Retracing Jack Kerouac

According the Butte America website on which I found the following quote, Jack Kerouac stopped by the M&M Cigar Store  one time. I can’t say when exactly that was, as I don’t know if and when he actually made it this way, but he certainly wrote about Montana quite a few times. It was published in Esquire Magazine in 1970. Of course by that time Kerouac was already dead, so I can’t say how credible that story is.

Anyway, here’s what he wrote about the M&M :

“It was Sunday night, I had hoped the saloons would stay open long enough for me to see them. They never even closed. In a great old-time saloon I had a giant beer. On the wall was a big electric signboard flashing gambling numbers …What characters in there: old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco-chewing businessmen! Groups of sullen Indians drank rotgut in the john. Hundreds of men played cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spitoons. It was the end of my quest for an ideal bar…”