. By early September, stories of entire families tortured to death had begun to circulate throughout central Montana. Lacking the resources to properly police the area, what remained of Grangeland’s law enforcement apparatus increasingly took to cutting deals with the NWF, with mixed NWF and law enforcement patrols of the border commencing towards the end of the month. Gradually and tentatively, the Northwest Republic was taking its first steps towards recognition as a nation.
These stories, in garbled form, had reached Sacramento by mid-October. Along with a stream of reports of low-level violence in the more dilapidated parts of Portland between Klassenite and anarchist gangs, they added to the Brown administration’s increasing conviction that the Siege of Butte posed a danger to the PSA. The final straw came in early November when Tobi Vail, a minor but locally famous musician from Olympia, was killed while smuggling supplies into Butte when the group of volunteers she was with stumbled into an NWF patrol. The government of the PSA tersely announced that no consular support would be provided to any volunteers entering the Federation of American States, that anyone attempting to cross the Idaho-Montana border would be arrested, and that the mercy flights into Butte would be temporarily paused.
Sensing a genuine change in sentiment, the NWF finally tightened the net around Butte, with a day of brief but intense fighting allowing them to regain uninterrupted control of the ridge overlooking city while all rail freight from Three Forks were intercepted from 10 November onwards. The following week saw Butte begin to fray at the seams. The earlier excitement of the great anarchist project that was the Autonomous Zones had begun to flag somewhat over the summer, with fewer and fewer citizens regularly attending participatory governance meetings which had started to seem interminable to all but the most enthusiastic. Now, the ruling council which had been elected to handle matters of city-wide governance were faced with the prospect of imposing enormously restrictive rationing at short notice on an increasingly intractable populace – although internal calculations had suggested that Butte might be able to survive the winter, even without forcing the railway connection to Three Forks open again, if every adult was restricted to half a pound of bread every two days, enforcement was considered impossible for all practical purposes.
It is unsurprising, given the circumstances, that the locals began to turn on the Pacific interlopers who, in their eyes, had poisoned international opinion against them. The first murder took place on 13 November, when a volunteer from Salem was beaten to death outside one of Butte’s few operational bars: no witnesses were prepared to come forward. By 15 November, the ruling council had told the remaining contingent of journalists that their safety could no longer be guaranteed: on the following day, the last Red Cross-marked aircraft, laden with journalists, took off from Butte Regional Airport. To her credit, Susan Sontag opted to remain in the city.
After lengthy discussion between the NWF and the RNL (facilitated, as usual, by the quietly indispensable Michael Aquino), the two armies offered terms of surrender to Butte on 17 November. The astonishing generosity of the terms (Butte would be permitted to police itself with no regular resident of Butte being disarmed, the Autonomous Zone would be allowed to keep its current system of government and send two representatives to the deliberative council of the newly-formed Northwest Republic, and whatever shipments of food and medicine was required by the city would be expedited once it had been signed) and the rapidity with which these terms were accepted at an extraordinary general meeting of Butte’s populace, with a handful of diehards and remaining volunteers forced to leave the meeting in fear of their lives, proved a deep disappointment to those international observers who had followed the slow escalation of violence with a sadism born of complete insulation from any consequences for their cheerleading, and had seen the faction they supported as supermen who would, any day now, gun through waves of faceless proxies for the observers’ personal or political enemies.
Everyone else basically got what they wanted. The NWF and RNL were able to launder their reputation in the wider world; by permitting the existence of a comparatively safe haven for personal expression, the religious fundamentalists within both armies were able to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous mass of people chafing under the strictures of Rushdooneyite or Mormon rule (the mid-90s would see a slow but steady migration from rural northwest Montana to Butte); Gritz and Aquino had built a state which, if currently unrecognised, was on at least cordial terms with the border guards in the PSA and the Grangeland Republic; Butte, against the odds, had survived.
The Northwest Republic was officially established, as a union of the various groups in possession of territory in Northwest Montana, on 1 January 1995. It is a testament to the sheer oddness of this period that the Butte Autonomous Zone wasn’t the weirdest entrant.
Looking at the entire Northwest Montana Emergency from the vantage point of the early 2020s, it is the strange four-year interlude between the First and Second Northwest Montana Insurgencies that has attracted the most abiding popular interest. In a fundamental sense, the active insurgencies were unique only insofar as all of the participants were Anglophone. The First Insurgency had been prefigured almost exactly by insurgencies in multiple African and Middle Eastern theatres in the 1970s, some of which had ended in more comprehensive victories for the insurgents, and some of which had ended in their pacification by government forces, but all of which had followed similar trajectories, constrained by the internal logic of counter-insurgent warfare and the significant advantages enjoyed by the insurgents. The Second Insurgency, if countered using somewhat different tactics (albeit to no more lasting success) could again be made to fit a recognised pattern of counter-insurgent warfare in the twenty-first century. The interlude, however, is recognised more and more as a moment of flux heralding a sea change in the nature of warfare: the theatres in which it was fought; the goals of the combatants; and their methodology.
