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

from Butte. In his autobiography, the senior Hearst credited Daly with a tip to buy—for $30,000—a mine called the Ontario. The Ontario produced an estimated $14 million in silver and gold. “From that $30,000,” wrote Hearst, “everything else came.”²⁶

      Hearst and his partners (including Lloyd Tevis, who would eventually preside over the Wells Fargo Bank) bought into Daly’s new Anaconda mine. Daly received 25 percent of the equity in the mine, management responsibility, and—most significantly—an almost limitless operating budget.²⁷ In June 1881, workmen began sinking a new main shaft at the Anaconda. They quickly found rich deposits of silver. In the early days of the mine, ironically, Daly leased a mill from his future rival—William Clark.²⁸ Clark, back from his study at the Columbia University School of Mines, was still frantically amassing his own early fortune.

      The Anaconda was a profitable property on the basis of silver alone, but as Daly dug deeper, it was a less precious metal that would ultimately create a far greater treasure.

      In late 1882, miners at the Anaconda were drilling at the 300-foot level when they began to encounter “new material.” Word was dispatched to Marcus Daly and his lieutenant Mike Carroll, who came down to look for themselves. They watched as dynamite was set in a circle of holes bored into the quartz walls. The fuses were lit and the men took cover. A great blast shook the mine.

      When the debris settled, Daley stepped forward to pick up a chunk of the smoking rock. He turned to Mike Carroll excitedly. “Mike,” he said. “We’ve got it.” It was a singular moment, and it would change the life of both Daly and his adopted city of Butte. Marcus Daly had discovered the largest deposit of copper in the world.²⁹

      Like many great men, Daly combined talent and hard work with good timing. At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, just six years before Daly hit the Anaconda copper vein, a man named Alexander Graham Bell had demonstrated the transmission of speech through a copper wire. Two years before Daly’s discovery, a man named Thomas Edison received a patent for an invention he called the “incandescent lamp.” Through the inventions of Edison and Bell, the world was on the brink of an explosion in the demand for copper.³⁰

      Daly knew he had discovered the supply.

       Four

       “WHAT MEN WILL DO”

       Ernest Sullau’s Death an Example of What Men Will Do to Help Their Fellows

      —HEADLINE, BUTTE MINER, JUNE 10, 1917

      Ernest Sullau would have smelled gas within minutes of accidentally starting the fire, probably during those initial, panicked moments in the 2,400 Station. Sullau had encountered gas before. In fact, after his wife, Lena, learned of an earlier incident, she had urged him to be more careful. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “No death is easier and sweeter.”¹

      Sullau’s reassurances aside, death by gas falls far closer to insidious than sweet. This was particularly true for the men of the North Butte Mining Company. As they battled to escape from the depths in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 9, 1917, most of the miners knew that the deadly, invisible gas pursued them. They could smell it and even taste it as they ran.²

      The gas was carbon monoxide, also known by its scientific symbol of “CO.” According to the Bureau of Mines’ official accident report, “At least 150 of the 163 men killed showed the cherry-red blood and knotted veins of neck and side of head characteristic of carbon monoxide poisoning.”³ CO is a brutally efficient killer. If inhaled in sufficient quantities, it keeps the blood from absorbing oxygen, strangling its victims from the inside out.

      Carbon monoxide is produced when wood or fossil fuels are burned, and it is most dangerous when its fumes are confined. Thousands of people die each year from CO poisoning inside their homes, usually because furnaces or appliances fail to ventilate properly. It is easy to see how carbon monoxide could wreak havoc within the interior of a burning mine.

      Most people familiar with carbon monoxide know that the gas is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Yet dozens of North Butte survivors reported smelling and tasting gas, meaning that the CO must have mixed with other gases and smoke. One likely source of this distinctive odor was the burning, melting three-ton cable. Its cloth insulation was soaked in oil, and both the lead sheathing and copper-wire center would have spit off fumes as they melted in the intense heat of the fire. Another possible source of the odor was the burning shaft timbers, chemically treated to withstand moisture.

      On the night the fire began, 415 men were at work underground in the North Butte’s Granite Mountain and Speculator mines. They were widely dispersed, laboring in pairs or small clusters in hundreds of locations throughout the workings. Fifty-seven men were at work in the upper parts of the mines—between the 400- and 800-foot levels. Most of the rest worked deep in the ground—between 1,700 and 3,000 feet below the surface.⁴

      Ernest Sullau grasped quickly that the fire put hundreds of men at risk, though he might not have imagined the scope or speed of the danger. As we know, the fire broke out at 11:45 P.M., driving Sullau and his companions from the 2,400 Station within minutes. By midnight, rising smoke was visible at the Granite Mountain collar.

      Smoke and gas also spread rapidly from Granite Mountain across to the Speculator through the multiple crosscuts.⁵ So rapidly did the fumes travel that by 12:10 A.M.—only twenty-five minutes after the start of the fire—smoke began to rise from the collar of the Spec. By 1:00 A.M., gases had spread to adjoining mines owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, including the Badger, the Diamond, and the High Ore.⁶

      As the miners initially encountered smoke, most thought it was dust from drilling or smoke from blasting, both commonplace in the mines. Indeed, the North Butte mines exploded more than 1,700 pounds of dynamite every day.⁷“My partner was at the machine when we noticed what appeared to us to have been an unusual amount of dust,” said a survivor named Jack Watts. His partner started to oil the machine “when a boy from the 2,200-foot level rushed to [us] asking us if we saw any smoke. By this time we were all coughing.”⁸

      In many parts of the mine, the smoke and gas were accompanied by a wave of scorching heat from the inferno of the Granite Mountain shaft. Victims hundreds of feet from any flames were found with their faces singed.⁹ So intense was the heat generated in the Granite Mountain shaft that it warped the steel cages in the Speculator shaft—800 feet away. According to one report, twelve men were killed in the Speculator when the heat from Granite Mountain snapped “clean” the cable to their cage. The cable was pulled to the surface, leaving the cage and its victims lodged at the 2,200-level of the shaft.¹⁰

      What we know about the movements of Ernest Sullau after the start of the fire comes from stories told by survivors, many of whom owed him their lives. Having decided against the quick flight from the mine that would have saved his own life, Sullau set about warning his fellow miners of the calamity that he himself had unleashed.

      By midnight, all electric lines to Granite Mountain had been burned out. Even if there had been power, Sullau knew that there was no alarm system in place to warn miners of a fire or any other danger. In later years, Butte mines used the air supply itself as an alarm system. In the event of an emergency, a noxious odor was added to the oxygen that was pumped from the surface into the mines—similar to the scent added today to propane or natural gas. When miners smelled this odor, they knew to evacuate.¹¹ In 1917, though, the Butte miners could depend only on one another. Their safety hung by a fragile, human chain.

      It appears most likely that Sullau initially climbed down from the 2,400 Station. His intention was probably to descend as low as possible, then work his way back up toward the surface, warning as many men as he could find.

      One early sighting of Sullau