Fire and Brimstone
The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917
-
- 5,49 €
-
- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
From the #1 international bestselling author of The Revenant – the book that inspired the award-winning movie – comes the remarkable true story of the worst mining disaster in American history.
In 1917, the lives of a company of miners changed forever when the underground labyrinth of tunnels in which they worked burst into flames. 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.
Reviews
‘Compelling if horrifying account of the fire and the trapped men is the heart of this yarn, its soul is Punke’s historical contextualization’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 international bestselling novel 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.
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.
