Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine Memorial

The cable that started it was meant to make the mine safer. On the evening of June 8, 1917, a crew lowering a heavy electric line down the Granite Mountain shaft for a sprinkler system lost it about 2,400 feet down, and the fall tore its lead sheath open. Just before midnight the assistant foreman, Ernest Sullau, climbed out of the cage to look, and his carbide lamp lit the oil-soaked insulation. The shaft became a chimney. Sullau went back into the workings to warn as many men as he could and died of the fumes; smoke spread through the crosscuts into the Speculator and the mines around it, where 415 men were on shift.

Some lived longer than anyone above ground expected. Manus Duggan, a nipper, led twenty-nine men into a dead-end drift on the 2,400 level and sealed it with canvas, timber and their own clothes, and through the night he held them there, opening a small hole now and then to test the air. On the afternoon of June 10 they crawled out to the shaft, and twenty-five survived. Duggan did not: his body was found on a ladder far above. On the 2,200 level the shift boss J. D. Moore walled himself in with eight or ten men, and six were brought out alive on June 11; Moore was not one of them. Both left letters to their families, and at the memorial an actor reads them aloud.

Butte's council voted for a memorial in 1917 and never built it. A VISTA volunteer, Gerry Walter, learned in the 1990s that a memorial had been promised and pushed until one was built, and the open-air plaza above the shaft, designed by the Butte architect Mark Reavis, was dedicated on June 8, 1996. Flags of sixteen nations stand around it for the countries the miners came from, and the view runs over the headframes of the Hill to the Continental Divide.