Since the Butte Miners Union’s demise in 1914, tensions between miners and mine owners had only grown more severe. War exacerbated this, first by ramping up copper production, which yielded big profits for mine owners but only minimal benefits for mine workers. And second by threatening to draft workers into a war they believed they had no interest in.

In the midst of these tensions, an unprecedented tragedy hit Butte. On June 8, a fire broke out in the Granite Mountain Mine. A miner’s headlamp accidentally ignited oil cloth sheathing on a long cable in a shaft. Flames quickly shot up the mine shaft, igniting timber supports. The fire spread through the mine and into an adjoining mine, the Speculator.

The fire pumped smoke and toxic gases through the vast network of tunnels in Butte’s mines. Miners trying to escape had to navigate a maze of dark, smoke-filled tunnels. In addition, in flagrant violation of safety laws, the mine companies had walled off some of the tunnels. Later, dead men were found with their fingertips ground to the bone from clawing against the closed walls trying to escape.

Miners on the surface launched heroic rescue efforts. But it was impossible to reach many of the men locked thousands of feet in the depths of the mountain. Some rescuers died trying. In the end, 168 miners lost their lives. It was, and remains, the worst hard-rock mining disaster in U.S. history.

The mine disaster catalyzed a spontaneous strike in one Butte mine that eventually spread to all of the other mines. Other trades associated with the mines also struck. Butte’s miners organized a new union. They demanded safety reforms, better pay, and above all, an end to the “rustling card” system that allowed the Anaconda Company to ban workers who threatened its power. But Anaconda refused to end the system. So the strike went on, paralyzing the greatest copper mines on earth.

Given the strategic importance of copper to the war, Butte’s strike quickly gained national attention. Labor organizers, mine owners, consumers, and the federal government all recognized it as a strike of potentially immense consequences. The city, and the nation, were on edge.

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When it was installed in 1915, the electric hoist at the Granite Mountain mine was the largest in the country. Connected to the Speculator mine 200 yards to the south, Granite Mountain was developed to bolster the productive capacity of its parent mine. Instead, it nearly destroyed it.

The Granite Mountain-Speculator fire of 1917, the worst hard-rock mining accident in the history of the United States, began in the shaft of the Granite Mountain mine. Once ignited, it was only a matter of minutes before the entire lower half of the shaft was engulfed in flames, spreading deadly smoke and gas through miles of underground workings.

As one miner reported to the Butte Miner newspaper “It was about midnight when I heard someone shouting ‘Fire!’ My partner and I were working a short distance away from the 2600-foot station. We went out to investigate. The shaft was like a roaring furnace.”

Of the 410 men lowered into the Granite Mountain mine for the nightshift on June 8, 1917, 168 did not return alive. Some miners battered down concrete bulkheads that separated the tunnels from those of adjacent shafts. Many escaped through the Badger and Diamond mines. A few managed to barricade themselves behind bulkheads in the mine and were found alive after as long as 55 hours.

The disaster touched off a period of labor unrest, as most of Butte’s miners went on strike to protest dangerous working conditions. Federal troops were called in to force the miners back to work, and they occupied the city until 1921.

Today the open-air plaza of the Granite Mountain Memorial interprets the events, people, and turbulent times that surrounded the catastrophe. The Granite Mountain headframe, now surrounded by waste from open pit mining, can be seen from the memorial, as well as a panoramic view of Butte’s mining landscape.

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