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From left, Cari Coe, the program director for the Clark Chateau in Butte; Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees; and Aaron Parrett, one of the musicians participating in the “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” project, at the first concert for the project.
Cash for Junkers performed their renditions of historic Butte mining songs for the “Little Slice o’ Heaven” community radio show on April 8. From left are John Rosett, Jeff Turman, Tyler Roady and Grace Decker.
Ben Pickett and Christy Hays play the historic Butte mining song “No Sheepherders in Butte” March 4 at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.
Jessica Catron at a “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” recording session at the Len Waters Recording Studio in Butte on Feb. 18, 2022.
Missincinatti play a “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” concert at the Clark Chateau ballroom in Butte on Feb. 19, 2022. From left are Jeremy Drake, Corey Fogel and Jessica Catron.
Aaron Parrett in his “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” recording session on Dec. 3, 2021.
IWW labor organizer Frank Little
Butte copper king Marcus Daly
Butte copper king William A. Clark
Cornelius Kelly, the vice president of the Anaconda Copper Company
A caricature of Butte copper king F. Augustus Heinze
June 13 is Miners Union Day in Butte, in commemoration of a widespread strike in Butte on June 13, 1914.
Butte – The Richest Hill on Earth – circa 1908
A sketch of Butte underground miners enjoying a meal, from the November 1901 Anaconda Standard.
A historical photo of the Anaconda Mine in Butte
Coming off shift at Butte’s High Ore Mine
If you go back over 100 years to the early days of underground mining in a tough town like Butte, Montana, you’ll find the hard-rock miners living hard lives in the tunnels deep under the ground, and then doing some hard living in the town after hours. But one thing you’ll also find as part of those miners’ lives of long ago that you probably don’t hear much in the mines of today is a lot of singing – singing in the tunnels as they worked, singing in the bars where everyone gathered because they couldn’t go home to watch television, singing songs celebrating what may be their short life as a miner, and singing songs about the hardships of mining and rebelling against injustices and the inequalities between the mine workers and the mine bosses.
A lot of those songs are gone to the mists of time, maybe still faintly echoing through some empty tunnels under Butte, but some of the songs or at least the lyrics have survived, and a few are being given new life through a project called “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp.”
The idea for the song project was sparked after Cari Coe, the program director for the Clark Chateau in Butte, ran across an article called “Songs of the Butte Miners” which was published in Western Folklore magazine in January 1950. She also found a July 1967 Western Folklore article called “Protest Songs from the Butte Mines” which told about a small booklet of 25 songs named “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” which was published by the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, probably in 1917 or 1918. Coe was able to find a rare copy of the IWW song booklet in the archives in Butte.
Coe had not really been aware of the town’s mining songs before reading those stories. Talking with people in town, she found that some of the old-timers knew about the songs of the miners, but the songs were becoming a lost part of history. That gave Coe an idea for a project.
“I thought it would be really cool to commission Montana musicians and local musicians to take those songs and kind of bring them to back to life but in a contemporary context, in their own musical styles, keeping the original lyrics but also adding lyrics perhaps to address whatever is relevant today,” Coe said.
She wrote two grants, one to the Montana Cultural Trust and one to the National Endowment for the Arts. First she received funding from the Montana Cultural Trust to commission four musicians or groups to work on mining songs. The musicians selected for the project go to Butte two times. The first time they spend a few days in Butte, staying at an old Victorian house that was the home of Butte’s first mayor. They spend time going through the archives of mining songs and historical materials, and they can visit whatever historical sites they are interested in, such as the World Museum of Mining.
“They kind of just feel the vibes of Butte,” Coe said.
During this visit they also go on Coe’s community radio show and talk about what they have been doing and learning in Butte.
A couple of months later they return to Butte to perform the mining song or songs they have worked on. They do a brown bag lunch talk and an evening performance, they appear on Coe’s radio show again, and they record the song.
After receiving that initial grant, Coe received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund visits from ten more musicians or groups, so the project will go on for about two years.
“I’m really excited about that,” Coe said.
By the end of summer six musicians or groups had completed and recorded their mining songs, and two more were scheduled to perform their songs in Butte in September and October. You can listen to the songs which have been released so far on the Clark Chateau website.
When all of the songs are completed, there will be plenty of music to put together into a compilation album of the mining songs.
The musicians who have participated in the project have expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to spend some time in Butte digging into the history.
“This was a very inspiring time for me,” Jessica Catron of the group Missincinatti said during her brown bag lunch performance. “When I came in November, staying for five days, and having all the access to these things and anything else one could imagine to find here, it was just—I felt like I was in school again … I learned so much.”
