The Speculator Mine Disaster

June eighth, nineteen seventeen. The Speculator Mine shaft in Butte ran twenty-four hundred feet into the ground, and on that night it held nearly four hundred men working the overnight shift. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company was running maximum production to meet wartime demand. The copper in these shafts was going into shell casings, telephone wire, and the engines of a war. Nobody had slowed down for safety inspections in months.

An electric cable caught fire near the top of one of the shafts. The cable burned through its insulation and ignited the wooden shaft timbers. Smoke and carbon monoxide began flooding the underground tunnels faster than any rescue team could be assembled on the surface. Within minutes the ventilation system that should have cleared the air was instead pulling the gas deeper into the mine.

The men below had been trained for fire. Some of them knew exactly what to do: wall yourself in. Using timber frames and whatever clay and rock was at hand, groups of miners sealed off pockets of air and waited. They lit candles to measure the oxygen. When the candles dimmed, they knew. In at least two of these sealed pockets, miners wrote farewell letters on their lunch pails and on the rock walls around them. The letters were found when the rescue teams finally broke through.

One hundred sixty-eight men died. It remains the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history. Most of the dead were immigrants: Irish from County Cork, Cornish hard-rock veterans, Slavic workers, Finns. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company paid out settlements to surviving families and resumed operations within days. No executives faced criminal charges. The company's own newspapers covered the aftermath carefully.

The Granite Mountain Memorial stands near the original shaft today. The names of the dead are on the wall. A good number of them died writing goodbye to people who would not see those letters for days.