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In December of 2021, Don Peoples Sr. fell and broke his collarbone. 

The break was bad enough that it required surgery on Dec. 23, and the Butte High vs. Butte Central basketball games just so happened to be at the Butte Civic Center that night.

When you undergo any surgery, you are supposed to take it easy for a few days, at the very least. Since Peoples was in his early 80s, the doctor wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight for observation.

The doctor apparently didn’t know who he was dealing with.

That night at the Civic Center, Dougie Peoples scored 22 points as Butte Central rolled to a 65-37 win over the Bulldogs, and Dougie’s “Papa Don” was looking on proudly from a few rows behind the BC bench.

“I said, ‘No, I want to go to the basketball game,” Peoples said as he appeared on the first episode of the ButteCast in September of 2022. “I didn’t want to miss that basketball game because I had a feeling we were going to do alright.”

A few days later, I called Peoples to talk about the work we were doing to select the Butte Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2022. He did not answer the phone.

An hour or so later, he called back. I joked that I assumed he was busy exercising. I didn’t think he was really exercising so soon after a surgery. What kind of person would be working out so soon after surgery?

Apparently, I forgot who I was dealing with.

“I just got off the bike,” Peoples said.

“Oh man,” I replied. “You are too tough for your own good.”

“Well,” Peoples said before saying five words that I think perfectly sum up the man who led Butte through its darkest hour, “you can’t be a wimp.”

Peoples, who passed away at the age of 86 last Wednesday, was anything but a wimp. If he had been, Butte just might be a ghost town.

Butte survived — and even thrived — because Peoples was the chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow every year of the 1980s. He led us through that difficult decade with toughness, determination and an impossible sense of optimism.

The 1980s brought economic despair to the Mining City. It was the worst decade since the Great Depression. The mines closed, the Berkeley Pit started to flood, and families left town by the hundreds.

My dad was an electrician for the Anaconda Company and then the Atlantic Richfield Company after it bought the copper giant. He was laid off, and the only jobs he could find were hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from home.

Our family was poor. So were our neighbors. Most of the city was poor. National news outlets wrote our obituary.

But every time I watched the news and saw Peoples, I felt that there was no way those bad times would last forever. I just knew Don Peoples would not let that happen.

One night, my family went to a Butte Copper Kings baseball game at Montana Tech’s Alumni Coliseum. We could not afford to go to the game, but my parents took us anyway.

We did not have any money for concessions, so we probably only got one mini baseball helmet filled with fries that night, though I am sure I asked for more.

An inning or two into the game, I looked up by the press box and saw Peoples, who was sitting with his wife, Cathy. 

“There’s Don Peoples,” I said loud enough for just about everyone to hear. It was as if I saw the president of the United States walk in.

A little bit later, I watched as my dad quietly walked up to Peoples between innings. He told the chief executive that we shared a few relatives, which Peoples immediately recognized. Then my dad, hat in hand, told him that he was out of work and times were tough.

Peoples told my dad to stop by his office the next weekday, and he did. For the next several weeks, my dad had a job on the sidewalk crew, and we got to go to more Copper Kings games that summer.

I will forever be grateful for that, and the many families who benefited because Peoples immediately began working to bring back mining to the Mining City surely feel the same way.

On his way home from a business trip to Seattle, Peoples learned of the shutdown of mining operations in Butte. He worried about the thousands of people who would be devastated by the news as he sped home. He also immediately started working to ease that pain.

It wasn’t time to sulk. For Peoples, it was time to act.

Montana Resources bringing mining back to Butte, thanks largely to the actions of Peoples, could never compare to the Anaconda Company’s heydays, but can you imagine if we did not get all those jobs back? Those obituaries would have been on the money.

But it was not just the decision making by Peoples that was so instrumental. It was his voice of optimism and strength.

He named us the “Can Do City,” and that was so much more than a slogan. It was a way of life. It was a way of defining a community attitude that thought nothing was impossible, no matter how long those unemployment lines might be. 

“It was a big deal,” Peoples said of the moniker. “It became a real movement.”

Then Peoples led the way as Butte applied for and was named an “All-American City.” We went from being on life support to being one of just 10 cities in America to receive that honor.

Those names might seem trivial, like a feel-good Tony Robbins kind of motto. But they were not. Those names were Peoples’ way of telling the world that reports of the demise of the Mining City were greatly exaggerated.

Under the leadership of Peoples, Butte was never going to go away. It would take a whole lot more than an economic depression to do us in. We would overcome, he said, and we did.

“There were years when the unemployment rate was 20 percent,” Peoples said. “That’s pretty steep. People rallied behind things and got things going. But Butte’s spirit is something that no other city in Montana has. As far as I’m concerned, no city in the world has the spirit of Butte, Montana.”

In the summer of 1989, Peoples, who was named one of the top 20 mayors in the United States by U.S. News and World Report in 1987, stepped down as chief executive. He took a job as CEO of MERDI/MSE, saying he thought he could do more to improve the state and Butte in that role.

By then, times were better in the Mining City. Things were looking up. We survived the rough 1980s, and we were looking to grow in the 1990s.

“Butte-Silver Bow is in excellent shape,” Peoples said in a Montana Standard article announcing his decision. “In a very short time, they are going to be saying, ‘Who was that guy?’”

Of course, that could not have been much further from the truth. After leaving the courthouse, Peoples was still very much a part of so many great things in Butte. He had a behind-the-scenes hand in so many great things that there is no way to name them all.

That includes an instrumental role in building the Maroon Activities Center. 

Peoples acknowledged that his quote turned out to be a false one when I talked to him for the first ButteCast episode, but he kept the same humble attitude when acknowledging that people still knew who he was.

“I think it’s my sons and my grandsons,” he said of keeping the Peoples name popular in Butte and around the state. “And my granddaughters.”

Peoples struggled with his health the last several months. When he missed the press conference announcing the Butte Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2026, a class that includes his son Don Peoples Jr., I knew things were not good.

But Peoples kept going to watch his grandson, Ryan, play basketball for the Maroons. He still followed the career of Dougie at the College of Idaho. He watched his granddaughter, Quinn Carter, coach the BC girls’ basketball team.

You could tell it was tough for him to be there, but nothing was going to keep him away. He never wanted assistance, either. He was going to get to where he was going on his own.

Even with time running short, Peoples still epitomized the toughness of this old mining town. He still embodied the spirit of “Butte Tough,” and he still consistently showed the same desire and determination that helped keep Butte going during those dark times of the 1980s.

Right until the very end, Peoples showed us that you can’t be a wimp.

— Bill Foley can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.