The Bear Creek Coal Trains

By Editor

Bearcreek, Carbon County, Montana, February 1943

A miner named Domenico Andreozzi went into Smith Mine No. 3 on the morning of Saturday, February 27, 1943, the same way he had gone in on hundreds of other mornings. He carried his lamp. He wore his cotton shirt and lace-up boots. He was paid by the ton, not by the hour, which meant that every minute he spent walking to his working place was a minute he was not earning. The company understood this arithmetic very well.

The Montana, Wyoming and Southern Railroad had been hauling coal out of the Bear Creek drainage in Carbon County since 1906. It was a twenty-one-mile line, running from the Northern Pacific junction at Bridger up through the Clark's Fork valley to the mines at Bearcreek and Washoe. The railroad had been built by a promoter named Frank Hall, who had originally called his enterprise the Yellowstone Park Railroad, which tells you something about the nature of railroad promotion in that era. The Northern Pacific had no interest in buying Hall's line, but it had every interest in controlling the coal that came out of those hills, because Bear Creek coal was high-grade bituminous, and it made Northern Pacific locomotives run more efficiently than any other fuel available in south central Montana. The NP eventually acquired a parallel line and squeezed Hall out, but the short line survived under new management and a new name, and for nearly fifty years it performed the one function it had been built to perform: it moved coal from the mouth of the mine to the mainline at Bridger, where it could be distributed to railroad depots and domestic consumers across the region.

The coal seams in the Bear Creek drainage had been known since the 1880s. The Rocky Fork Coal Company opened the first commercial mine in 1887, the same year the Northern Pacific completed its Rocky Fork branch line connecting Red Lodge to the mainline at Laurel, forty-four miles to the north. The branch line and the mines were not coincidental developments. The railroad needed the coal, and the coal needed the railroad, and the men who owned both understood that the arrangement would be profitable for everyone except the men who actually dug the coal out of the ground.

By the early 1900s, several operations were running in the district. The Smith Mine began production in 1900 under local operators and was acquired in 1906 by the Montana Coal and Iron Company, which had the capital to sink deeper shafts and open new adits into the mountain. By 1917, the Smith Mine alone was yielding more than 238,000 tons annually. Across the Red Lodge-Bearcreek coalfield in the 1920s, production reached approximately one million tons per year, and more than a thousand men worked underground in the district.

Those men had come from a long way off. The workforce was drawn from the immigrant communities of southern and eastern Europe: Italians from the Piedmont and the Veneto, Finns from the lake country, Slavs from Poland and Croatia and Slovenia, Scandinavians from Norway and Sweden. They had come to Montana on the same railroads that would carry their coal away. They settled in ethnic enclaves along the creek, and the neighborhood known as Finn Town preserved something of the old country in the shadow of the mine tipple. They formed mutual aid societies and built churches and sent their children to the Red Lodge schools. The company was glad to have them. The company was less glad when they organized.

The working conditions in the Bear Creek mines were what working conditions in underground coal mines were everywhere in that period: dark, wet, gaseous, and dangerous. The seams ran deep into the mountain, and the deeper the men worked, the more methane accumulated in the poorly ventilated passages. It was commonplace for miners to smoke while working. The company knew this. The state mine inspector knew this. The federal Bureau of Mines had published reports on the hazard of methane accumulation in mines of this type. The knowledge existed. The changes did not follow.

At 9:37 on the morning of February 27, 1943, a methane gas explosion ripped through Smith Mine No. 3, approximately 7,000 feet from the mine entrance. The blast was deep enough underground that it was not heard at the surface. The people of Bearcreek and Red Lodge noticed something was wrong only when a strange smoke and a chemical smell began drifting out of the mine mouth. The explosion had enough force to knock a twenty-ton locomotive off its tracks a quarter mile from the blast origin.

Seventy-seven men were working that Saturday. Three got out alive.

Rescue teams came from nearby mines and from a special unit in Butte. Family members gathered at the mine entrance. The fumes were so concentrated that rescuers could work no more than five minutes at a time before being forced back to the surface. The Red Cross established an emergency hospital in Red Lodge, staffed in part by student volunteers from the local high school. More than a hundred rescuers suffered injuries or exposure to the gas. The number of dead rose to seventy-four before the count was finished. Thirty had been killed instantly by the force of the explosion. The rest had suffocated on carbon monoxide and methane in the dark passages where they had been working when the air turned against them.

Some of the men had time enough to write. Rescuers found messages chalked on the walls and on pieces of timber in the deeper sections of the mine. One read: "Good bye wife's and daughters. We died an easy death. Love from us both. Be good."

The Smith Mine never reopened. The Montana, Wyoming and Southern Railroad continued to haul coal from the remaining operations in the district for another decade, but the district was dying. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company had reduced its coal purchases years earlier, shifting to electricity for its smelter operations. The domestic market was shifting to oil and natural gas. The last mine in the Bear Creek drainage closed in the early 1950s, and in 1953 the Montana, Wyoming and Southern Railroad ceased operations, its tracks pulled up and sold for scrap.

The corrugated steel buildings of the Smith Mine still stand along Montana secondary highway 308, east of Red Lodge. A roadside sign marks the site. The cemeteries in Bearcreek and Red Lodge hold the names of the men who went into the mountain and did not come back. The railroad grade has gone back to grass.

See also

• Montana, Wyoming and Southern Railroad, Carbon County, Montana
• Smith Mine Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, 2009
• Red Lodge, Montana, county seat of Carbon County