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

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quantities dumped down the shaft by firemen.

      In the crosscut between the Speculator and Granite Mountain, Budelière and his comrades encountered water up to their armpits—rising water. Because of the crosscut’s low ceiling, only a few inches separated the surface of the deep water from the rocky roof of the tunnel. Budelière elected to keep going. For the other men, though, it was too much, and they decided to turn back.

      As he slogged through the deep water, holding his head and his flashlight in the narrow band of air, Budelière reached a point where the rock above him was so low that his helmet scraped the ceiling. Incredibly, he removed the helmet and moved forward, craning his head in the narrow belt of air between the water and rock.

      Budelière became the first (and for a while, the only) rescuer to reach the lower levels of the Granite Mountain workings. A Butte Miner headline hailed his courage as “Only Equaled by Those of Titanic Disaster.” He found no survivors, instead only “scores of bodies.”

      Dozens of other helmet men would also play vital roles in those first hours after the fire, “assisting the almost exhausted men” who had clawed their way close to the surface. The general chaos made it difficult to estimate the precise number, though as the accident report states, the helmet men “undoubtedly saved many lives.”42

      An increasingly well-organized system greeted the helmet men and the wounded miners as they were raised from the depths. At the Speculator, the Badger, and the High Ore, rough mine buildings were quickly converted into field hospitals and morgues.43

      At the Speculator collar, a guard monitored entrance and exit from the shaft. Still, miners and rescuers rushed forward hopefully whenever the hoist was raised. As each man emerged (or was carried) from the cage, timekeepers O’Keefe and McDonald attempted to make an identification. Many miners, though conscious, clearly suffered from the effects of gas. In its early stages, exposure to carbon monoxide can cause confusion, irritability, and delirium. Miners were described as “muttering unintelligibly to all questions of the hospital attendants.”44

      A doctor with a stethoscope checked the unconscious, “determining as fast as possible the chance of a spark of life.”45 Those with a heartbeat were usually hooked up to pulmotors and, like the ill-fated Ernest Sullau, attended by a team of physicians. Many recovered and walked home, while ambulances transported others to local hospitals.

      For the first thirty-six hours after the start of the fire, the dead were carried into the Speculator storeroom (and its counterparts at the other mines). Bodies fell into two categories—those that could be identified and those that could not. The unidentified were laid out in a row until friends could come along and attach a name. Other unidentified bodies were distributed among Butte’s many funeral homes. Dozens of men would ultimately be buried, anonymous, in communal graves.

      At 3:45 in the afternoon on Saturday, June 9—a little more than twelve hours after the start of the fire—Coroner Lane issued a statement to the press, grimly tolling the growing carnage. Thirty-three bodies had been recovered from the mine, with ten of those still unidentified. Between 165 and 175 men were believed to be still underground. The statement’s conclusion was grave: “[L]ittle or no hope is held out for them.”46

      In the depths of the mine, though, hope was still alive.

       Seven

       “STANDARD OIL COFFINS”

       They will cut your wages and raise the tariff in the company stores on every bite you eat, and every rag you wear.

       They will force you to dwell in Standard Oil houses while you live, and they will bury you in Standard Oil coffins when you die.

      —F. AUGUSTUS HEINZE, OCTOBER 26, 1903

      On April 27, 1899, predawn of the twentieth century, fifty-seven-year-old Marcus Daly sold his beloved Anaconda to the Standard Oil Company.1 Less than twenty years had passed since Daly, the once penniless Irish immigrant, bought a middling silver prospect for $30,000 from a veteran of the Civil War. The Anaconda that Daly sold to Standard Oil’s William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers—for a stunning $39 million—was now a sprawling empire. The transaction, gushed the front page of the New York Times, was the “biggest financial deal of the age.”2

      The deal included not only Daly’s rich Butte copper holdings, but also the other manifold components of Anaconda’s vertically integrated machine: the world’s largest smelting operation, timber holdings of more than a million acres, sawmill facilities in both Montana and Idaho, coal beds in Montana and Wyoming, waterworks, rail lines, a real estate company, brickyards, newspapers, hotels, and even retail stores.3 Taken together, a remarkable three-quarters of Montana wage earners drew their checks from some part of Daly’s Anaconda enterprises.4

      Yet just as Marcus Daly had dreamed of creating an empire, Standard’s Rockefeller and Rogers envisioned something bigger still: not an empire, but the empire. In the late nineteenth century, the mighty Standard Oil had come to dominate 90 percent of the American oil industry. Seeing the enormous profits to be gained from capturing a monopoly, businessmen of the 1890s battled to replicate the Standard Oil model in other fields—from sugar and tobacco to telephones and steel.5 A new generation of Standard Oil leaders, meanwhile, searched for fresh domains to conquer. Copper stood out as a gleaming target. “Think it over,” Henry Rogers is reported to have said, “and you will agree with me that the possibilities are far beyond those of oil.”6

      The purchase of Anaconda from Marcus Daly represented the first significant step toward the creation of a copper trust. Standard Oil incorporated a new holding company called “Amalgamated,” into which the component pieces of the new copper trust would be collected. Henry Rogers—known to his Wall Street contemporaries as the “Hell Hound”—would be Amalgamated’s new president. William Rockefeller—son of the great founder—would be secretary and treasurer. Marcus Daly, though nominally Amalgamated’s vice president, was by this time gravely ill and increasingly unable to work. Eastern management had come to Butte.

      So had eastern finance. Within a matter of weeks, Standard Oil took Amalgamated public. After a heavy promotional campaign to “stir up a market,” Standard Oil sold one-third of the stock in its $39 million investment for a tidy $26 million in cash.7 Put another way, Standard recouped two-thirds of its month-old investment in exchange for only one-third of Anaconda’s ownership. In his classic history The War of the Copper Kings, C. B. Glasscock summarized the new situation back in Butte:

       No longer were the mines of Butte to be operated solely for their production of copper, zinc, silver, lead and gold. Thenceforth they were to be operated also for their production of new stock certificates, theoretically based upon metal resources and output, but practically based upon the acquisitive genius of Henry H. Rodgers [sic], William Rockefeller … and their associates and successors in Wall Street.8

      Standard Oil floated a second issue of Anaconda stock in 1901. Naked manipulation of the stock price would follow: driving the price higher before selling; then driving it down before buying back shares at bargain-basement prices. Thousands of small investors lost millions of dollars.9 Meanwhile Standard Oil/Amalgamated—with a fat new war chest—went after the rest of Butte’s copper.

      Two men stood in its way. One was the scandalous William A. Clark—fresh from his foiled effort to bribe his way into the U.S. Senate. The other was a relative newcomer to Butte, a twenty-nine-year-old boy-king who would rise to fight a brilliant war against the most powerful economic juggernaut of its time.

      Butte history has a singular ability to keep topping itself. As remarkable as was Clark’s and Daly’s War of the Copper Kings in the 1890s, it practically pales in

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