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'The Chop House Affair' and the purposefully forgotten victories for Montana's Black residents • Daily Montanan [1]
['Darrell Ehrlick', 'Sam Stockard', 'Jordan Hansen', 'More From Author', '- June', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-06-19
You probably don’t know much about “The Chop House Affair” or the man who was arrested at his own wedding for wearing an Elks pin because those stories were intentionally left out of most state history accounts for differing reasons – some deliberate and malicious, others more benign.
But as Montana celebrates Juneteenth — the commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, and news of which finally reached slaves in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — historian Kate Hampton of the Montana Historical Society spoke about the unexplored and unheralded contributions made by African-American Montanans, and the efforts to read those histories, many heartbreaking and discriminatory, into the record. Hampton spoke at the Western Heritage Center on Thursday afternoon in Billings.
“The Chop House Affair,” as Hampton has named it, didn’t even have a name because nearly as soon as news of it became public, the white press in Montana wanted to ignore it, or it was relegated to several innocuous sentences. Montana had three Black-owned newspapers, which have helped preserve a different, largely unrecognized history.
The incident took place in September 1881 in Butte when William Woodcock, a Black man, traveled to Butte from Helena with the man he helped care for, Alexander Botkin, a white man who would later go on to become Montana’s second lieutenant governor from 1893 to 1897. Botkin was paralyzed, used a wheelchair, and Woodcock was his hired servant and a beloved figured in Helena.
However, as the two met Botkin’s brother for dinner in Butte, they went to the Virginia Chop House, which was arranged with large tables, making dining communal. When the table with Botkin was too full, Woodcock moved to a different table, upsetting an unnamed white patron. The restaurant told Woodcock he couldn’t dine there.
Woodcock became so upset by the treatment that he took the proprietor to court, suing under the relatively new 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed equal protection of the law. Amazingly for its time, Hampton said, the district court found in Woodcock’s favor, awarding him $500 — which would translate to more than $16,000 in today’s value.
“That should have been front-page news, but it wasn’t. You could hardly find any mention of it because there was a concern among leaders and newspapers that it would suggest others do the same,” Hampton said.
The silence seemed to work because a decade later, Black-owned newspapers around the state still noted the state’s largest mines — the largest economic engine in Montana — refused to hire Black citizens to work. Meanwhile, Black people reported searching for places to eat because restaurants, even in its capital, refused to serve them.
Montana’s white Legislature even passed laws that took banning interracial marriage farther than other states. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, Montana took the unusual step of nullifying marriages or refusing to recognize marriage between couples of mixed races, even refusing to recognize the marriages if they were performed in a different state or where the practice was legal.
In a sign of how deeply Jim Crow laws penetrated beyond the states of the Confederacy and American South, the Legislature in 1907 outlawed non-white members of fraternal organizations from wearing pins, ribbons or other identification associated with those organizations.
“In Montana, they only wanted people wearing these insignias who looked like them,” Hampton said.
In 1908, William Holland, a Black man, was literally ripped away from his own wedding for wearing a diamond pin with the Elks insignia.
“He was arrested at his own wedding,” Hampton said.
The Montana Supreme Court struck down the law, saying it clearly violated the Equal Protections clause, punishing one group of people for wearing a pin or symbol that others could wear freely.
That case, too, Hampton said, escaped much notice from the media at the time, again fearing that widespread knowledge of it might encourage others to take their civil right complaints to court.
“Most of our history books and articles fail to realize or mention the contributions of the past,” Hampton said.
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