Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917. Michael Punke
[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
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, 31 baths, and 4 galleries for the display of Clark’s beloved art collection, gathered during numerous trips to fin de siècle Europe. To ensure consistency of building materials throughout the house, Clark purchased entire stone quarries and his own bronze foundry. In addition to his Fifth Avenue residence, Clark maintained mansions in Butte and Los Angeles, with an oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara thrown in for good measure. Nor did Clark neglect his family’s housing needs. Son William Junior’s Butte home featured a $65,000 garage (with heated floors) for the protection and care of horses, carriages, and an extensive automobile collection.2
Daly’s and Clark’s financial power converted easily into political power, and it was the realm of politics that provided the central battleground for the two men’s titanic clash. Speculation about the origin of the Clark-Daly feud has inspired a rash of theories ranging from personal slight to clashing business plans. Whatever the genesis of the enmity, the political ambition of William Clark and the election of 1888 provided the backdrop for the feud’s first dramatic, public eruption.
In 1888, Montana was still a territory, and an election was held to select its nonvoting delegate to the United States Congress. Clark ran as a Democrat on a platform calling for lower trade tariffs (the Republicans of the day called for higher ones) and “keep[ing] the Mongolian race from our shores.”3
Daly, in addition to his personal disdain for Clark, had a pointed parochial interest at stake. His copper industry required gargantuan amounts of timber—both to buttress his mine shafts and to fuel his smelters. Part of Daly’s western empire included extensive timber holdings, but Anaconda also took logs another way—by poaching off federal lands. For years this practice had been overlooked, in part because of vague property lines, but the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland brought several enforcement suits—still pending in 1888. Daly hoped that Republican Benjamin Harrison would win the presidential election (which he did), and that a Republican delegate from Montana would have more sway than a Democrat (i.e., Clark) in getting the Department of Interior to quash the suits.4
Daly quietly set about to engineer a Clark defeat, beginning by ensuring that his own miners and sawyers (whose shift bosses inspected the ballots before submission) voted against Clark. It worked. Clark lost fourteen of sixteen Montana counties, and the infamous “War of the Copper Kings” had begun.5
For a dozen years, the Clark-Daly feud would foul the waters of Montana politics—culminating with perhaps the most corrupt election in American history and spilling dramatically onto the floor of the United States Senate.
By 1899, Montana had become a state—entitled to representation by two senators in Washington. Until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came into force, senators were not elected directly by popular vote, but rather indirectly by state legislatures. This concentration of electors greatly facilitated corruption, conveniently congregating the handful of men who cast the deciding ballots.
The stage was set for copper king William A. Clark, who having conquered the world of business now ached for the title of senator. He made no bones about the means he would deploy to win. His son Charlie said, infamously, “We will send the old man to the Senate or the poorhouse.”6
An investigation by the United States Senate would later reveal the depth and breadth of Clark’s bribery. For many legislators, the bribe was no more complicated than an envelope stuffed with cash. For others, bogus business deals were concocted to cover the tracks, including a number of land transactions in which Clark paid ridiculously inflated prices. One legislator struggled to explain how he had arrived at the legislative session penniless (indeed, borrowing $25 to make the trip) but returned home to pay $3,500 cash for a new ranch. Another claimed part of his $3,600 windfall as the profits of gambling; the rest, he said, he had “found in his hotel room.”7 By one credible estimate, Clark paid around $431,000 for the purchase of forty-seven votes, a tidy sum in the currency of the day.8
This scale of bribery, to the credit of a few solid Montanans, did not go unnoticed. Indeed, a remarkable drama played out over a month-long period in Helena, the state capital. Rumors of Clark’s bribery began even before the opening of the legislative session, and during the session, “the purchase of votes was talked about almost as freely as the weather.”9 Mark Twain, who knew William Clark personally, said that “by his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.”10
The smell, though, was offensive to some—or at least to a few. Rumors became so persistent that the Montana legislature formed a committee to investigate the corruption before the voting took place. The most dramatic testimony came from a former buffalo hunter, Senator Fred