Today Butte is a city of about 34,000 nestled in the mountains under the landmark of a huge open pit, with a reputation of being a unique town in Montana because of its mining and labor history. But when you delve deeper into the history you find so many stories packed with drama, and you see that Butte and its hard-working miners had a huge impact on the entire country and the world.
For anyone interested in learning more about the history of Butte, there are plenty of resources available. There are podcasts and lots of books, many of them focusing on one particular aspect of Butte’s history and finding how that part of history ties in with all the colorful history of the town and mining and labor, and how all of this history affected the wider world.
The “Death in the West” podcast focuses on the unsolved 1917 murder of IWW labor organizer Frank Little. In June, the podcast received an Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History. In books, “Fire and Brimstone” by Michael Punke tells the story of the 1917 Speculator/Granite Mountain mine disaster. “The Gibraltar” by Jerry Calvert covers socialism and labor in Butte from 1895 to 1920. Ivan Doig’s “Work Song” is a novel set in Butte in 1919. “Hell with the Lid Off: Butte, Montana” is “a memoir of the ‘Wildest Town in the West’ by 1890s police reporter Herbert Smith.” And there are plenty more books and other resources available on Butte history, including the hour-long 2009 PBS documentary “Butte, America.”
The first real gold mining in Butte was in 1864, and by 1867 there were about 5,000 miners in town. The living conditions were rough. One estimate is that each winter about 10 percent of the people died, but more people kept pouring in. By 1870, though, as the gold ran out and miners got into the more difficult job of digging shafts to mine silver, the population of Butte was down to around 240.
Marcus Daly was one of the Butte’s three copper kings, and they were all colorful characters. Daly, who was born in Ireland in 1941, started out life in the United States as a destitute immigrant. From 1862 to 1868 Daly made a name for himself at the Comstock Lode at Virginia City, Nevada, said to be the greatest silver mine in history.
In 1876 Daly was sent to Butte to scout out the mining there. The silver mining wasn’t going that well, but the story goes that in late 1882 Daly stood with a chunk of ore in his hand and excitedly declared, “We’ve got it.” He had discovered the largest copper deposit in the world.
The timing was right. Two years earlier Thomas Edison had received the patent for the incandescent lamp. Soon a huge amount of copper was needed to wire the world to provide people with all the benefits of electricity, and Daly’s miners went to work producing the copper to meet the demand. The massive volume of copper produced by the miners made possible the electrification of the country.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that Daly’s empire at Butte would help transform how humans live on earth,” the “Death in the West” podcast said.
It is estimated that from 1905 to 1917 about one-fourth to one-third of all the copper produced in the world came from Butte.
By the late 19th century, Punke said in “Fire and Brimstone,” “a remarkable three-quarters of Montana wage earners drew their checks from some part of Daly’s Anaconda enterprises.”
Of course, Daly became very wealthy. And in 1899 Daly sold his Anaconda empire to Standard Oil’s William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers for $39 million, which the New York Times called the “biggest financial deal of the age.”
The other two copper kings, Fritz Heinze and William A. Clark, sold their Butte area holdings to Standard Oil’s Amalgamated Copper Company in 1906 and 1915.
What was life like for the Butte miners through this time? They spent a lot of their time living their rough and rowdy lives, sometimes accompanied by boisterous singing.
The “Songs of the Butte Miners” article which inspired Coe to start the mining song project laments that “On the face of things it seems that the folk-song tradition of the hard-rock miner is not, and has never been, so hardy as the traditions of the sailor, the lumberjack, and the cowboy—to take the most obvious examples—nor so rich and flourishing as the minstrelsy of the coal miner in the eastern and central parts of the United States.”
But the article says that most likely there only seems to be a lack of “hard rocker” mining songs because the people who went to the mining areas of the West to document the mining songs arrived about 10 or 20 years too late. Changes in mining and the use of power equipment and resistance from the bosses cut down the singing in the mines over the years.
“According to the testimony of old-timers, singing on any large scale does not date beyond the early years of the century, when the real old-time hard-rock men ‘wuz a-singin’ all the time,’” the article says.
“A self-styled ‘genuine tramp miner’ who worked in the mines of Butte off and on most of his life said that miners sang ‘whenever they could get out from under the ear of the boss.’ He remembers, particularly, one shifter who used to come through the drift saying, ‘Get to work! This ain’t no singin’ school.’”
The “Songs of the Butte Miners” article says, “Miners sang these songs not only in the mines, but in the saloons, on the streets, and wherever else they gathered. James J. Gleason, a man who has shown keen interest in local history and popular antiquities for almost a half century, and who possesses vast sheaves of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, poems, and various other memorabilia, tells of festive song in the saloons of Butte, when on payday night kegs of beer would be placed on sawbucks in the center of the saloons, and the men would sing and dance around as they came back for refills.”
