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

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СКАЧАТЬ powerful merchant-bankers out of Salt Lake City. The Walkers hired Daly to run their Emma silver mine, then their Ophir. Both properties boomed. Around this time, the Walkers began to catch wind of opportunities in a Montana town called Butte. In 1876, they sent Marcus Daly to scout it out.

      Daly, known for being able to “see farther into the ground than any other man,”¹⁷ liked what he found. He settled on a recommendation that the Walker brothers purchase a silver mine called the Alice. The Walkers agreed, giving Daly an equity share to move to Butte and run the mine. The Alice—purchased for $25,000—would ultimately produce millions in silver for its owners. The mine would also launch Daly, and most significantly, signal the true takeoff of Butte’s silver boom.¹⁸

      Daly superintended the Alice for five years and in the process became a wealthy man. For Daly, though, the object was not wealth, but empire. In 1880, he sold his share in the Alice for “a rumored $100,000” and began searching Butte for another property.¹⁹ What he found would surpass his wildest dreams, for nothing like it had ever existed before.

      In 1875, a former Union soldier named Michael Hickey staked a claim on the Butte Hill, hoping to catch the swelling wave of silver. As an infantryman in McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Hickey had fought in Richmond and Petersburg. Before the battle for Richmond, he read a Horace Greeley editorial in the New York Tribune. “Grant will encircle Lee’s forces …” predicted Greeley, “… and crush them like a giant anaconda.”²⁰

      The image of an “anaconda” would stick with Hickey, and when it came time to name his new claim, “That word struck me as a might good one.”²¹ In the five years following its establishment, the Anaconda was no better than a middling prospect in a town where scores of companies had staked their claims. But Marcus Daly turned the tide. According to Butte lore, Daly met Michael Hickey one day while taking a walk. Hickey told Daly about the progress at his mine. “I’ve sunk a forty-five-foot shaft on my Anaconda claim and I’ve sure got silver ore but I’ve got to go deeper to make it pay,” he said. “If you’ll deepen the shaft, we can make a deal.”²²

      Daly would ultimately pay $30,000 for outright ownership of Hickey’s property. He had taken the first step toward his future empire, but it was only the first step. As Daly knew better than anyone, to transform the Anaconda into a profitable silver mine would require money. Money to sink and timber the shaft. Money to excavate the ore. Money to crush. Money to smelt. Money far beyond his own not insubstantial means.²³

      There are conflicting stories as to why Daly did not stick with the Walker brothers of Salt Lake. By one account, he offered the Walkers an option on the Anaconda “but they could not be induced.”²⁴ By another account “Daly froze them out.” Even as he ran the Alice for the Walkers, Daly corresponded with his old friends from the Comstock—George Hearst and the partners in his syndicate. In 1881, Daly traveled to San Francisco to present his plans.²⁵

      George Hearst—father of the future newspaperman William Randolph Hearst—had reason to trust the ruddy Irishman from Butte. In his autobiography, the senior Hearst credited Daly with a tip to buy—for $30,000—a mine called the Ontario. The Ontario produced an estimated $14 million in silver and gold. “From that $30,000,” wrote Hearst, “everything else came.”²⁶

      Hearst and his partners (including Lloyd Tevis, who would eventually preside over the Wells Fargo Bank) bought into Daly’s new Anaconda mine. Daly received 25 percent of the equity in the mine, management responsibility, and—most significantly—an almost limitless operating budget.²⁷ In June 1881, workmen began sinking a new main shaft at the Anaconda. They quickly found rich deposits of silver. In the early days of the mine, ironically, Daly leased a mill from his future rival—William Clark.²⁸ Clark, back from his study at the Columbia University School of Mines, was still frantically amassing his own early fortune.

      The Anaconda was a profitable property on the basis of silver alone, but as Daly dug deeper, it was a less precious metal that would ultimately create a far greater treasure.

      In late 1882, miners at the Anaconda were drilling at the 300-foot level when they began to encounter “new material.” Word was dispatched to Marcus Daly and his lieutenant Mike Carroll, who came down to look for themselves. They watched as dynamite was set in a circle of holes bored into the quartz walls. The fuses were lit and the men took cover. A great blast shook the mine.

      When the debris settled, Daley stepped forward to pick up a chunk of the smoking rock. He turned to Mike Carroll excitedly. “Mike,” he said. “We’ve got it.” It was a singular moment, and it would change the life of both Daly and his adopted city of Butte. Marcus Daly had discovered the largest deposit of copper in the world.²⁹

      Like many great men, Daly combined talent and hard work with good timing. At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, just six years before Daly hit the Anaconda copper vein, a man named Alexander Graham Bell had demonstrated the transmission of speech through a copper wire. Two years before Daly’s discovery, a man named Thomas Edison received a patent for an invention he called the “incandescent lamp.” Through the inventions of Edison and Bell, the world was on the brink of an explosion in the demand for copper.³⁰

      Daly knew he had discovered the supply.

       Four

       “WHAT MEN WILL DO”

       Ernest Sullau’s Death an Example of What Men Will Do to Help Their Fellows

      —HEADLINE, BUTTE MINER, JUNE 10, 1917

      Ernest Sullau would have smelled gas within minutes of accidentally starting the fire, probably during those initial, panicked moments in the 2,400 Station. Sullau had encountered gas before. In fact, after his wife, Lena, learned of an earlier incident, she had urged him to be more careful. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “No death is easier and sweeter.”¹

      Sullau’s reassurances aside, death by gas falls far closer to insidious than sweet. This was particularly true for the men of the North Butte Mining Company. As they battled to escape from the depths in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 9, 1917, most of the miners knew that the deadly, invisible gas pursued them. They could smell it and even taste it as they ran.²

      The gas was carbon monoxide, also known by its scientific symbol of “CO.” According to the Bureau of Mines’ official accident report, “At least 150 of the 163 men killed showed the cherry-red blood and knotted veins of neck and side of head characteristic of carbon monoxide poisoning.”³ CO is a brutally efficient killer. If inhaled in sufficient quantities, it keeps the blood from absorbing oxygen, strangling its victims from the inside out.

      Carbon monoxide is produced when wood or fossil fuels are burned, and it is most dangerous when its fumes are confined. Thousands of people die each year from CO poisoning inside their homes, usually because furnaces or appliances fail to ventilate properly. It is easy to see how carbon monoxide could wreak havoc within the interior of a burning mine.

      Most people familiar with carbon monoxide know that the gas is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Yet dozens of North Butte survivors reported smelling and tasting gas, meaning that the CO must have mixed with other gases and smoke. One likely source of this distinctive odor was the burning, melting three-ton cable. Its cloth insulation was soaked in oil, and both the lead СКАЧАТЬ