Labor History

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.

On the night of June 8, 1917, Butte was a city working at full speed for a nation at war. The United States had entered the First World War that spring, and copper was urgently needed for shell casings, wire, and munitions. The mines on the Butte hill were running around the clock, and about 410 men were underground on the night shift in the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines, two connected workings operated by the North Butte Mining Company on the northern edge of the city.