Frank Little

Few American cities were as thoroughly unionized as Butte. Miners organized on June 13, 1878, when workers at the Alice and Lexington silver mines faced a wage cut from $3.50 to $3.00 a day and formed the Butte Workingmen's Union to resist it. The organization, soon known as the Butte Miners' Union, held the $3.50 wage, grew into one of the largest local unions in the United States, and made June 13, Miners' Union Day, a city holiday. Nearly every trade in town eventually organized, and Butte earned a name that followed it for decades: the Gibraltar of Unionism.