There were a lot of refills.
“The Atlantic Bar, which claimed to be the largest in the world, was a block long and served up 12,000 glasses of beer on a typical Saturday night,” Punke writes in “Fire and Brimstone.”
Here’s the chorus of the “Irish Miner’s Song” – “So fill the glass up to the top; Let the toast go merrily round. Here’s a health to every miner that works beneath the ground.”
But the miners’ lives were not all singing and partying. There was plenty of hardship and unrest and plenty of reasons for labor discontent.
The “Songs of the Butte Mining Camp” booklet which was published by the IWW in 1917 or 1918 has 25 labor songs which could be sung to popular tunes of the day. The IWW produced the songbook apparently hoping that miners in Butte would sing the songs and become radicalized and inspired to become active in the labor movement. However, the booklet arrived after the era when miners often broke out in song while working, and there is no evidence that the IWW songs ever caught on. Still, the sentiments in the songs probably rang true with many miners in Butte, where there was a strong labor union tradition.
For years Butte was strongly unionized, but by the pivotal year of 1917, there was no recognized union in town. There were several reasons that the union movement became disorganized for a while. There was infighting between union factions and conflicts between the many different ethnic groups working at the mines. Also, the mines fought to get rid of the unions, developing a “rustling card” system which identified union sympathizers so they could not get hired.
Many of the Butte labor songs expressed a discontent with the disparities between the working class miners and the powerful bosses and the wealthy copper kings. It’s a sentiment which many Butte miners probably felt years ago, and which still rang true with some of today’s musicians who worked on the songs for the “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” project.
One of the songs which the band Missincinatti performed for the “New Songs” project was “Solidarity Forever,” which is sung to the melody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” One of the verses says:
“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn, We can break their haughty power and gain freedom when we learn, That the union makes us strong.”
People at the performance agreed it’s sad that the message still applies to many workers worldwide today.
“Nothing has changed,” said guitarist Jeremy Drake.
Before his performance of the song “Ain’t You a Wobbly,” Aaron Parrett said that in some ways the situation today is actually worse than in was 100 years ago.
“We live in an age right now – a gilded age of capitalist consolidation which is actually way worse than it was in the 1870s to 1920s,” Parrett said. “One percent of all the population in this country owns 40% of the wealth, and about 40 people control almost all of that one percent.”
However, looking back through history, it’s also true that working conditions, at least for miners in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, are much better than they were 100 years ago.
The mine tunnels far under the surface of Butte could be very uncomfortable places to work. It could be hot – sometimes over 100 degrees – and extremely humid. Miners talked about pulling off their boots to pour out the sweat.
The song “Solidarity Forever” has the line, “It is we who work in hot box till the sweat runs out our shoe.”
And safety back then seems like it was kind of an afterthought, partly because the technology they had meant that mining was intrinsically dangerous, and partly because sometimes even simple steps weren’t taken to make the workers safer.
One of the tools of the trade back then were “buzzies,” giant drills powered by compressed air that filled the air with dust thick with silica. Lots of miners breathed in that dust and got silicosis.
“In 1921, the Bureau of Mines published the results of an investigation of lung disease among Butte miners in the years 1916 to 1919,” Punke wrote in “Fire and Brimstone.” “A staggering 43 percent had silicosis, and six percent had tuberculosis. According to another study, 675 Butte miners died of respiratory disease in the years between 1907 and 1913.
“One analysis looked at miners’ casualty rates not including lung disease. It concluded that if a miner spent ten years in the mines, he stood a one in three chance of being seriously injured and a one in eight chance of being killed. In the decade before the North Butte disaster, mining accidents in Butte killed an average of one man a week.”
The old mining ballad “Only a Miner” begins with, “Only a miner, killed in the ground; only a miner, and one more is gone. With our hearts full of sadness, we’ll bid him farewell; his mining is over, poor miner, farewell.”
The song “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Dad,” begins, “Don’t go down in the mine, Dad; Dreams very often come true. Daddy, my dear, it would break my heart, if anything happened to you.”
The miners who left work drenched in sweat and coated in dust, after risking their life to earn what might be a few dollars a day, could then walk by the copper kings’ mansions in Butte. The copper kings may not have been as wealthy as Jeff Bezos, but they still did quite well. William Clark not only had his Butte mansion, but he also had a Fifth avenue mansion in New York with 121 rooms and 31 bathrooms, plus homes in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.
