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

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СКАЧАТЬ Clark bribery scandal look like child’s play. This time the great trust ignored Heinze and went straight to the governor of Montana, Joseph K. Toole. In exchange for reopening Amalgamated’s operations, Standard demanded that the governor convene a special session of the Montana State Legislature. Once convened, the legislature was directed to pass a new law that would allow offensive judges to be disqualified in civil suits. They called it the Clancy Law.³⁷

      Governor Toole, to his credit, initially resisted, rightfully horrified at the precedent of acceding to such raw corporate blackmail. Ultimately, though, with winter looming and most of his state out of work, the political pressure was too great. On December 1,1903, the Montana legislature convened in special session. By December 10, Standard Oil had its new law. Fritz Heinze had lost his most potent weapon—the courts. Heinze would mount a few skirmishes in the ensuing months, but the end was now written.³⁸

      In 1906, F. Augustus Heinze sold his Butte holdings to Amalgamated for $12 million. In 1910, William A. Clark followed suit, selling most of his property in Montana. Through Amalgamated—in 1915 the name reverted back to the old “Anaconda”—Standard Oil had consolidated virtually all the holdings of the three former Copper Kings. The new corporation was a leviathan of remarkable scale and power. “Regardless of its shifting corporate entity,” said one Montanan who watched the changes, “it was always referred to … as ‘the Company, ’ a simple yet awe-inspiring term.”³⁹

      Marcus Daly, of course, died before seeing the evolution of the company he built. Heinze moved to New York City, where he lived in a double suite at the Waldorf, married a beautiful actress, squandered most of his fortune in a banking venture, then died at age forty-five from cirrhosis of the liver. William Clark, after a single term in the U.S. Senate, would also spend most of his time in Manhattan (when not in Europe), collecting art and residing in his 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion.

      Back in Butte, meanwhile, the miners and their families would live with the consequences.

      One of the men who would soon feel the consequences of Standard Oil’s Butte takeover was Burton “B.K.” Wheeler. By the time of the North Butte disaster, Wheeler held the powerful position of federal district attorney for Montana. He had arrived in Butte, though, as a freshly minted graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, in the waning days of Fritz Heinze’s epic battle with Standard.⁴⁰

      B.K. Wheeler, destined to be one of the most important men of his generation, settled in Butte as the result of a losing poker hand. Wheeler was born in Hampton, Massachusetts, in 1882, the son of a cobbler. He worked his way through the University of Michigan Law School, clerking in the dean’s office during the school year and selling cookbooks door-to-door in the summer. Upon Wheeler’s graduation, the dean offered to help place him in “one of the big New York law firms.”

      B.K. Wheeler declined. “[R]eturning East seemed stultifying,” wrote Wheeler in his autobiography. “I was anxious to go anywhere that was wide open with opportunity … ever since I was a child I had dreamed of going West.” With his life savings of $500, Wheeler set out to find a job, hopping from town to town for three months before arriving in Butte in the fall of 1905—just as Standard Oil was fixing its grip on the city.

      Wheeler spent a week interviewing with “every successful lawyer in the city.” The results of his effort: “exactly one offer.” And not one he found attractive. Wheeler packed the bag containing his worldly possessions and headed for the train station. “I decided to try Spokane.”

      On his way to the station, two well-dressed men, presenting themselves as fellow travelers, invited the young man to share a drink. Wheeler accepted the invitation, and as they sat down at a bar the men proposed “a friendly game of cards.” The young lawyer suggested “pitch.”

      “Oh no,” said one of his companions, “let’s play poker.”

      In a matter of minutes, Wheeler was betting the remnants of his life savings on a pair of jacks. When one of his new friends turned up three treys, the game was over. “I sat there dumbfounded,” said Wheeler. He learned later, of course, that the game had been rigged, but the result would stand. The train for Spokane came and went, and Wheeler accepted the job he had rejected the day before.

       Eight

       “THEN WE MET DUGGAN”

       Then we met Duggan, a nipper, who knows every foot of the ground.

      —JOSIAH JAMES, QUOTED IN THE ANACONDA STANDARD, JUNE 11, 1917

      Miner John Wirta was at work on the 2,600 level of the Speculator in the early morning hours of June 9 when “an Austrian” ran through his crosscut, yelling in broken English, “Come on! Come on! Pretty danger!” At first Wirta and his crewmates thought the man was crazy. “But we feared there might have been a cave-in or fall of ground above, so we went up to the twenty-fourth level.” At the 2,400, according to Wirta, “We smelled smoke and gas for the first time and heard that there was a big fire in the shaft.”¹

      Though their situation was obviously serious, Wirta and the others with him could take one bit of comfort. The 2,400 level of the Speculator connected directly to the High Ore mine. One of the men knew the passage and “thought we could get out that way.” They took off through the connecting drift.²

      The miners had progressed only a few hundred feet when they encountered a concrete wall with a rusted iron door, sealing the drift closed. They tried the handle, but the rust froze it solid. Precious minutes ticked away as they pounded at the handle, the smoke and gas pursuing them through the drift. There must have been collective elation when finally the door gave way, swinging back on its corroded hinges toward the Speculator.³

      But as the men turned their lanterns to illuminate the opening, they did not find a passageway to safety. Directly behind the door stood another concrete wall, blocking their path from top to bottom and from side to side. Desperately they searched for tools—something to batter down the wall. Finding nothing but train tracks, the miners pulled up the rails and began to pound. The wall, though, was too thick: four inches of concrete framed by a one-inch timber brattice.⁴

      The experience of Wirta and his companions was not unique. In numerous North Butte connections to adjoining Anaconda properties, miners fleeing the fire encountered bulkheads—solid walls obstructing their escape. Many of the bulkheads had apparently been built after the May 1917 fire in the Anaconda-owned Modoc mine. Ironically, the intent of the walls had been to keep the Modoc smoke and fumes out of the Speculator.⁵ In this regard, the structures were perfectly proper. What was improper—indeed what was illegal under Montana State law—was for walls to be built without doors.⁶ Some dead miners were found “piled up against bulkheads of solid cement,” remembered B.K. Wheeler, the federal district attorney, “although state law required that all bulkheads in the mines must have an iron door which can be opened.”⁷ The rationale for requiring doors, of course, was to prevent the precise scenario that was playing out in the Speculator—the entrapment of men in the event of an emergency.

      The contemporaneous accounts do not record the terror and panic that Wirta and the others must have felt as they battled this new obstacle, but bulkheads built without doors would emerge as one of the most bitter issues in the aftermath of the fire. There were widespread, graphic rumors that rescue crews found dead miners with “their fingers worn to the knuckles in an attempt to reach СКАЧАТЬ