Red Lodge: Coal Towns, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and the Smith Mine
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Red Lodge was built on coal. The Rocky Fork Coal Company opened the first mine here in eighteen eighty-seven, and within a few years men from Finland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, Germany, Norway, Russia, and Greece were digging side by side in the seams beneath the Beartooth Mountains. Each ethnic group settled its own neighborhood: Finn Town, Little Italy, Hi-Bug.
At the peak of the coal era, about six thousand people lived in Red Lodge. Then came February twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-three. A methane explosion at the Smith Mine in nearby Bearcreek killed seventy-four men before breakfast.
It was the worst coal mine disaster in Montana history. Only three miners who reported for work that day got out alive. The mine never reopened.
Coal had already been declining, and the Smith Mine ended it. What saved Red Lodge was a road. The Beartooth Highway, completed in nineteen thirty-six, linked the town directly to Yellowstone's northeast entrance, and tourism filled the space coal had left behind.
