When Montana went dry in 1916 -- three full years before the rest of the nation followed with the Eighteenth Amendment -- the state's history books recorded the political debates, the temperance marches, the legislative votes. What they largely failed to record were the women who looked at the new law, shrugged, and got to work. In a state where the bootlegger is often imagined as a grizzled rancher with a rifle and a pickup truck, the real story is far more surprising. Some of Montana's most successful, daring, and resourceful bootleggers were women.
Why Montana Went Dry Early
To understand the lady bootleggers, you first need to understand the world they operated in. Montana in the early 1900s was a state in transition. The mining boom towns -- Butte, Anaconda, Helena -- were rough, hard-drinking places where saloons outnumbered churches by wide margins. Butte alone had an estimated three hundred saloons at its peak, many of them running twenty-four hours a day to serve the miners coming off shift.
The temperance movement found fertile ground among the wives and families of these mining communities. Women who watched their husbands drink away their wages, who suffered the violence and poverty that followed, became fierce advocates for prohibition. Montana's women had won the right to vote in 1914, and they used that power immediately. In 1916, Montana voters approved a statewide prohibition measure, making it one of the first states in the nation to go dry.
The law took effect on December 31, 1918. And almost immediately, an underground economy sprang up to replace the one that had just been outlawed. In this new economy, women held surprising power.
Bertie Brown: The Queen of Glacier Park
Bertie Brown arrived in northwestern Montana sometime around 1910, a young woman seeking opportunity in a land that offered few conventional paths for women. She settled near the border of what would become Glacier National Park, in a region of staggering beauty and extreme isolation. The nearest town of any size was miles away over rough mountain roads. The nearest federal agent was even further.
Bertie recognized opportunity where others saw only wilderness. The Canadian border lay just to the north, and across that border, liquor remained legal and plentiful. The new Glacier Park was drawing tourists -- wealthy easterners who arrived on the Great Northern Railway expecting to find adventure and, ideally, a drink to go with it. Bertie became the link between supply and demand.
She established a network of runners who brought Canadian whiskey across the border through mountain passes that no revenue agent could patrol. She stored the liquor in hidden caches throughout the park's wilderness -- in abandoned mining cabins, in root cellars, in hollowed-out logs. She sold to tourists, to locals, to anyone with cash. By some accounts, she ran one of the most efficient smuggling operations in the entire northern tier of Montana.
What made Bertie remarkable was not just her business acumen but her ability to operate in plain sight. In an era when law enforcement simply did not expect women to be involved in the liquor trade, Bertie's gender was her best camouflage. She presented herself as a respectable frontier woman -- a homesteader, a lodge keeper -- and the authorities consistently underestimated her. When they did come looking, she knew the backcountry better than any of them. She could disappear into the mountains for weeks, waiting out a raid, then resume operations as if nothing had happened.
Bertie Brown was arrested multiple times but spent very little time behind bars. Juries were reluctant to convict a woman, especially one as charming and well-liked as Bertie. She operated throughout the Prohibition years and, according to local legend, retired comfortably when repeal finally came. The exact details of her later life are hazy -- as is fitting for someone who spent decades staying one step ahead of the law.
Josephine Doody: Butte's Speakeasy Queen
If Bertie Brown was a creature of the wilderness, Josephine Doody was a creature of the city. Butte, Montana in the 1920s was one of the toughest towns in America. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company dominated the city, its mines honeyccombing the hill beneath the surface streets. The miners were hard men -- Irish, Cornish, Finnish, Serbian, Chinese -- who worked brutal shifts underground and emerged wanting exactly two things: food and drink.
When Prohibition shuttered Butte's legendary saloons, the drinking did not stop. It simply moved underground -- in some cases, literally. Butte's network of basements, tunnels, and sub-basements became home to dozens of speakeasies. And Josephine Doody ran some of the best of them.
Josephine was a formidable presence. Tall, sharp-tongued, and fearless, she had grown up in Butte's Irish community and understood the city's power structures intimately. She knew which police officers could be bought, which politicians needed favors, and which miners would cause trouble if they drank too much. She ran her establishments with an iron hand and a generous pour.
Her speakeasies were more than just places to drink. They were social clubs, meeting halls, and informal employment offices. Miners came to Josephine's to find work, settle disputes, and hear the latest news from the hill. She extended credit to men between jobs, fed families who were struggling, and donated to every church fundraiser and community event in the neighborhood. In return, the community protected her. When revenue agents came asking questions, nobody in Josephine's neighborhood had ever heard of any speakeasy.
Josephine sourced her liquor from multiple channels. Some came down from Canada via the Hi-Line corridor. Some was distilled locally in stills hidden in the basements of Butte's boarding houses. And some, it was whispered, came from a still that Josephine herself operated in an abandoned mine tunnel beneath her establishment. The tunnels of Butte were a bootlegger's dream -- miles of underground passages, many of them unmapped, providing infinite hiding places.
Like Bertie Brown, Josephine benefited from the era's gender assumptions. Agents who raided her establishments often arrested the male bartenders while ignoring the woman who owned the place and ran the entire operation. She was fined several times but never served significant jail time. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Josephine applied for one of Butte's first legal liquor licenses and transitioned seamlessly into legitimate business.
The Wider Sisterhood
Bertie and Josephine were not anomalies. Across Montana, women played vital roles in the Prohibition-era liquor trade. Ranch wives ran stills while their husbands maintained plausible deniability working the cattle. Boarding house operators served whiskey with dinner as a matter of course. Women drove delivery routes because they were less likely to be stopped and searched. Native American women on Montana's reservations, where prohibition had been in effect since long before statewide measures, had their own long traditions of resistance to alcohol restrictions imposed from outside.
These women operated at enormous risk. If caught, they faced not only legal penalties but social ostracism. A man caught bootlegging might be seen as a lovable rogue. A woman caught doing the same was a scandal. Many of them were supporting families -- some were widows, some had absent or incapacitated husbands, and the bootlegging income was the difference between survival and destitution.
Their resourcefulness was extraordinary. They hid bottles in baby carriages, in laundry baskets, in flour barrels. They sewed pockets into their coats large enough to hold pint bottles. They developed elaborate warning systems -- a lantern in a window, a flag on a fence post -- to alert their networks when agents were in the area. They kept meticulous mental records of their transactions, never writing anything down that could be used as evidence.
Legacy and Remembrance
The lady bootleggers of Montana left few records of their own. They did not write memoirs or give interviews. Their stories survive mainly in oral tradition -- tales passed down through families, community memories that grow more colorful with each retelling. Separating fact from legend is often impossible, which is perhaps exactly how Bertie, Josephine, and their sisters would have wanted it.
What we can say with certainty is that these women demonstrated a level of courage, ingenuity, and determination that their era rarely acknowledged or celebrated. They operated in a world that told them they were too delicate for business, too virtuous for crime, too simple for strategy. They proved all of that wrong. They built enterprises, managed networks, evaded authorities, and supported communities -- all while the law and society conspired to make their work invisible.
Today, Montana has more than forty licensed craft distilleries. Women own and operate many of them. The spirit of independence and craftsmanship that drove Bertie Brown and Josephine Doody lives on in every distiller who bucks convention, takes a risk, and makes something extraordinary with their own hands.
At Montucky Moonshine, we raise a glass to all of them. The ones whose names we know, and the many more whose names were deliberately lost to history. Montana's lady bootleggers were not footnotes. They were the backbone of an underground economy, the keepers of community, and the living proof that the independent spirit has never belonged to just one gender.