Black Gold

By editor

Red Lodge, Carbon County, Montana

If you ever find yourself wandering through the narrow Bear Creek valley just west of Red Lodge, Montana, you might be inclined to think there’s not much going on besides the occasional jogger or the slow drift of a mountain breeze. But a century ago, this quiet pocket of the Beartooth Mountains was more alive than a henhouse at feeding time, churning out what locals called “black gold” -- coal thick enough to fuel locomotives, smelters, and stoves from here clear to Anaconda.

The Bear Creek coal fields, discovered in 1866 by one “Yankee Jim” George, didn’t earn their keep right away. It took nearly forty years before the coal seams were put to commercial use, largely because the Yellowstone Park Railway arrived in 1905, making it worthwhile to haul this dense, bituminous coal out of the ground and into the wider world. Before then, the coal lay in wait, buried beneath layers of earth and time, the product of some sixty million years of geological happenstance. You see, long before the miners showed up, this part of Montana was a subtropical coastal plain with rivers that dumped tons of plant material into an inland sea. Over millions of years, that plant matter compressed into coal seams up to eleven feet thick, part of the Fort Union Formation, which altogether holds over 200 billion tons of coal stretching through eastern and central Montana.

That coal was a prize worth digging for. Unlike the softer lignite and sub-bituminous coal found further east, Bear Creek’s bituminous coal packed more heat per ton. It was cleaner, too, which made it a favorite for industrial users who needed steady, intense heat -- like the mighty Anaconda Copper Company. Their smelter in Anaconda gobbled up coal to turn ore into the copper that fueled America’s electrification. Railroads, too, relied on Bear Creek coal to keep their steam engines chugging. One can imagine the clatter and clank of locomotives, each foot of track puffing black smoke, carrying coal and copper and people across the vast expanses of the West.

By 1910, five companies were mining coal in Bear Creek, and two towns, Bearcreek and Washoe, had grown up to house the miners and their families. These were no ordinary towns. They were melting pots of immigrants from Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, and Finland, people drawn by the promise of steady work underground and the hope of a better life above. Their lives were hard, the work dangerous, and the pay modest -- but they built communities bound by shared hardship and the hope that the coal would keep flowing.

The heyday of mining came in the early 1920s. The coal seams were thick enough to make mining relatively straightforward, at least by the grim standards of underground coal work. And the demand was high. However, as the decade wore on, the world changed. Railroads began converting to diesel engines, which didn't need coal. Homes switched to natural gas for heating, cleaner and easier to use. The great coal boom began to dwindle. By the time 1953 rolled around, commercial coal mining in the Bear Creek fields had ended when the Smith Mine closed its doors.

But coal mining in Bear Creek was not without its dark moments. On February 27, 1943, the Smith Mine exploded, killing 74 miners -- Montana’s worst underground mining disaster. The cause of the explosion was never definitively established, but the tragedy was a grim punctuation mark in the region’s history. The miners who died were mostly immigrants -- men who had come from across the Atlantic, drawn by the promise of work but caught in a perilous trade. The disaster ripped through the tight-knit community like a thunderclap. The Anaconda Standard reported at the time, quoting mine official W.H. Buck, who said, “We are devastated by this loss. These men were the backbone of our industry and community. Our thoughts are with their families, who suffer an unimaginable loss.”

In the years after the tragedy, the mine and the town of Bearcreek faded. The coal seams still lay there, but the smokestacks grew quiet, and the whistles ceased their calls. Today, the Bear Creek coal fields are a quiet place, their black veins hidden beneath grass and pine, their stories mostly told by old timers and the occasional historian.

An odd footnote to the coal story occurred in 1926, when a miner stumbled across a fossil tooth in the Eagle Coal Mine. Thinking it might be a human molar, he handed it to J.C.F. Sigfreidt, Red Lodge’s local doctor and amateur paleontologist. Sigfreidt was convinced this tooth proved that humans had lived in the area a million years ago -- a bold claim that stirred local curiosity. He told a reporter, “This tooth is proof that man walked these lands long before we thought possible.” But as it often goes in science, the excitement was premature. Later analysis by professional paleontologists revealed the tooth belonged to some ancient mammal, not a human. The moment was a curious misstep, an example of hopeful thinking tangled with the dusty facts of geology.

The story of Bear Creek coal is not just one of geology or economics, but of people -- immigrants who risked life and limb in the mines, companies that sought to turn black rock into profit, and the slow transformation of energy that reshaped the American West. The coal powered locomotives, heated homes, and fueled industry, but it also demanded a steep price in human lives and community upheaval.

If you ask the old-timers in Red Lodge or Bearcreek today, they’ll tell you about the days when coal was king. You might hear about “Yankee Jim” George trekking into the valley in 1866, or the roar of the trains, or the hum of the smelter in Anaconda. They might tell you about the Smith Mine disaster and the families it broke. And they will remind you that beneath the quiet hills lie the seams of black coal that once kept Montana’s heart beating.

See also

• Black Gold at Red Lodge, Carbon County
• Butte Mining Through the Years at Butte, Silver Bow County
• Contributions of the Washoe Smelter at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County