Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

by Michael Punke
Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

by Michael Punke

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Revenant — basis for the award-winning motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio — tells the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history.

A half-hour before midnight on June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in the North Butte Mining Company's Granite Mountain shaft. Sparked more than two thousand feet below ground, the fire spewed flames, smoke, and poisonous gas through a labyrinth of underground tunnels. Within an hour, more than four hundred men would be locked in a battle to survive. Within three days, one hundred and sixty-four of them would be dead.

Fire and Brimstone recounts the remarkable stories of both the men below ground and their families above, focusing on two groups of miners who made the incredible decision to entomb themselves to escape the gas. While the disaster is compelling in its own right, Fire and Brimstone also tells a far broader story striking in its contemporary relevance. Butte, Montana, on the eve of the North Butte disaster, was a volatile jumble of antiwar protest, an abusive corporate master, seething labor unrest, divisive ethnic tension, and radicalism both left and right. It was a powder keg lacking only a spark, and the mine fire would ignite strikes, murder, ethnic and political witch hunts, occupation by federal troops, and ultimately a battle over presidential power.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781401308896
Publisher: Hachette Books
Publication date: 08/14/2007
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 368
Sales rank: 234,589
Product dimensions: 5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range: 13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Michael Punke serves as the U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He has also served on the White House National Security Council staff and on Capitol Hill. He was formerly the history correspondent for Montana Quarterly, and an adjunct professor at the University of Montana. He is the author of The Revenant and Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. His family home is in Montana.

Table of Contents


"There Is a Sign"     1
"Like a Gigantic Torch"     8
"The Richest Hill on Earth"     16
"What Men Will Do"     26
"Sweetened Corruption"     40
"Helmet Men Braving Death"     47
"Standard Oil Coffins"     60
"Then We Met Duggan"     75
"Hey Jack, What the Hell"     84
"If the Worst Comes"     98
"Dreading to Look"     105
"Now Is the Time"     116
"Men Alive!"     122
"Bamboozeling or Abuse"     134
"Too Good Miners"     145
"In the Dark"     153
"We're Dying in Here"     161
"Point of Eruption"     169
"For You and the Child"     180
"Dupes and Catspaws"     188
"Others Take Notice"     202
"Spy Fever"     213
"What Will Become of Them"     226
"Some Little Body of Men"     235
"Down Deep"     253
Epilogue: "Normal for Its Time"     273
Acknowledgments     275
Notes     279
Index     325
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