Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917. Michael Punke

to approach the cage. Eventually enough water was poured into the shaft so that two firemen, Angus McLeod and George Lapp, could at least remove the bodies.

      With the fire and death at the mouth of Granite Mountain, few onlookers would have noticed what happened at 12:10 A.M., when smoke began to rise from the Speculator shaft—800 feet away.²¹

      Ernest Sullau could not see the Speculator shaft from his position near the Granite Mountain’s 2,400 Station. He didn’t need to. As a veteran of the North Butte Mining Company, Sullau understood intuitively the interconnection between the Granite Mountain and the Spec.

      Butte sat atop a labyrinth made up of thousands of miles of underground mining works.²² The North Butte’s holdings illustrate a small portion of this subterranean world. Its two main shafts—Granite Mountain and the Speculator—ran straight down, each with its own headframe and hoist system to transport men and ore. The two shafts stood 800 feet apart, connected by at least ten crosscut tunnels. If the mine is compared to a human body, the shafts and crosscuts were like main arteries. Branching off of these arteries were hundreds of smaller veins and capillaries. There were “drifts”—horizontal excavations to remove ore; “stopes”—excavations in the shape of a step; and “manways”—man-size, vertical shafts with a ladder inside that allowed men to climb up and down between different levels.²³

      And all of that was just the property of the North Butte Mining Company. The Granite Mountain and the Spec connected directly, at multiple levels, to five other mines, which were owned by Anaconda.

      Ernest Sullau knew that the deadly consequences of the fire—his fire—would not be contained in one shaft, or even in one mine. The smoke and fumes spewing forth from the Granite Mountain shaft would spread throughout the far-flung recesses of this underground world, where hundreds of men were at work. Sullau also knew something else—that the fumes were filled with deadly gas.

      There is no doubt that at this juncture, minutes after the start of the fire, Ernest Sullau could have saved himself. Though the main shaft was ablaze and its hoist no longer a viable option, other clear avenues of escape were within easy reach.²⁴ With his long years of experience, Sullau knew the mine workings as well as the streets surrounding his own home.

      There is no record of his thoughts as Ernest Sullau made the decision that sealed his own fate that night, but we know he did not run away.

       Three

       “THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH”

       No one knows it yet, but I have discovered the richest hill on earth.

      —ATTRIBUTED TO COPPER KING MARCUS DALY

      In the spring of 1856, a small party led by Caleb E. Irvine camped on a high plain below a distinctive butte near the headwaters of the Clark Fork River. They were traders, not miners, but they made a discovery that hinted at the future of the hill on which they stood. Near their camp, Irvine discovered a deep trench, dug into an outcropping of exposed quartz. Next to the trench were elk antlers, apparently used as gads to scrape out the hole.

      Who dug the hole and what if anything they found were never discovered. As Irvine and his men pondered the mystery, a band of hostile Blackfoot Indians approached their position, and the traders beat a quick retreat toward the more hospitable country of the Shoshoni and the Crow.¹

      The real discovery of Butte would come as a consequence of the decline in California’s supply of “placer” gold. Placer gold was “poor man’s diggings”—dust and nuggets close to the surface, ready to be scooped up by methods of no greater sophistication than a metal pan or a wooden sluice. As California’s gold industry shifted from placers to more industrialized forms of removal in the mid-1850s, the “forty-niners” began to search for new prospects. They turned inland and by the early 1860s had developed placer strikes in Idaho and Colorado.²

      In 1862, as the Civil War raged back east, wandering argonauts turned up the first substantial gold strike in what is now Montana. The location of the gold was a small rivulet called Grasshopper Creek. Within a year, miners unearthed an even larger deposit about seventy miles away at a site they dubbed “Alder Gulch.” Now the real rush was on. Eighteen months later, ten thousand men were sifting every creek bed between the boomtowns of Bannock and Virginia City.³

      Among the young miners who joined the gold rush to Montana was a skinny, conniving, blindly ambitious twenty-four-year-old named William A. Clark. As much as any man, Clark would rise to shape a critical, rollicking epoch of western history. His origins, though, were humble; he was born of Scotch-Irish parents on a Pennsylvania farm. The Clark family moved to Iowa, where William continued a solid education that included two years of legal study at Iowa Wesleyan College.⁴

      Clark worked as a schoolteacher in Missouri and apparently fought briefly with the Confederate Army before deciding to seek his fortune in the West. Prospects already were fading by the time the young man reached the Colorado mines in 1862, and after working as a “$2.50 a day laborer,” Clark headed for the new strikes in Montana. With a partner, he staked a claim near Bannock. They built a log cabin and sluices and, after only a year, sold their property for a healthy profit of $2,000 each. For Clark, this initial stake would grow into a fortune of $47 million and make him one of the richest men in the world.

      Clark’s early wealth, though, would not come from gold—at least not directly. Like many financial giants of the mining era, Clark’s initial success lay not in the mines—but in the miners. With his $2,000 in profits from sluicing gold, he bought mules and began moving freight between Salt Lake and the Montana boomtowns, carrying shovels, picks, tobacco, and even eggs. His goods, according to Clark, sold for “extraordinarily high prices.”⁵ With his profits he moved into wholesaling, mail transport, and then banking. By the age of thirty-three he was a millionaire and one of the leading financiers in what had become the Territory of Montana. “[E]verything he touched seemed to turn to gold.”⁶

      “Turn to copper” might have more accurately described Clark’s career, for it was not the yellow metal, but the red, that would ultimately create the great bulk of his fortune. Nor was it the soon-to-be ghost town of Bannock with which Clark’s name would forever be tied—but Butte.

      The first true mining in what was soon to become Butte occurred in the summer of 1864, as Bannock and Virginia City miners began to spread out into untapped areas. Two men, named William Allison and G. O. Humphreys, decided to dig deeper in the shallow pit—the one beside the elk-horn gads—discovered by trader Caleb Irvine eight years earlier. Allison and Humphreys carried dirt from the pit down to Silver Bow Creek to wash it, and in their pans they found gold. They named their site “Baboon Gulch,” though this soon gave way to a more stately appellation reflecting the distinctive nearby hill. “Butte City” was born. (“City” was later dropped.)⁷

      By 1867, five thousand miners were spread out below the butte and along the meandering Silver Bow Creek. Butte’s naissance as a gold mining camp alloyed the town with characteristics from which it would never separate—not that it wanted to. It was a harsh and dangerous place, where efforts to earn a living came often at the cost of men’s lives. An eastern reporter, as horrified as his modern counterparts by the West’s attachment to firearms, had this to say about the camp: “Every businessman in Butte and every miner is a walking arsenal. He carries a brace or two of pistols in his belt and a Bowie knife in his right boot.”⁸

      The harsh winters and unsanitary living conditions created a breeding ground for disease, and in mining camps such as Butte “it was a fair estimate that ten percent would die between the months of September and May.” Frozen ground made it difficult to bury the dead, so log stockades were sometimes constructed to protect the bodies from the indignity of consumption by wild animals.⁹

      With