Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917. Michael Punke
presented $30,000 in cash to the investigating committee. “I know that the course I have pursued will not be popular, but so long as I live, I propose to fight the men who have placed the withering curse of bribery upon this state.” A grand jury was now convened to consider the findings.11
William Clark, though, was far from finished. As balloting began for the Senate election and as the grand jury convened, Clark’s men flooded still more money into the streets—now including the grand jurors on their lists of targets. Clark’s network of Montana newspapers, meanwhile, blasted the Whiteside allegations as part of a vast conspiracy.
At the same time, Senator Whiteside himself became the target of a vicious counterassault. Whiteside’s recent election to the state senate had been challenged by his local opponent, and Clark’s forces seized upon the opening. A recount was demanded, and Clark’s forces succeeded in disqualifying ballots in which Whiteside voters had marked an “X” after his name—rather than before.12
Clark’s audacious, shameless counterassault worked. The grand jury declined to find evidence of bribery. Senator Whiteside, meanwhile, was disqualified from the state congress. The old buffalo hunter, at least, did not go down quietly. On the day of his disqualification, Whiteside rose on the floor of the state senate and gave his former colleagues full bore. “If I failed to express myself at this time,” he said, “I feel that I would be false to myself, false to my home, and false to the friends that have stood so manfully by me.
“Let us clink glasses and drink to crime,” chided Whiteside. The Senate election, he said, “has reminded me of a horde of hungry, skinny, long-tailed rats around a big cheese.” Dozens of men would turn away their eyes and squirm uncomfortably in their seats as Whiteside delivered his final broadside. “I am not surprised that the gentlemen who have changed their votes to Clark recently should make speeches of explanation, but I would suggest that their explanations would be much more clear and to the point if they would just get up and tell us the price and sit down.”13
Money, indeed, had trumped. The Montana legislature sent William A. Clark to the United States Senate, but the election saga was far from over.
Marcus Daly’s newspapers had made sure that the bribery scandal received wide play. Organized in part by Daly, anti-Clark forces took their fight to Washington. The U.S. Senate, under its own rules, can reject members for cause. On the day that William Clark took his seat in the Senate, two petitions were laid before the national body—one from Clark opponents in the Montana legislature and one from the governor of Montana. The petitions outlined the charges against Clark, and in a process familiar to modern political observers, the Senate launched an ethics investigation through the Committee on Privileges and Elections.
Clark watched as a parade of Montana state legislators gave sheepish explanations of the sudden turns in their economic fortunes. Senator Whiteside too told his story, and both Clark and Daly were called before the committee. (Daly, of course, was no angel. The committee, for the record, found ample wrongdoing on both sides.)14
In the end, Republicans and Democrats voted unanimously “that the election to the Senate of William A. Clark, of Montana, is null and void on account of briberies, attempted briberies, and corrupt practices.” Faced with adoption of the committee recommendation by the full United States Senate, William Clark resigned on May 15, 1900.15
Resignation, though, was not the same as quitting. Remarkably, Clark’s most outrageous maneuvers were still to come. His resignation created a vacancy that the governor of Montana would now be entitled to fill. The governor, Robert B. Smith, was a Daly ally and had aided the effort to overturn Clark’s election. Smith’s lieutenant governor, however, a man named A. E. Spriggs, was a close ally of Clark’s.
Clark allies arranged an elaborate scheme to lure Governor Smith out of the state. In his absence, Lieutenant Governor Spriggs—now Acting Governor Spriggs—appointed William Clark to the vacant Senate seat! Learning of this outrage, Governor Smith rushed back to Montana, declared Spriggs’s action invalid, and appointed his own man to the Senate. Each side protested the action of the other, and both candidates were tossed to Washington for the United States Senate to sort out.
Perhaps fatigued with the shenanigans, the Senate never resolved the matter of Montana’s rightful representation. The issue would die without any man taking the office. Montana citizens, having labored to earn the cherished right of statehood only a decade earlier, would have only one senator in Washington for the balance of the term.16
The election scandal of 1899, viewed from the distance of a full century, might be amusing if not for the legacy it spawned. Through a decade-long struggle founded on ego and personal aggrandizement, the Copper Kings had done much to “define deviancy down.”17 In the process, Montana picked up habits that would stick with the state for decades, including crude manipulation of the press, naked political corruption, and domination of state government by the copper industry.
In a few years, powerful interests from outside the state would use these same tools in ways as yet unimagined. Indeed, in one sense, the War of the Copper Kings can be viewed as a “noisy diversion.”18 For while Clark and Daly roiled the waters on the surface, a great shark circled below.
Helmet Men Braving Death Each Minute
—HEADLINE, BUTTE DAILY POST, JUNE 9, 1917
Cornelius “Con” O’Neill was lying in bed when he heard the Speculator whistle blow the alarm, just after midnight on June 9, 1917. O’Neill was foreman of the Bell and Diamond mines, Anaconda-owned properties adjoining the Speculator to the south. Married and a father of four young children, the thirty-seven-year-old lived with his family in a gracious house (owned by Anaconda) barely a stone’s throw from the mines.1 O’Neill’s wife, Julia, sensing the seriousness of the emerging disaster, pleaded with him to stay home. Instead, the “big, robust Irishman” rushed to the Bell-Diamond.2
O’Neill arrived while the fire was still in its early minutes, probably around 12:30 A.M. He found himself in the midst of a chaotic and confusing scene. What was obvious, though, was that the Granite Mountain shaft was ablaze. The “flaming torch” at its collar stood only a few hundred feet up the hill. Foreman O’Neill instantly recognized the danger to his own men in the depths of the Diamond. Of particular concern were thirty miners at work on the 1,800-foot level, where there was a direct connection to the Speculator.3
O’Neill directed his men to gather the makings for a bulkhead to “keep the smoke and gas from our men.” Quickly they loaded canvas and other materials onto the cage. Two other men accompanied Con O’Neill into the Diamond shaft—Ed Lorry and “Con” Toomey (O’Neill was sometimes known as “Big Con” to distinguish him from the multitude of “Cons” among the heavily Irish miners). None of the men wore any type of breathing apparatus, but when they reached the 1,800 Station of the Diamond, the air initially was clear. They progressed some 150 feet toward the Speculator and began to make preparations to build a canvas bulkhead.4
When the gas came, it hit hard and fast. Lorry suddenly collapsed. O’Neill and Toomey attempted to carry the stricken man back to the 1,800 Station, but then O’Neill too went down. Though they were close to the station, only Toomey managed to crawl back. By the time he got there, rescuers in breathing apparatus had already descended to search for the three men, worried by the length of time they’d been gone.5
“To hell with me—I can make it,” Toomey told the rescuers. “O’Neill and Lorry are in there.” The rescuers hurried down the drift, finding O’Neill and Lorry unconscious. One of the rescuers described the scene. “The smoke and gas were so thick in the 1,800