Mountain View Cemetery

Frank Little was a tireless labor organizer and member of the Industrial Workers of the World — the IWW, whose members were known as "Wobblies." He spent years organizing miners, lumberjacks, and oil field workers across the American West, fighting for better wages and safer conditions at a time when working people had few protections. By 1917 he had risen to the IWW's General Executive Board, becoming one of the union's most outspoken voices.

Little arrived in Butte in July 1917 to support the copper miners who had walked off the job following the Granite Mountain Mine disaster just weeks earlier. He gave passionate speeches against both the mine owners and American involvement in World War I — a bold and dangerous stance at the time. In the early hours of August 1, 1917, six masked men broke into his boarding house room, beat him, tied him to the back of a car, and dragged him to the edge of town where they hanged him from a railroad trestle. A cryptic vigilante warning was pinned to his chest. No one was ever arrested or charged. His funeral drew more than 3,000 workers through the streets of Butte — the largest funeral in the city's history — and he was laid to rest here at Mountain View Cemetery.

— Frank Little, in his final public speech, Butte, Montana, 1917

Just before midnight on June 8, 1917, 410 men descended into the Granite Mountain shaft for another night shift in the copper mines of Butte. Earlier that day, a crew had been lowering a three-ton electric cable as part of a fire safety installation. The cable slipped, fell deep into the shaft, and its protective covering tore open, exposing oiled insulation. When a foreman went down to inspect the damage with a carbide lamp, the flame caught the cable — and within minutes, the shaft became a chimney of fire and toxic smoke.

The fire spread rapidly through the interconnected tunnels of the Granite Mountain and neighboring Speculator mines. Most of the 168 men who died were suffocated by carbon monoxide, never reached by flames. Some survived by following the example of a miner named Manus Duggan, who sealed a group of 29 men into a dead-end tunnel and bulkheaded it shut — 25 of them survived. Others wrote final letters to their wives and mothers before the air gave out. The disaster is remembered as the deadliest hard-rock mining accident in United States history. The memorial at Mountain View Cemetery, erected by the North Butte Mining Company, honors those who could not be identified.

— Butte newspaper, June 1917