IWW and Frank Little: The Murder Nobody Investigated

Nearly two months after the Speculator Mine killed one hundred sixty-eight men, Butte was still raw. The Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, had been organizing in the city since the nineteen-tens, building on a labor movement that went back to the Butte Miners Union of eighteen seventy-eight. The Speculator disaster had given their organizing a new urgency, and the copper companies had noticed.

Frank Little had come to Butte in the summer of nineteen seventeen specifically to help the IWW organize. He was a mixed-race man, part Indigenous, who had spent years doing dangerous labor work across the West. He was outspoken against the war, against Anaconda, and against the conditions the company had allowed to kill a hundred and sixty-eight men underground.

On the night of August first, nineteen seventeen, six men came to the rooming house where Little was staying. They forced their way in and took him. His body was found hanging from a railroad trestle before dawn. A note was pinned to his clothing with a coded warning to other labor organizers. No one was ever arrested. The coroner's inquest recorded the cause of death and moved on. The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives hold the documented record; the identity of the men who carried out the killing is not established in that record, though contemporaneous reporting and subsequent historical research have pointed toward individuals connected to the Anaconda company. The gap in the official record is itself part of the story.

His death effectively ended IWW organizing in Butte. The summer of nineteen seventeen, the Speculator disaster, the organizing surge, and the killing of Frank Little, compressed into six weeks, marked the moment when Butte's labor movement broke.