The song “Cornelius Kelly,” which the group Cash for Junkers performed for the “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” project, reflects the feelings which some of the miners probably felt for the people who ran the mines. Kelly was the vice president of the Anaconda Copper Company. The song includes the lines, “This old gent’s name is Cornelius Kelly, Was meant to crawl upon his belly, But listen, boys, he’s good and true, The Company’s interest to pull thru, But when it comes to working men, He’d rather see them in the pen, Or burning in eternal hell – His nostrils would enjoy the smell.”
There is a lot of instability in the world today, but look back 105 years at 1917 and you’ll see a powder keg of a year, especially in Butte. The year started out with lots of news of World War I, and the U.S. entered the war in April. The demand for copper went even higher and the price of copper spiked.
On the morning of June 8, 1917, a miner in the Granite Mountain shaft under Butte accidently ignited a fallen electrical cable with his carbide lantern. The fire quickly spread through the tunnels. It was a horrific tragedy that killed 163 miners, most of them from carbon monoxide poisoning. The Speculator Mine Disaster is the worst hard-rock mining disaster in U.S. history.
“It was only after the fire, according to one survivor, that ‘they placed signs around to tell men which way to go,’” Punke wrote.
The disaster triggered the formation of a new union and a strike at the mines.
“By July the mines were all but shut down,” host Zach Dundas said in the “Death in the West” podcast. “The strike threatened not only the war effort, but the immense profits of the Anaconda Company. The atmosphere in Butte was chaotic and sinister. Copper company detectives spied on labor leaders. Nationalists hassled opponents of the war. Meanwhile, ethnic and political rivalries divided the union movement.
“At the height of this crisis, Frank Little showed up, and delivered a series of hell raising speeches at labor rallies.”
Little was a labor organizer with the IWW, an organization with a goal of bringing together all unions and all workers to hopefully lead to a better, socialist world. It was a message that probably held an appeal for many who were living through horrible working conditions every day.
On the morning of Aug. 1, after Little had been in Butte for 13 days, a group of masked men broke into his room. They gagged him, tied him to the back of their car, dragged him through the streets of Butte so that his kneecaps were almost completely torn off, and hung him from a railroad trestle. They put a note on his body which said, “Others take notice. First and last warning.”
The six men involved in the murder were never identified.
The Butte Miner newspaper reported that at the funeral, 2,514 people participated in a procession through town in demonstration against the lynching. It was the biggest funeral in Butte history. Little’s death was on the front page of newspapers around the country.
In his introduction to his song for the “New Songs” project, Parrett said as part of his research he reread Jerry Calvert’s book “The Gibraltar,” a history of unionism in Butte. Parret said for many years Butte was known as the Gibraltar of unionism, meaning that it is where the ships of industry burst their prow.
“Only Jerry Calvert points out that this never really happened, that unions almost won nothing in Butte and the companies always came out on top, pretty much,” Parrett said.
There’s no doubt that the early miners of Butte, a tough bunch working hard in the heat far underground, and singing their work songs, raucous party songs, protest and labor songs, and their laments, had a huge impact as they produced the copper that wired the country. How much impact they had as they engaged in labor struggles over the years is a lot harder to measure, but probably over time the experiences, the tragedies, the protests and the labor organizing of the Butte miners did help contribute to better working conditions that so many enjoy today. 
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From left, Cari Coe, the program director for the Clark Chateau in Butte; Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees; and Aaron Parrett, one of the musicians participating in the “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” project, at the first concert for the project.
Cash for Junkers performed their renditions of historic Butte mining songs for the “Little Slice o’ Heaven” community radio show on April 8. From left are John Rosett, Jeff Turman, Tyler Roady and Grace Decker.
Ben Pickett and Christy Hays play the historic Butte mining song “No Sheepherders in Butte” March 4 at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.
Jessica Catron at a “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” recording session at the Len Waters Recording Studio in Butte on Feb. 18, 2022.
Missincinatti play a “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” concert at the Clark Chateau ballroom in Butte on Feb. 19, 2022. From left are Jeremy Drake, Corey Fogel and Jessica Catron.
Aaron Parrett in his “New Songs for the Butte Mining Camp” recording session on Dec. 3, 2021.
IWW labor organizer Frank Little
Butte copper king Marcus Daly
Butte copper king William A. Clark
Cornelius Kelly, the vice president of the Anaconda Copper Company
A caricature of Butte copper king F. Augustus Heinze
June 13 is Miners Union Day in Butte, in commemoration of a widespread strike in Butte on June 13, 1914.
Butte – The Richest Hill on Earth – circa 1908
A sketch of Butte underground miners enjoying a meal, from the November 1901 Anaconda Standard.
A historical photo of the Anaconda Mine in Butte
Coming off shift at Butte’s High Ore Mine
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