surviving to tell the tale.16
Sheridan and Conroy must have calculated that they could still outrun the flames aboard the hoist. Like hundreds of other men at work in the mine that night, the two station tenders made snap judgments that sealed their fate. To signal the engineer on the surface to pull them up, they would have attempted to ring the bell—unaware that the ruined electrical wires kept their desperate signal from reaching the surface. By now the fire was virtually exploding up the shaft. Within a few instants, Sheridan and Conroy were enveloped in flames.
On the surface, the engineer, with Baldy at his side, became increasingly uneasy.17 From the station where he operated the levers that raised and lowered the hoists, the engineer watched a giant gauge that showed the position of the cage—sitting at the 2,200 Station. But there had been no signal to raise it. The miners communicated with the surface in a sort of abbreviated version of Morse code. In each station was a cord with a large handle. Pulling the cord completed an electrical circuit, ringing a bell in the hoist house. There was a specific call to indicate that the cage was clear: two bells, pause, one bell, pause, two bells. Once the engineer heard this signal, he knew it was safe to move the cage. In those minutes around midnight, though, he heard nothing from the men on the 2,200.
At about that time smoke started to pour from the Granite Mountain shaft. Frantically, the engineer raised the cage.18
By the time it emerged from the collar, the cage was surrounded by fire “flying from the shaft like a gigantic torch.” The engineer stopped the cage about forty feet above the surface, dangling from the gallows headframe atop a “geyser of flames.” Horrified witnesses could see the charred remains of Sheridan and Conroy, locked in a “death embrace.”19
In its coverage of the incident, the Butte Miner attempted to reassure its readers with the assertion that “the terrific heat without doubt quickly snuffed out the lives of the two station tenders,” though it also noted that the victims were found “with arms and feet burned away.” Other accounts were even more graphic. The Butte Daily Post reported that Sheridan and Conroy were “burned almost to a crisp” and that “even the hair and flesh on their heads [was] gone, so that their skulls were laid bare.”20
The flames and heat from the fire made it impossible for onlookers to approach the cage. Eventually enough water was poured into the shaft so that two firemen, Angus McLeod and George Lapp, could at least remove the bodies.
With the fire and death at the mouth of Granite Mountain, few onlookers would have noticed what happened at 12:10 A.M., when smoke began to rise from the Speculator shaft—800 feet away.21
Ernest Sullau could not see the Speculator shaft from his position near the Granite Mountain’s 2,400 Station. He didn’t need to. As a veteran of the North Butte Mining Company, Sullau understood intuitively the interconnection between the Granite Mountain and the Spec.
Butte sat atop a labyrinth made up of thousands of miles of underground mining works.22 The North Butte’s holdings illustrate a small portion of this subterranean world. Its two main shafts—Granite Mountain and the Speculator—ran straight down, each with its own headframe and hoist system to transport men and ore. The two shafts stood 800 feet apart, connected by at least ten crosscut tunnels. If the mine is compared to a human body, the shafts and crosscuts were like main arteries. Branching off of these arteries were hundreds of smaller veins and capillaries. There were “drifts”—horizontal excavations to remove ore; “stopes”—excavations in the shape of a step; and “manways”—man-size, vertical shafts with a ladder inside that allowed men to climb up and down between different levels.23
And all of that was just the property of the North Butte Mining Company. The Granite Mountain and the Spec connected directly, at multiple levels, to five other mines, which were owned by Anaconda.
Ernest Sullau knew that the deadly consequences of the fire—his fire—would not be contained in one shaft, or even in one mine. The smoke and fumes spewing forth from the Granite Mountain shaft would spread throughout the far-flung recesses of this underground world, where hundreds of men were at work. Sullau also knew something else—that the fumes were filled with deadly gas.
There is no doubt that at this juncture, minutes after the start of the fire, Ernest Sullau could have saved himself. Though the main shaft was ablaze and its hoist no longer a viable option, other clear avenues of escape were within easy reach.24 With his long years of experience, Sullau knew the mine workings as well as the streets surrounding his own home.
There is no record of his thoughts as Ernest Sullau made the decision that sealed his own fate that night, but we know he did not run away.
No one knows it yet, but I have discovered the richest hill on earth.
—ATTRIBUTED TO COPPER KING MARCUS DALY
In the spring of 1856, a small party led by Caleb E. Irvine camped on a high plain below a distinctive butte near the headwaters of the Clark Fork River. They were traders, not miners, but they made a discovery that hinted at the future of the hill on which they stood. Near their camp, Irvine discovered a deep trench, dug into an outcropping of exposed quartz. Next to the trench were elk antlers, apparently used as gads to scrape out the hole.
Who dug the hole and what if anything they found were never discovered. As Irvine and his men pondered the mystery, a band of hostile Blackfoot Indians approached their position, and the traders beat a quick retreat toward the more hospitable country of the Shoshoni and the Crow.1
The real discovery of Butte would come as a consequence of the decline in California’s supply of “placer” gold. Placer gold was “poor man’s diggings”—dust and nuggets close to the surface, ready to be scooped up by methods of no greater sophistication than a metal pan or a wooden sluice. As California’s gold industry shifted from placers to more industrialized forms of removal in the mid-1850s, the “forty-niners” began to search for new prospects. They turned inland and by the early 1860s had developed placer strikes in Idaho and Colorado.2
In 1862, as the Civil War raged back east, wandering argonauts turned up the first substantial gold strike in what is now Montana. The location of the gold was a small rivulet called Grasshopper Creek. Within a year, miners unearthed an even larger deposit about seventy miles away at a site they dubbed “Alder Gulch.” Now the real rush was on. Eighteen months later, ten thousand men were sifting every creek bed between the boomtowns of Bannock and Virginia City.3
Among the young miners who joined the gold rush to Montana was a skinny, conniving, blindly ambitious twenty-four-year-old named William A. Clark. As much as any man, Clark would rise to shape a critical, rollicking epoch of western history. His origins, though, were humble; he was born of Scotch-Irish parents on a Pennsylvania farm. The Clark family moved to Iowa, where William continued a solid education that included two years of legal study at Iowa Wesleyan College.4
Clark worked as a schoolteacher in Missouri and apparently fought briefly with the Confederate Army before deciding to seek his fortune in the West. Prospects already were fading by the time the young man reached the Colorado mines in 1862, and after working as a “$2.50 a day laborer,” Clark headed for the new strikes
