Fire and Brimstone

On the night of 8 June 1917, fire broke out more than two thousand feet underground in the Granite Mountain shaft of the North Butte Mining Company at Butte, Montana. Smoke and poisonous gases spread through connected workings, trapping hundreds of miners. Punke reconstructs the disaster through company records, survivor accounts and the messages written by men waiting behind improvised bulkheads, following both the rescue effort below ground and the families gathering above.

The catastrophe occurred while Butte’s copper mines were working at wartime intensity and labour relations were already volatile. The book places the fire within a city divided by corporate power, immigrant communities, dangerous working conditions and union conflict, showing how the deaths accelerated strikes and political confrontation. It is both a tightly organised disaster narrative and a study of industrial risk in early twentieth-century America.