Hanna, Two Explosions, One Mine

Hanna was born when the Union Pacific Coal Company sank a mine at Chimney Springs in eighteen eighty-nine and named the new camp after Marcus Hanna, a coal and industrial businessman who became a United States Senator from Ohio. The mine became the site of two catastrophic disasters. On June thirtieth, nineteen oh three, a methane explosion in Hanna Mine Number One killed one hundred sixty-nine men, Wyoming's worst single mining disaster.

The blast decimated the town's male population and the company paid almost nothing to survivors' families. Five years later, on March twenty-eighth, nineteen oh eight, the same mine exploded again. Eighteen men were trapped, and when forty-one rescuers entered to help them, a second blast killed everyone inside.

Twenty-seven bodies were eventually recovered; thirty-two were left in the mountain. The mine was permanently closed.