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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 had a German name,” said Burton K. Wheeler, the federal district attorney in Butte, “it was widely believed [the fire] was an act of sabotage directed by the Kaiser.”⁵⁴ The Anaconda Standard offered a similar report: “The suspicion is very strong in the minds of hundreds of people in this community that those interested in stopping the production of copper and zinc in this community may have had something to do with these fires.”⁵⁵

      In the days to come, the rumor would mix easily in a deadly brew of anti-German hysteria, broader ethnic conflict, and a crippling strike. For the time being, though, all eyes remained fixed on the plight of the men in the mines.

      In the first two hours after the fire, North Butte officials held out hope that most miners would escape through adjoining properties. Urgent telephone calls went out to the other mines as the officials attempted to establish a head count of those who had escaped. Sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., the timekeeper gave an initial report: 204 souls were still missing. “Scores of men,” they suddenly knew, were “trapped in the lower workings.”

      Upon hearing the report, L. D. Frink, superintendent of the North Butte mines, turned solemnly to the other men in the room. The fire, he told them, looked “nothing short of a calamity.”⁵⁶

       Five

       “SWEETENED CORRUPTION”

       By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.

      —MARK TWAIN ON WILLIAM A. CLARK

      By the mid-1890s, Butte, Montana, had become the undisputed copper capital of the world, and copper had turned Butte’s two ruling “kings”—Marcus Daly and William Clark—into fabulously wealthy men.

      For his part, Marcus Daly resided in his own town, christened with the same name—“Anaconda”—as his company. The town of Anaconda stood twenty-six miles from Butte and was built around a gigantic smelting operation constructed by Daly and his partners to process the raw riches ripped from their mines. Daly built and lived in the sumptuous Hotel Montana, which he kept fully staffed, though he and his family were often the only guests. Each morning, he ate a breakfast of beefsteak in a dining hall designed to accommodate 500, though he usually dined alone.¹

      The floor of Daly’s hotel bar featured a wooden inlay of Tammany, his favorite racehorse, constructed by an imported New York artist from over a thousand pieces of hardwood. Anyone stepping on Tammany’s regal head was required to buy drinks for the house. As for Tammany himself, Daly kept him and the rest of his horses on a 22,000-acre horse farm in the lush Bitterroot Valley. (When Daly died, his horses sold at auction for more than $2 million.) For his commute between Anaconda and Butte, Daly rode a private rail car named Hattie, said to be the most luxurious in the country. Daly also owned the rails along which Hattie rolled, having built his own railroad after a dispute with Montana Union over rates.

      William Clark was even richer—and more extravagant—than Marcus Daly. Clark’s tastes, reflecting one sharp contrast with Daly, ran to the pretentious. He built, for example, a garish Fifth Avenue mansion in New York at a cost of $7 million, reportedly the most expensive private residence of its day. The mansion included 121 rooms, СКАЧАТЬ