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FIRE AND BRIMSTONE The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 Michael Punke Published by The Borough Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF First published in Great Britain by The Borough Press 2016 Originally published in 2006 by Hyperion Books Source for diagram on here: Bureau of Mines, ‘Lessons from the Granite Mountain Shaft Fire, Butte’, 1922 Copyright © Michael Punke 2006 Michael Punke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Cover photographs © C. Owen Smithers Collection Butte-Silver Bow Public Archive (front); Shutterstock.com (fire and landscape) A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008189310 Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008189327 Version: 2016-02-11
Dedicated to the people of Butte, Montana
Tell her we done the best we could, but the cards were against us.
—J.D. MOORE, JUNE 9, 1917 CONTENTS
Three: “THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH”
Six: “HELMET MEN BRAVING DEATH”
Nine: “HEY JACK, WHAT THE HELL”
Fourteen: “BAMBOOZELING OR ABUSE”
Seventeen: “WE’RE DYING IN HERE”
Nineteen: “FOR YOU AND THE CHILD”
Twenty-one: “OTHERS TAKE NOTICE”
Twenty-three: “WHAT WILL BECOME OF THEM”
Twenty-four: “SOME LITTLE BODY OF MEN”