Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917. Michael Punke
seething labor unrest, divisive ethnic tension, and radicalism both left and right. It was a powder keg lacking only a spark, and in the days surrounding the disaster, multiple conflicts would converge and explode. B.K. Wheeler would ride through the center of this firestorm, then carry its legacy in the decades to follow.
Only two months earlier, in April 1917, the United States had waded into the bloody fray of World War I. For Butte, one immediate effect of the conflict was the widening of ethnic fissures. Butte was a microcosm of Europe, and Europe was at war. German immigrants opposed fighting against their recent homeland, where many of their families still lived. The English and the French, by contrast, cheered America’s alignment with their countrymen. The Irish, with historical animosity toward England, stood in bitter opposition to an American alliance with the British. The Finns, strongly socialist, saw the war as a scheme to “break the power of the people of Russia.”3 War also led to an increase in immigration from eastern and southern Europe, and all of Butte’s then-current inhabitants resented the influx of Italians and Slavs, who as the newest wave of immigrants were willing to work for the lowest wages.
Leftists marched in opposition to the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” and plotted the downfall of the capitalist system. Rightists launched a hunt for “Shadow Huns” and changed the names of German foods. In the approved parlance, hamburger became Salisbury steak, frankfurters became hot dogs, and sauerkraut became liberty cabbage.4
An early flashpoint in Butte centered on registration for a new draft, with Registration Day falling on June 5, 1917—only three days before the North Butte disaster. Butte war opponents, led by the Finns and Irish, circulated handbills screaming “WAR IS HELL. WE DO NOT WANT IT” and “DO NOT REGISTER.” “[W]e are,” warned the handbills, “at the behest of the money powers, to be taken forcibly to kill and be killed.”5 The draft even threatened to reignite problems with the Indians. Butte newspapers ran a wire story reporting that antiwar protesters included the Cheyenne, who were “holding war dances and threatening violences.”6
The responsibility to enforce the draft law seemed an odd match for District Attorney B.K. Wheeler. As a Quaker, he had his own considerable misgivings about American involvement in the war and had established his young career by representing Butte’s working-class men—usually against “the money powers.” Yet as the federal district attorney, Wheeler took seriously his responsibility to enforce the law and issued a tough statement on the eve of Registration Day. “Any man within the draft age who is heard making the remark that he will not register will be warned during the day by the Attorney’s force. If he has not registered by nine P.M., he will be taken promptly to jail.”7
Wheeler’s tough tone dissuaded some but not all. On Registration Day, a group of Finns and Irish led a protest march of as many as 2,500 people. Antiwar speeches were delivered in English and in Finnish before the Butte mayor addressed the crowd (from the top of a building), demanding it disperse. The order was met with jeering and boos that quickly degenerated into rioting, leading police and sheriff’s deputies to fire shots into the air and then wade into the crowd with clubs and long nightsticks. When the rioters still failed to disperse, the National Guard was called in. Forty soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets “came at a run” from an encampment on the edge of town. Finally the riot broke up, with twenty men and one woman arrested.8
“The draft riots were forgotten three days later when fire broke out,” remembered Wheeler.9 Forgotten for a time, though the riot offered a preview of the broader ramifications of the disaster that was about to erupt—a disaster that would envelop Wheeler’s long career in ways that he could not possibly foresee.
As they ascended the shaft, the members of the cable crew no doubt felt a mixture of relief and trepidation. They knew they were lucky to be alive, but there would be serious consequences for their role in ruining a valuable piece of mine property. The cable cost more than $5,000—the equivalent of a year’s wage for four men.10
What the cable crew could not know was that the events they had set in motion would stretch far beyond a $5,000 electrical wire. In less than two hours, hundreds of men would be locked in a desperate struggle to survive. In less than three days, 163 of them would be dead.11
Nor would the death and destruction be limited to the mines.
Before the last chapter was written, the legacy of the disaster would include murder, a crippling strike, an ethnic and political witch hunt, a national law effectively suspending the First Amendment, and an epic battle over presidential power. Butte, Montana, sits in the heart of the American West—but this is the story of a very different frontier.
Daylight had come and gone when the cable crew reached the surface, late in the evening of June 8, 1917. The men reported the lost cable to Ernest Sullau, the assistant foreman. Sullau had just arrived at work, and the responsibility for pulling the ruined cable from the shaft would fall to him. Mine operations ran round the clock, and Sullau headed up the graveyard shift.
An appalling sight which caused the strongest hearts to quail was the cremation of two men, Mike Conway [sic] and [Peter]Sheridan, station tenders, who were trapped like rats in a double decked cage, about twenty feet above the collar of the shaft, with the flames flying from the shaft like a gigantic torch around them.
—BUTTE MINER, JUNE 9, 1917
The miners who worked for forty-eight-year-old Ernest Sullau called him “Sully.” Just about everybody in Butte, it seems, had a nickname.
Sullau was born in Hamburg, Germany, on Christmas Day 1868. He came to America as a “small boy” and spent most of his adult life as a miner, including stints chasing gold in Klondike and Nome. When he arrived in Montana around 1897, he first worked as a placer miner—sifting small claims of his own. By 1900, though, Sullau gave up his quest for the big strike, opting instead for the steady wages of industrial mining. By 1917, he was a seasoned, fifteen-year veteran of the North Butte Mining Company’s Speculator and Granite Mountain mines.1
While Sullau never got rich, the stability he found in Butte’s mines brought him other benefits. In 1911, at the age of forty-two, Sullau married Lena Benson, a woman unabashed in her affection for her husband. “He was the best man that ever lived,” she said. “When the twenty-to-six car came I knew he would be on it.” Through his hard work and experience with the North Butte Mining Company, Sullau had risen to the rank of assistant foreman. Between his respected position in the mine and his comfortable home life, Sullau had reached a “good place in life.”2
Sullau’s task on the evening of June 8, 1917, was straightforward: Descend the mine in the auxiliary cage (which was not blocked by the ruined cable); find the top end of the cable; attach it to a hoisting rope; and pull it up. With the cable removed, an assessment could be made of the damage done to the shaft.
Already it was clear that the water supply to the lower reaches of Granite Mountain had been severed. Without water, the miners’ Leyner drills could not function. The men at the 3,000 level, unable to work, had gone home, no doubt grumbling about the wages they lost in a workday cut short.3
Accompanying Sullau into the mine were a shift boss named John “Baldy” Collins and two shaft men. It was 11:30 P.M. when the four men crowded into the open cage and began their descent. Their destination was a point fifty feet below the 2,400 Station—where the top portion of the electrical cable had lodged.
The ride down, covering nearly half a mile, would have taken around five minutes. When the men finally came even with the tangled mass, there was no sign of the end of the cable. To search for it, Sullau and Baldy crawled out of the cage—edging perilously along the timbers