Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

With the corporate stakes now life or death, Standard Oil came roaring back. Montana wants Amalgamated shut down? Show Montana what that means. Within hours of Clancy’s decision, Standard ordered a total shutdown of all Amalgamated operations in the state. Amalgamated mines in Butte were immediately closed. The great smelter fires were extinguished in the towns of Anaconda and Great Falls. Across Montana’s forests, lumber camps were emptied. So too were sawmills, coal mines, railroads, retail stores, and dozens of other related industries. Overnight, three-fourths of Montana’s wage earners found themselves abruptly thrown out of work.

Having shown Montanans the price of defiance, Standard Oil issued its demand to Heinze: Sell the offending minority shares and drop the suits. Heinze, playing for time, promised to answer the next day from the courthouse steps.

What followed was one of the great pieces of political theater. When Fritz Heinze arrived at the appointed hour to give his response, an audience of ten thousand people stood waiting outside the courthouse. It was an angry crowd. Fritz, he knew, had tapped too deeply from his reservoir of goodwill. His injudicious use of lawsuits had triggered a terrible backlash, and now thousands of workers—including the teeming mob that stood before him—faced a frigid Montana winter with no jobs.

Heinze began to speak, his deep voice booming so that his words could be heard up and down the street. He deplored the control that Amalgamated had gained over the affairs of the state. The emerging trust, he argued, was the “greatest menace that any community could possibly have within its boundaries.” He reminded them that Amalgamated was really Standard Oil, and that Standard Oil had “trampled every law, human and divine.”

Most of all, though, he cast his fight as their fight.

If they crush me today, they will crush you tomorrow. 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.

It was brilliant demagoguery, all the more effective because—at some level—it was true. So great was Heinze’s oratory that, for a few days at least, he managed to turn the tide back in his favor.

Soon, though, Standard Oil issued a new demand—so audacious that it made the old William 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 (#ulink_b9c00e8c-43ad-5511-a2b9-46f1d0e53a71)

“THEN WE MET DUGGAN” (#ulink_b9c00e8c-43ad-5511-a2b9-46f1d0e53a71)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 safety.”

Wirta’s group would manage to avoid at least this fate. Grasping the futility of pounding at a concrete wall without proper tools, they ran back into the smoky Speculator.

“We first tried to go up to the twenty-second level,” reported Wirta, “but the gas was so bad that we were forced to stop.” Back down at the 2,400, Wirta gathered twenty-five sticks of dynamite, determined to return to the High Ore bulkhead and blast his way through. But it was too late. By then strong gas had filled the connecting drift, preventing all access. “We all thought that we were facing death,” said Wirta. “This was the first I heard of the nipper.”

Wirta would emerge as one of the key chroniclers of the North Butte disaster for an important reason in addition to his good memory. He was one of the few miners who carried a watch.

More men began to converge in the main tunnel at the 2,400 level of the Speculator. Like John Wirta, most had already made other attempts to escape and, like Wirta, most believed that their options had dwindled to nil. Two of the men joining this growing group were Albert Cobb and his partner, Henry Fowler. Barely an hour earlier, Cobb and Fowler had been working in the 2,400 Station of Granite Mountain when Ernest Sullau came scrambling up from the shaft, burning cable at his heels, desperately demanding a bucket of water.

When it became clear that the Granite Mountain fire would not be doused by buckets, Cobb and Fowler fled in the direction of the Speculator, warning others as they moved through the crosscut. Before long, though, they encountered a group of miners fleeing in the opposite direction who told them “the station was bulkheaded.” Next Cobb and Fowler tried to climb up a level but found that path blocked by gas as well. “We were like a bunch of fools and did not know where to go,” remembered Cobb. “We met Duggan after we came back from the Speculator shaft.”

Manus Duggan was born on May 30, 1887, in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

He was pure-blooded Irish, the son of two first-generation immigrants named Mary and John Duggan. The closest that Manus came to a birthright was his auburn hair, green eyes, and a tradition of mining—his father made his living in the Coatesville coal mines. At the time of the fire, Manus’s father was dead. His mother, though, was actually on a train bound for Butte. Manus had saved for months to raise the money to bring her west.

As a boy, Manus had managed to obtain an elementary education. At age twelve, though, he joined his father in the coal mines, “picking slate.”

The precise year that Duggan arrived in Butte is unknown, but it is believed that he headed west during one of Coatesville’s periodic downturns. He may have arrived in Butte in 1906 at the age of twenty-one. It is known that in that year Duggan took a room at the Brogan Boarding House, an establishment named for its proprietor, Mary Brogan.

Mary Brogan’s daughter Madge was a preteen when Manus moved in, but he caught her eye from the beginning. “He was the finest looking man who ever walked the earth,” she would say in her later life. “I was crazy about him from the time I was eleven years old.”

Madge was eighteen and Manus was twenty-seven when they married, on April 7, 1915, at the Sacred Heart Church. Forgoing any sort of honeymoon, the newlyweds put Manus’s modest savings toward the construction of a small house—which Manus built himself.

It was a piecemeal process, with construction progressing in tandem with Manus’s wages. Madge would remember the greatest gift that Manus ever gave her—a porcelain commode. The indoor toilet took the place of an outdoor privy and eliminated frosty nighttime treks during Butte’s frigid winters.

Duggan worked for the North Butte Mining Company as a “nipper.” The primary responsibility of nippers was to sharpen tools, a constant need, as the miners drilled into solid rock. In the course of their workday, nippers moved throughout the mine, gathering up tools, shuttling them to the surface, and returning with freshly honed equipment. In their daily travels, the nippers developed a familiarity with every crosscut, manway, and drift.

A miner named Josiah James was the first to encounter Manus Duggan after the start of the fire. James was working with his partner, a young Italian, when they learned of the burning shaft. The two partners, after fleeing the burning Granite Mountain shaft, decided to split up in order to warn others. The Italian miner would later be found dead. James had better luck—the first man he met was Duggan.

Duggan offered to help spread the alarm as they searched desperately for a way out. Manus and James ran through the smoky labyrinth, gathering up the men—and boys—they found along the way. They covered an enormous amount of ground in a period of less than an hour: down twenty stories from the 2,400 to the 2,600; back up to the 2,400; then up to the 2,200; then down again to the 2,400. Seventeen-year-old Willy Lucas was at work on the 2,400 when he received the nipper’s warning, falling quickly in tow.

At the 2,600, Duggan found an Austrian immigrant named Godfrey Galia. “I was working on the 2,600 level when the nipper ran in and told us there was a fire in the shaft.”