Given that the first few months of this interlude, which saw the temporary and ad-hoc coalition between the provisional council of the North-West Front and the leadership of the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion transform, as the Northwest Republic, into a government which had asserted a shaky but sustained authority throughout the entirety of Northwest Montana by the beginning of 1995, most prominently involves the Siege of Butte, it is unsurprising that this episode has been responsible for a wide array of literature. These records of the siege range from Barbara Ehrenreich’s wistful meditation on the town of her birth and its transfiguration through shared suffering, through Robert Fisk’s fascinating if deeply unreliable accounts of Northwest Montana between 1994 and 2002, to Susan Sontag’s solipsistic yet oddly compelling description of her experience of the Butte Autonomous Zone.
The most radical interpretation of the Siege of Butte, however, was unquestionably produced in the late 1990s by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, whose overriding fascination with the Northwest Montana Insurgency and its aftermath fuelled his most ambitious output in the period. In a series of essays published in Liberation, Baudrillard evaluated the siege as an overall phenomenon, taking as his starting point the simple fact that the Butte Autonomous Zone had remained independent of the Northwest Republic for about five months longer than it should have been capable of on paper.
By any objective standard, the situation facing the defenders of Butte in early April of 1994 was untenable. In possession of fewer than one hundred rounds of ammunition per man, utterly dependent on the importation of about forty thousand pounds of food per day once the fortnight or so of food which could be stockpiled had been consumed, and cut off from any plausible relief expedition, Butte would have been lucky to survive under a conventional siege until May – regardless of the inherent unpredictability of a direct assault and its inevitable degeneration into chaotic building-to-building fighting, the NWF could simply have rendered Butte’s water treatment plant inoperable, waited seventy-two hours and then offered the defenders a choice between surrender and dehydration.
That Butte not only managed to survive through the summer but that its eventual absorption into the Northwest Republic was conducted on surprisingly favourable terms points to the importance of a different series of factors governing the conduct of the siege. The collapse of any meaningful CSA military presence in Northwest Montana, followed in short order by Haig’s abortive coup, fundamentally changed the equation faced by the besiegers and defenders: on a fundamental level, both sides benefited from the indefinite prolonging of the siege.
Baudrillard’s landmark essay on the siege begins in media res, with the first landing of a Red Cross-chartered aircraft carrying medical supplies and intended to evacuate Butte’s youngest, oldest and sickest residents to Idaho (the product of an agreement hashed out between a representative of the BAZ, an emissary from the RNL and a high-ranking Idaho National Guard officer in the conference room of a Coeur D’Alene Best Western) at the BAZ-controlled Butte Regional Airport: Baudrillard notes in passing that actual aid workers on the flight were outnumbered about two to one by an array of journalists.
In reality, this flight, touching down in late May 1994, was merely the most visible result of a much wider-ranging effort conducted by both sides to spread the immediate impact of the siege as widely as possible, with an eye to achieving broader aims not immediately related to control over twenty or so square miles of Montana real estate. To the extent that such an effort can have a definite beginning, it was precipitated towards the end of April when Robert Fisk, assigned by the Associated Press to Seattle to cover a bilateral trade conference between Canada and the PSA dull even by the standards of bilateral trade conference, happened to notice a brief item in a local newspaper about a potential syndicalist rebellion in Butte. Scenting a story, and infuriated with himself for having arrived in the area slightly too late to witness the collapse of SATPO first-hand, Fisk abandoned his reportage of the conference: bribing his way past the thoroughly demoralised border guards with several packs of cigarettes and penetrating the thoroughly leaky cordon around Butte with ease, he was able to compile a lengthy report, the gist of which was wired to sympathetic media outlets on his arrival in Boise a week later.
It is at this moment, Baudrillard asserts, that the siege ceases to be a military struggle and becomes two separate interactive performances in which a strange sort of parasocial relationship is formed between the outside world and each of the participating factions. Regardless of exactly how far the reader is willing to go along with his thesis (it’s important to remember that while these “performances” were ongoing, militiamen on both sides were fighting and occasionally dying on the outskirts of Butte, in an – admittedly desultory – struggle for physical territory) it is clear that the siege, while it continued, filled a deep need for a portion of its observers.
