To Butte

Several months hence certain private coaches will be shunted to the railroad sidetracks at Butte, Mont. Certain serious, well-groomed gentlemen will detrain and be driven to the unpretentious station of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul.

None of them at first will have paid much attention to the city of Butte straggling up the mountain sides, where by day mine mouths stare like blackened cataracts on the human eye, and by night lights glare coldly. In Butte there are good homes and business blocks. But for the most part the dwellings, chop houses, onetime honky-tonks, have a temporary air, a helter-skelter appearance derived perhaps from the mining camp tradition.

The business men of Butte, the strangers will find alert, vigorous, cordial. But about the streets, even among the throng at the station entrance, they will see another type, for the I. W. W. make the city one of their strongholds.

At Butte the arrival of the strangers--financiers, lawyers, rail-roaders--will prepare for the opening of perhaps the greatest auction sale in history, the knocking down, under the hammer of a U. S. special master, of the $750,000,000 St. Paul system, the system which stretches from a network of roads anastomosing over Wisconsin, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois, then in a thin line over Montana, Idaho and Washington to Puget Sound--11,000 miles of trackage.

This three-quarter-of-a-billion road was forced into involuntary bankruptcy 14 months ago by creditors with a $125,000 coal bill, an incident sufficient to precipitate a receivership imposed by the Federal Court in Chicago, also investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The I. C. C. investigation is peripatetic. The members have been sitting in Manhattan, where they, these past three weeks, have been quizzing such notables as Percy A. Rockefeller (TIME, April 19) and John D. Ryan, seeking to learn the causes which enforced the receivership. So far the most curious, though perhaps not the most important point disclosed, is that Rockefeller and Ryan both like free railroad passes. Soon the hearings will move to Chicago, and later to the Pacific coast.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson has been pondering over a 300-page petition of the Guaranty Trust Co. of Manhattan, which asked for foreclosure on the St. Paul's properties and their sale forthwith.

Last week the judge finally ordered both. The place of auction will be the main entrance of the Butte railroad station. The time he will set much later, waiting with courtesy to the I. C. C. until it completes its investigations.

The main bidders will be Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and the National City Bank of Manhattan, both heavy investors in the road. Other creditors will be protected by their bids, although it seems that preferred and common stockholders will suffer as they must under any similar financial holocaust.

*An officer of the court appointed by the judge as an aide. His duties are those of a trusted recorder for the court. Thus he may hear and report on matters referred to him.