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The Other Western Front – An Irishman’s Diary about the Butte mining disaster of 1917

The Montana explosion was nearer the battlefields of first World War than anyone knew

The city of Butte, Montana, was a long way from the front lines of the first World War – five thousand miles and more on the map. But as a strange coincidence of anniversaries this week suggests, it was nearer the battlefields than anyone knew.

In Belgium last Wednesday, Ireland helped commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Messines, begun on June 7th , 1917, with a series of huge mine explosions that scar the landscape to this day.

The mines might not make history, a British general joked before they were detonated, but they would certainly change the “geography”. And sure enough, the resulting craters, some now small lakes, have become permanent features.

Meanwhile in Butte, on Thursday, they were commemorating a landmark tragedy, also with large Irish involvement, that happened on June 8th , 1917. That too involved a mine explosion, of a kind. In its own way, also, it helped change the local landscape for ever.

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And although entirely accidental, it was not unconnected with the cataclysmic events in Europe.

Butte was at its all-time peak in 1917. Decades of copper mining in "the richest hill on earth" had transformed it from an unpopulated outcrop of the Rocky Mountains to a city of 90,000.

It had 42 churches, six times as many bars, and three daily newspapers. Feeding all these were 102 vertical-shaft mines – one a mile deep – that branched out horizontally in all directions.

If the German-occupied Messines Ridge was extensively undermined by June 1917, it was as nothing compared with Butte, where tunnels sometimes ran into each other, resulting in hand-to-hand combat by rival claimants.

The cumulative length of underground passages was never exactly known. Some estimates suggest 10,000 miles.

After a dip in fortunes before the war, Butte’s mines were again booming in 1917, boosted by America’s entry into the war and by insatiable demand for copper, at the front lines and elsewhere.

Although the miners were well paid, they risked their lives for it. More than 2,000 died in Butte over the years, with multiples of that seriously injured. And as production peaked again, inevitably the inadequate safety standards of the era were stretched to breaking.

Just before midnight on that June 8th , a three-ton electric cable being lowered into the Granite Mountain Mine went plummeting down the shaft instead. Two and a half thousand feet below, a foreman inspected the damage. Doing so, he unwittingly set fire to the oil-soaked cable with his lamp.

The resultant conflagration doomed many of the men below, but some of the attempts to rescue them were also fatal.

Irish victims

Among the 168 dead were two Irishmen, Michael Conroy from Mayo and Peter Sheridan from Monaghan, who had been working at surface level. Both 36 and married with children, they descended into hell to try and save the others and were incinerated in the attempt.

Most of those below died from asphyxiation as oxygen ran out over days. With extraordinary stoicism, some wrote farewell notes in the dark.

One man advised his wife and child to use the compensation money to move to California. Manus Duggan, a young foreman who helped save 28 others but couldn't save himself, wrote that he had no fears of death and asked forgiveness for any offence he had ever caused.

Duggan is a hero of a musical, No Greater Love, with which Butte is commemorating the tragedy this weekend.

Irish relatives of the victims are attending that and other ceremonies. And the disaster is being marked here too.

Last night in Mayo, Michael Conroy was remembered at a Mass in Barnacarroll Church, after which locals unveiled a replica of his Butte memorial.

The city never fully recovered from the tragedy. A general strike for better working conditions followed.

The mixture of bitter industrial relations, laced with pro- and anti war propaganda, led to such atrocities as the lynching of Frank Little, an anti-war trade unionist.

In later years, after a long postwar decline, the shafts were finally abandoned in favour of open-cast mining, which gradually swallowed the founding neighbourhoods, including Dublin Gulch.

Today, old Butte is a fascinating shadow of its former self.

And one its central features is a crater that dwarfs anything in Messines. The Berkeley Pit is now also a lake.

Man-made, rust-coloured and permanently monitored by environmental scientists, it serves as a sump, draining the surrounding territory of the poisonous residues from a century of mining.