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

him it would mean death. But Sullau was determined to search for his friend Jack Bronson, the shift boss who earlier led other men (including the young Eastern European Mike Jovitich) up the long climb through the Speculator.³⁰ Bronson survived the fire, and it is possible that he was already safe on the surface when Sullau went back to look for him.

      On the 600 level of the Speculator, just after midnight, a debate took place that must have been repeated throughout the upper workings on the night of the fire: two men arguing about the source of smoke. One, a Balkan miner named Chris Vukovich, believed it came from nearby blasting. His partner, Louie Muller, worried that the cause was more ominous. “That’s not powder smoke,” he told Vukovich. “It’s gas.”

      Then a shift boss ran through, settling the debate with frightening certainty. “Run boys, it’s fire!”³¹

      Vukovich and Muller were two of the fifty-seven men working that night in the upper portions (between the 400 and 800 levels) of the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines. Thirty-one of these men—more than one half—would die, an even higher mortality rate than the lower portions of the mines.³² Though they were closer to the surface and farther from the source of the fire, the miners in the upper levels were in some ways disadvantaged compared to the men at the greater depths. The upper levels did not connect to adjoining properties—the most successful route to safety for the men below. The other disadvantage for the men in the upper reaches was that none of them had any idea as to the source of the fire, smoke, and gas.

      As for Muller and Vukovich, both initially climbed down a narrow manway ladder toward the 700 level. They most likely chose this direction because the 600 level had no connection to the Granite Mountain shaft, whereas the 700 did. Like so many others, they probably believed that the Granite Mountain hoist would provide their passage to safety. As they descended, though, the two partners and the other men with them encountered thickening smoke, ³³ pouring through the crosscut from the Granite Mountain shaft. “[T]he smoke and gas nearly suffocated us,” reported Muller. “Somebody said to go back …”³⁴

      There was panic on the ladder, with some miners seeking to go back up even as others piled down. In the manway as elsewhere, the men struggled to sort through the chaos, their responses as diverse as the number of miners in the mine. Some resigned themselves to death, begging stronger men to pass along notes to their families. Some shouted curses. Some whispered prayers. Most struggled forward, desperate to breathe again in the light of day.³⁵

      Vukovich chose to keep climbing downward, and like almost every miner who went from the 600 to the 700 level, he was later found dead.³⁶

      Whether through knowledge, intuition, or luck, Muller was among the survivors. Unlike his partner, Muller turned around and climbed back up to the 600 level, deciding to try for the 600 Station of the Speculator. As he ran toward the station through the 600 crosscut, he stumbled across a pile of seven bodies. Muller managed to carry three to the station before becoming too weak to go back.³⁷ Someone rang for the Speculator hoist. Unlike the Granite Mountain shaft, where fire burned out all wiring, the Speculator shaft still had electricity. At least one of the Speculator hoists, though it had not been in use due to shaft repairs, was still serviceable.

      A few minutes after they called to the surface, the hoist appeared. Muller would be one of the thirty-two men who were lifted from the 600 and 400 Stations of the Speculator shaft—the only men taken alive through either the Speculator or Granite Mountain shafts in the immediate aftermath of the fire.³⁸

      Two other men in the upper levels, unable to outrun the pursuing gas, showed the innovation that desperation bred. Their names were John Boyce and John Camitz. Like many others working in the upper levels, they made an initial effort to escape via the 700 level. Like a lucky few, they managed to retreat from the 700 before they were overcome.³⁹

      Instead of climbing up to the 600 level, however, Boyce and Camitz made their way into a wet drift, an excavation that branched off the 700 crosscut.⁴⁰ But they could not outrun the smoke and gas. The two men fell to the ground, unable to breathe. “We thought we surely must die,” said Boyce later.⁴¹

      “As I fell, half exhausted, to the ground, I felt the hose line carrying air.” It was, literally, a lifeline. By 1917, Butte mines used compressed air to power their drills, and dozens of similar hoses were strung throughout the workings. Although nearly blind from the smoke and “almost out of my head,” Boyce managed to cut two openings in the hose with his candlestick holder. “We lay there on the ground, our blouses pulled tight about our head, and sucked in that hose line air …”⁴²

      For nearly four hours they held this tenuous position, sucking air from the hose even as the gas washed over and around them. Several times the two men pulled themselves upright, creeping back toward the 700 crosscut to see if the gas had cleared. It had not, and they quickly retreated to their prostrate position with the hose.⁴³

      Around 5:00 A.M., events forced Boyce’s and Camitz’s hand: The air hose failed. With no other option, they began working their way toward the Speculator Station, stepping over the bodies of their fallen fellow-miners.⁴⁴ Many dead men were found with their blouses over their heads and their faces pressed to the ground, searching, it appeared, for that last breath of clear air.⁴⁵ Other dead men were found still gripping their lunch pails, overcome before they could grasp the full gravity of the danger that pursued them.⁴⁶

      As they approached the Speculator Station, Boyce and Camitz saw the beacon of a rescuer’s light. The cage was called and the two men were whisked to the surface, “weakened by breathing gases, but able to walk at all times.”⁴⁷

      Ernest Sullau almost made it. By the time he collapsed, he had cleared the property of the North Butte Mining Company and was ascending toward the surface through the adjoining Badger mine, leading a final group of miners to safety. For a while the other men dragged his limp body toward the surface, but finally they abandoned him, apparently afraid that their slower progress would cause them too to succumb to the gas.⁴⁸

      On the surface, a gasping miner reported Sullau’s position to a growing group of rescuers. Fitted with primitive breathing apparatus, a crew descended the mine, located Sullau, and carried him to the surface. Though unconscious, Sullau was reportedly “still warm.” The rescuers placed him in the Badger mine’s “dry,” a room where miners changed clothing at the end of their shift.⁴⁹

      A team of physicians, called to the mine in the minutes after the fire, launched a dramatic three-hour effort to save Sullau’s life. They were well equipped, quickly connecting the stricken miner to a machine called a pulmotor. A recent invention, the pulmotor was a portable respirator turned by a hand crank. It looked a lot like another popular invention of the day—the Victrola.⁵⁰

      As many as fifteen doctors⁵¹ labored over Sullau, working the pulmotor “in relays.” At several junctures, Sullau gained consciousness, each time giving hope that his life might be saved. Ultimately, though, his body could not shed itself of the cumulative effects of the gas. Sometime around dawn on Saturday, June 9, the man who started the North Butte disaster was added to the list of its victims.⁵²

      As word of the fire spread through Butte in the predawn hours, panic-stricken families began to gather at the gates of the mines, held back by a company of troops from the Montana National Guard. One wife not among the worried bystanders was Lena Sullau. For three weeks, she had been in North Dakota, tending her ailing father.

      “Saturday evening I received a wire from an undertaking establishment,” Lena told a reporter upon her return to Butte. “This was the first news I had of the accident.” She talked to the reporter about the effects of a recent tornado in eastern Montana, which she had witnessed on the train ride back to Butte. And she talked about the war in Europe. Ernest had an aged mother in Germany, but all of his other relatives had been killed in the fighting. “It seems all the world is wrong.”⁵³

      Though several local newspapers lauded Sullau’s bravery in warning other men of the fire, another, more insidious story was also spread. “Because the foreman