The function that the existence of the Butte Autonomous Zone fulfilled in the eyes of its sympathisers is more easily definable. For much of the half-century subsequent to the Second Weltkrieg, the Combined Syndicates of America had been the body from which the industrial syndicalist tendency within the global Left (maybe not quite as dominant as it had been prior to 1939, but still outweighing any other faction, at least among the intelligentsia in the developed world) had drawn much of its moral and intellectual support. The vast majority of its self-described syndicalist companion states over that period could be safely disregarded: Deat’s France and Shinwell’s Britain, prior to their comprehensive military defeats, as degraded Bonapartist dictatorships maintaining an increasingly threadbare popular legitimacy via appeals to revanchist sentiment; Brazil (where collectivised peasants, compelled to melt down their iron tools in backyard furnaces to support official figures on steel production, had starved en masse during the late 1950s) as a cautionary tale about the inapplicability of syndicalist thought to agrarian societies; the deranged hermit state of Patagonia as essentially a gas station for the CSA, whose money enabled the mad excesses of Homero Frasnelli (the mass declassification of the Bureau of External Security’s files in the late 2000s revealed that millions of American dollars had been used to fund Frasnelli’s investigations on whether syndicalism could be taught to dolphins). It was in the CSA and in the thirty-year apogee of its prosperity that overseas sympathisers had placed their hopes: the slow withering of its promise throughout the 1980s and its final, embarrassing collapse had hit them hard. In the Butte Autonomous Zone, people accustomed to making excuses for state failure could finally vicariously experience the earliest and most optimistic days of American syndicalism.
A similar tendency existed for the NWF’s external supporters. From the early 1990s onward, the sanitised picture of the NWF which a series of embedded reporters had presented to the outside world had struck a genuine chord with much of the rural Pacific States, who saw in their own, smaller-scale, struggles with central government (personified by the Bureau of Land Management) echoes of the insurgents’ fight for freedom. While this identification was less absolute outside the participants in the Sagebrush Rebellion, an at least vaguely pro-NWF sentiment was typical throughout the Commonwealth. This conception of the insurgents had been shattered by the last nightmarish weeks of Operation Mountain Lion: although little could be verified at this stage, lurid rumours of flayings and mass murder of civilians were percolating throughout the PSA. The NWF was, by mid-1994, desperately in need both of supplies and international recognition – anything whatsoever which could restore enough of their image to allow some sort of free flow of goods from the PSA would be invaluable.
With the first mercy flight into Butte Regional Airport, the parameters of the siege became clear. Butte itself, for the remainder of the siege, would be entirely dependent on what supplies could be flown in on Red Cross aircraft, transported by rail from the Homeland Republic-controlled Three Forks, or, in extreme cases, smuggled in by foot. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that NWF and RNL were careful not to impede the flights (of limited value in any case other than for medical supplies) and largely disregarded the handful of smugglers willing to run goods into Butte. It is perhaps stranger, given that the railway route ran through twenty miles of NWF-controlled territory, that about two out of three trains supplying food to Butte reached their destination intact, with the remainder generally being turned back without the benefit of incident. It was only later, with the benefit of hindsight, that it became clear that the NWF was prepared to allow just enough food into Butte to allow two weeks of storage at any one time, but not enough for a larger stockpile to be produced.
It was the summer of 1994 which saw the full flourishing of the Siege of Butte purely as spectacle: with active fighting over the outskirts of the city increasingly rare, the Autonomous Zone was swarmed with journalists: permitted a virtually free hand by what passed for the Zone’s ruling authorities (bizarrely, Susan Sontag was able to mount a full production of Fidelio in the middle of Butte using a local choir), they provided a steady stream of local colour which, however briefly, captured the interest of a surprisingly large proportion of the Pacific States’ citizenry.
The scale of financial support available to the nascent Butte Autonomous is illustrated by the well-publicised trial in 1995 of half a dozen scammers who had posed as an official relief organisation to extract close to a million dollars from well-heeled Seattle radicals: by the time anyone noticed that their organisation was entirely fictional, they’d converted these funds into high-grade MDMA. For people with fewer financial resources available and more time on their hands, the frayed NWF/RCL cordon around Butte provided an opportunity for more direct involvement: by late July, a steady trickle of foreign volunteers was crossing over the border to join one side or another. With its history both of labour radicalism and its status as the heartland of Klassenism, Portland alone provided more than a hundred volunteers for each side.
It was these volunteers which indirectly led to the end of the Siege of Butte. Although a few volunteers were to prove of genuine value for their factions (by far the best of these was Russell Bentley, a middle-aged arborist from San Antonio impelled to join the Butte Autonomous Zone from genuine ideological sympathy: rapidly discovering a genuine talent for guerrilla warfare, he would remain an important figure within Northwest Montana for the next decade, adopting the soubriquet of “Commander John Bunyan”), the volunteers were generally petty criminals with a lengthy history of violence, many of whom could have just as easily fought for the faction they were opposing. With the advantage of an extensive command structure, the NWF was able to spread its volunteers throughout more regular units: Butte, however, was incapable of exerting any real authority over their newcomers, often already arriving as a group and entirely uninterested in maintaining the sedate pace of the siege thus far.
