Helmet men who overexerted themselves frequently passed out—and sometimes died.
Despite its limitations, the breathing apparatus was all that Butte’s rescuers had. In eight days of rescue and recovery work, an estimated 175 men used the breathing apparatus to make more than 2,000 descents into the burning mines.11 Remarkably, though many were injured, none died.
The first rescue effort with breathing apparatus occurred barely an hour after the fire started. Sometime before 1:00 A.M., two men, named Harry Goodell and William Burns, entered the mine, using the Speculator shaft to access the 700 Station.12 They recovered two bodies, carrying them to the surface at 1:30 A.M.
The name of the first identified victim was Bill Ramsey, a mucker who worked on the 700 level of the Spec.13 Muckers occupied a position near the bottom rung of the mining ladder, their job to “muck up” the ore that more skilled workers had dynamited from the walls. Ramsey had been busy shoveling rock when smoke from Granite Mountain began to fill the drift.
Panic broke out, with many men on the 700 scrambling to climb up a manway to the 600 level even as men on the 600 tried to climb down. One of Ramsey’s fellow miners, John “Shorty” Thomas, urged him to climb up to the 600, telling him that there was no escape at the 700 level. But Ramsey refused. Apparently there was a brief argument about which way to go. Later Thomas, safe above ground, would report Bill Ramsey’s last words: “I’m a stayin’ fool.”14
It wasn’t until 2:15 A.M. on June 9, when North Butte officials first realized how few men had escaped through adjoining mines, that the organized rescue effort began to take full shape. The officials gave immediate notice to the coroner and the hospitals. The coroner, Aeneas Lane, called the undertakers. Within twenty minutes, a small fleet of ambulances and “undertakers wagons” stood waiting inside the mine yard.15 They would be busy throughout the long night.
Two lowly timekeepers, Grover McDonald and Thomas O’Keefe, emerged as key players in the early efforts to respond to the disaster. Their prime asset was a knowledge of the names and faces in the mines, and to them fell the task of keeping a tally of who was dead, alive, or missing. An urgent call went out, ultimately picked up by the newspapers, for North Butte miners to report in.16 Many men who had emerged safely from the fiery mines hurried home so that loved ones would know they were alive. The Anaconda Standard painted a telling portrait of a group of miners brought up through the Badger. They “took one look around the mine, glanced toward the Speculator and then started at a brisk walk for town.” Once on the street, a few threw their lunch buckets in the ditch. “I’m through with mining from this time on,” declared one man. “I will never go into the hole again.”17
The call for rescuers extended, of course, to all available helmet men. The federal government provided one source of trained men and equipment. Daniel Harrington, a Butte representative of the Bureau of Mines, sent telegraphs requesting the dispatch of two specially equipped mine rescue cars. Though much ballyhooed by Harrington, who would ultimately author the official Bureau of Mines report on the accident, the cars did not play a vital role in the rescue effort. The nearest of the two was located in Red Lodge, Montana—250 miles away. The second was in Colorado. By the time both cars reached Butte, the mission had shifted from the rescue of the living to the recovery of the dead.18
The more significant source of helmet men and equipment was local—the so-called Safety-First crews maintained by all of the major mines. As the largest mining operation, Anaconda provided the largest group of Safety-First men, more than 60 percent of the 175 men who wore equipment during the disaster. Though volunteers, the helmet men were paid time and a half for their work, or $7.12 per shift.
By noon of June 9, twelve hours after the start of the fire, thirty helmet men were at work below ground. Thereafter, more than fifty helmet men were deployed during any given eight-hour shift.19
Ninety of the helmet men had received formal training by the Bureau of Mines. One goal of the training was to teach the men to avoid the types of physical exertion with which their breathing equipment could not keep pace. Thus they were taught to walk at a speed of only three miles an hour, resting at the end of each minute. The men also practiced in dark “smoke rooms.” Wearing their breathing apparatus, they engaged in activities such as carrying a dummy, crawling through a nineteen-by-seventeen-inch tunnel, and climbing over obstructions. The exercises were important and succeeded in simulating many of the physical challenges that the rescuers would face. But as the Bureau of Mines noted, “It is not possible to reproduce the mental strain, anxiety, and fear sometimes manifested in mine-recovery work.”20
In addition to the helmet men, mine officials, firemen, medical teams, and undertakers—even the U.S. Army—were pressed into service. Company F of the Montana National Guard happened to be camped in Butte on the night of the fire. The Montana Guard had been federalized after the U.S. entry into the war, and Company F was stationed in Butte on “utility duty”—guarding the mines against potential sabotage. Only three days earlier, the soldiers had put down the draft riot. On the night of the fire, they formed a cordon around the mines, keeping out everyone except rescuers, doctors, and undertakers.21
Butte mayor William Maloney was the last major figure to join the rescue forces, awoken from his bed at 3:00 A.M. and rushed to the North Butte by car.
Many citizens of Butte first learned about the North Butte fire when they woke up on Saturday morning to find the town blanketed in smoke. The smoke “poured in a torrent, deluging the valley below and spreading out over the side of the hill like a giant shroud.”22
From the time, minutes after the start of the fire, when an unnamed miner attempted to throw a ten-gallon bucket of water down the Granite Mountain shaft, efforts to battle the flames and fumes were continuous.
For the first five hours of the disaster, rescue officials deliberately allowed the Granite Mountain shaft to burn. Though the draft in the Granite Mountain shaft was normally downcast, the flames and heat caused it to turn upward. Officials hoped that this upcast draft would help to suck the smoke and gas from the rest of the workings.23
Rescuers took several steps in an effort to augment the updraft effect. At 12:15 A.M., only thirty minutes after the start of the fire, North Butte General Manager Norman Braley ordered a reversal in the direction of a gigantic fan at the mouth of the Rainbow shaft. It was normally a suction fan, but Braley hoped that blowing down the Rainbow would help to push fumes up Granite Mountain. At 1:00 A.M., the same step was taken with fans at the Speculator and Gem shafts. And over the next forty-eight hours, several more mobile fans would be set up—including one so large that it was pulled into position by “eight horses and 50 men.”24
The combined effect of the fans was “a cloud that blew out of the shaft like it was driven by a gale.”25 The overall effect of these efforts seems to have been mostly positive, contributing to the more rapid clearing in some sections of the mines.26 While this clearing did not occur rapidly enough to save the 163 victims of the fire, it would later become critically important to dozens of other men.27
The fans also allowed firemen to begin dousing the blaze with water. Initially, rescuers had worried that dumping water into Granite Mountain might have the effect of turning the shaft back into a downdraft, which would in turn have sent more smoke and fumes into the workings. With the augmentation of the draft by multiple fans, however, firemen believed that they could begin to fight the fire with water. Eventually, “four pipe lines” would pump millions of gallons of water into the shaft at a rate of 500 gallons per minute. Still, it would be five days before firemen considered the fire to be under control.28
The water did have some unintended consequences.
