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

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       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 comparison to the titanic battles that took place from 1899 to 1906. This second War of the Copper Kings would again seize the attention of the entire nation. For decades to come, the outcome of the conflict would transform the town of Butte, the state of Montana, and the lives of the men and women who lived there.

      The third of the three Copper Kings—Frederick Augustus Heinze—was born in Brooklyn on December 5, 1869. Unlike his counterparts, Marcus Daly and William Clark, young “Fritz” Heinze grew up in a comfortable life of moderate wealth. He received a top-flight European education that included study in the classics, language, and a solid foundation in the scientific discipline that would shape his meteoric life—geology.¹⁰

      Fritz Heinze entered the Columbia University School of Mines at the age of fifteen and received his engineer of mines degree at nineteen. In addition to a knowledge of mining, Columbia taught Fritz other skills that would serve him well in Butte. He joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and was known as an expert poker player. For the rest of his short life, Heinze would be the charming frat-boy rogue. He could drink with the best of Butte—and that was saying something. He was tall, physically powerful, and handsome—his giant ego buffered by raw charm. In short, people loved him.

      After Fritz’s graduation from Columbia, his father offered to fund postgraduate study in Germany. Fritz, though, had his heart set on the West. Three months later, in September 1889, Heinze arrived in Butte. He hired on as a junior engineer at the Boston & Montana Company—an independent operation owned by neither Clark nor Daly.

      For a year the young Heinze added practical experience to СКАЧАТЬ