To break what they perceived as a deadlock, these groups launched a series of unsupported and spontaneous raids on the surrounding countryside, penetrating the cordon around Butte and descending on the remaining farming collectives in the region to demand supplies. Any resistance on the part of the farm workers was met with a brutality more associated with the end of Operation Mountain Lion. Initially wrongfooted by Butte’s change in strategy, the NWF and RNL were able to call upon enough manpower to reduce the collectives’ exposure somewhat. With slimmer and slimmer pickings available on their side of the Line of Truce, an increasing proportion of these raids were launched in those poorly-patrolled areas still under the de jure authority of the Grangeland Republic, while desperation ratcheted up the brutality of the raiders still further. By early September, stories of entire families tortured to death had begun to circulate throughout central Montana. Lacking the resources to properly police the area, what remained of Grangeland’s law enforcement apparatus increasingly took to cutting deals with the NWF, with mixed NWF and law enforcement patrols of the border commencing towards the end of the month. Gradually and tentatively, the Northwest Republic was taking its first steps towards recognition as a nation.
These stories, in garbled form, had reached Sacramento by mid-October. Along with a stream of reports of low-level violence in the more dilapidated parts of Portland between Klassenite and anarchist gangs, they added to the Brown administration’s increasing conviction that the Siege of Butte posed a danger to the PSA. The final straw came in early November when Tobi Vail, a minor but locally famous musician from Olympia, was killed while smuggling supplies into Butte when the group of volunteers she was with stumbled into an NWF patrol. The government of the PSA tersely announced that no consular support would be provided to any volunteers entering the Federation of American States, that anyone attempting to cross the Idaho-Montana border would be arrested, and that the mercy flights into Butte would be temporarily paused.
Sensing a genuine change in sentiment, the NWF finally tightened the net around Butte, with a day of brief but intense fighting allowing them to regain uninterrupted control of the ridge overlooking city while all rail freight from Three Forks were intercepted from 10 November onwards. The following week saw Butte begin to fray at the seams. The earlier excitement of the great anarchist project that was the Autonomous Zones had begun to flag somewhat over the summer, with fewer and fewer citizens regularly attending participatory governance meetings which had started to seem interminable to all but the most enthusiastic. Now, the ruling council which had been elected to handle matters of city-wide governance were faced with the prospect of imposing enormously restrictive rationing at short notice on an increasingly intractable populace – although internal calculations had suggested that Butte might be able to survive the winter, even without forcing the railway connection to Three Forks open again, if every adult was restricted to half a pound of bread every two days, enforcement was considered impossible for all practical purposes.
It is unsurprising, given the circumstances, that the locals began to turn on the Pacific interlopers who, in their eyes, had poisoned international opinion against them. The first murder took place on 13 November, when a volunteer from Salem was beaten to death outside one of Butte’s few operational bars: no witnesses were prepared to come forward. By 15 November, the ruling council had told the remaining contingent of journalists that their safety could no longer be guaranteed: on the following day, the last Red Cross-marked aircraft, laden with journalists, took off from Butte Regional Airport. To her credit, Susan Sontag opted to remain in the city.
After lengthy discussion between the NWF and the RNL (facilitated, as usual, by the quietly indispensable Michael Aquino), the two armies offered terms of surrender to Butte on 17 November. The astonishing generosity of the terms (Butte would be permitted to police itself with no regular resident of Butte being disarmed, the Autonomous Zone would be allowed to keep its current system of government and send two representatives to the deliberative council of the newly-formed Northwest Republic, and whatever shipments of food and medicine was required by the city would be expedited once it had been signed) and the rapidity with which these terms were accepted at an extraordinary general meeting of Butte’s populace, with a handful of diehards and remaining volunteers forced to leave the meeting in fear of their lives, proved a deep disappointment to those international observers who had followed the slow escalation of violence with a sadism born of complete insulation from any consequences for their cheerleading, and had seen the faction they supported as supermen who would, any day now, gun through waves of faceless proxies for the observers’ personal or political enemies.
Everyone else basically got what they wanted. The NWF and RNL were able to launder their reputation in the wider world; by permitting the existence of a comparatively safe haven for personal expression, the religious fundamentalists within both armies were able to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous mass of people chafing under the strictures of Rushdooneyite or Mormon rule (the mid-90s would see a slow but steady migration from rural northwest Montana to Butte); Gritz and Aquino had built a state which, if currently unrecognised, was on at least cordial terms with the border guards in the PSA and the Grangeland Republic; Butte, against the odds, had survived.
The Northwest Republic was officially established, as a union of the various groups in possession of territory in Northwest Montana, on 1 January 1995. It is a testament to the sheer oddness of this period that the Butte Autonomous Zone wasn’t the weirdest entrant.
