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Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 |  |
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Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 | |
The worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history began a half hour before midnight on June 8, 1917, when 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.
作者简介 Michael Punke grew up in the West and lives with his family in Montana. He is a former partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm and his professional experience includes work on Capitol Hill and the White House National Security Council. He is the author of a novel, The Revenant, based on the true adventures of a 19th-century frontiersman. The Revenant was a Spur Award finalist.
媒体推荐 both a heart-pounding story and a deeper reflectio.n -- Peter Stark, Correspondent, Outside magazine and author of At the Mercy of the River
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
In this compelling tale, Punke recounts the grim details of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in United States history. On June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in the main shaft of a huge complex of copper mines 2,000 feet beneath Granite Mountain in Butte, Mont. The fire raged for three days, killing 164 of the 400 or so men at work that day. Punke, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and novelist (The Revenant), takes the reader deep underground and into the heart of the calamity. If the horrifying account of the fire and the trapped men is the heart of this yarn, its soul is Punke's historical contextualization of the event. He paints a vivid picture of a city, state and nation in the grip of industrial monopolies. In Butte, copper was king and Standard Oil, in the guise of Anaconda Mining, owned most of the copper (though not the Granite Mountain mine). In Punke's telling, Standard Oil spent lavishly to control the municipal and state governments; they aggressively fought the miners' union. Immediately after the tragic fire, the workers violently vented their fury on the hated Anaconda. Like the hardworking miners he writes about, Punke gets the job done, with sturdy prose. (Aug. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
By the standards of the early twentieth century, the Granite Mountain copper mine was a model of safety; the shafts were well ventilated and a sprinkler system was nearly completed. Furthermore, the mine was owned by the North Butte Company, which was neither as powerful nor as resented as the rapacious Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which controlled much of Montana. Nevertheless, when a shaft fire broke out on June 8, 1917, it unleashed a variety of pent-up hatreds that had festered in Butte for months, if not years. Initially, the fire trapped more than 400 men beneath the surface. One hundred sixty-four people died, and Punke's recounting of the struggle of the others to survive is tense, exciting, and even inspiring. A lawyer, novelist, and Montana resident, he tells an equally interesting story of the ethnic conflicts, anti-war protests, and labor warfare that quickly exploded and ravaged the area for the next three years. This is a timely work, with the recent spate of fatal mine disasters reminding us that deep-shaft mining remains a dangerous profession. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Peter Stark, Correspondent, Outside magazine and author of At the Mercy of the River
both a heart-pounding story and a deeper reflectio.n
