The candidates were undoubtedly prepped about Butte’s economic history (raucous copper-mining town in its heyday, union town, company town, Democratic stronghold), its demographics (white, blue-collar, Catholic, lots of Irish), its decline (drastic population loss, abandoned mines, Superfund site, the Power debacle), the faint sparks of economic hope (a windmill turbine plant, an influx of artists and environmental cleanup folks), its surrealness (that 90-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, looking down from a mountaintop at a denuded landscape dotted with mine mainframes and an abandoned open-pit mine the size of a small county!)