The Richest Hill on Earth: Butte, 1914
By Editor
Butte, Montana, June 1914
The dynamite went off at the Miners Union Hall on June 13, 1914, and the building came down, and the men who had set the charge walked away into the smoke and the summer dark. The Butte Miners Union, Local No. 1 of the Western Federation of Miners, had stood for thirty years. It was gone in a night.
The men who set the charge were miners. The men who had been meeting in the hall were also miners. This is the first thing to understand about what happened in Butte in the summer of 1914.
The Anaconda Copper Mining Company owned the mines. It owned the Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, which carried the ore from the mines to the smelter at Anaconda, twenty-six miles to the west. It owned the smelter. It owned, in various ways, much of what could be owned in the city that had grown up on the richest hill on earth. The men who worked in the mines were paid wages by the company and spent those wages in the city and went back into the mines the next morning. This had been the arrangement for thirty years.
The trouble in 1914 was about union recognition. The Western Federation of Miners had negotiated a contract with the mine owners, and a faction of the miners believed the union leadership had sold them out, and the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, had been organizing in Butte since 1905, and the Wobblies believed that the WFM was corrupt and the only answer was one big union, and the WFM believed the Wobblies were anarchists, and both of them believed the Anaconda Company was the enemy, and the Anaconda Company believed all of them were the enemy, and the city of Butte in June 1914 was a place where these beliefs were held by men who worked underground with dynamite.
On June 13, a crowd attacked the Miners Union Hall during a union meeting. The men inside fought back. The crowd dynamited the building. The union's records and treasury were seized. The mayor declared a state of emergency. The governor sent the National Guard. The mine owners announced they would no longer recognize the union.
The men who had done the dynamiting were not arrested. The men who had been in the building were not compensated. The National Guard occupied Butte. The mines kept running.
The BA&P kept running too. The electric locomotives that Marcus Daly had ordered to haul copper ore from the mines to the smelter did not stop for labor disputes. The ore moved. The smelter processed it. The copper went east on the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern to the factories that needed it. The price of copper on the New York market did not reflect what had happened in Butte on the night of June 13.
Three years later, on June 8, 1917, a fire started in the Granite Mountain mine shaft and burned through the connected Speculator Mine, and 168 men died underground, and the protests and strikes that followed brought the National Guard back to Butte, and in August of that year, Frank Little, an IWW organizer, was taken from his rooming house at three in the morning by six men in a car and hanged from a railroad trestle on the outskirts of the city. His killers were not identified.
The ore kept moving. The BA&P kept running. The price of copper did not reflect what had happened.
The Miners Union Hall was never rebuilt. The site where it stood is a parking lot now. The mines are closed. The Berkeley Pit, which is what open-pit mining left behind when it was done with the hill, is filling with acidic water that cannot be discharged into the Clark Fork River. The Anaconda Company is gone. The copper is gone. The men who worked in the mines are mostly gone.
The BA&P's right-of-way is a trail now.
See also
- Butte, Montana labor history, the full account of labor conflict in Butte
- Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, the copper railroad at the center of the economy
- Speculator Mine disaster, the 1917 fire that killed 168 miners
- Frank Little (activist), the IWW organizer lynched in Butte in 1917