Missoula Author to Share Story of Mining’s Worst Disaster

Doug Ammons

Just before midnight on June 8, 1917, a fire was accidentally started a half-mile down the main shaft – called the Granite Mountain shaft – of the biggest and deepest mine on the Butte Hill, the Speculator. The intense heat reversed the flow of air in the mine within a few minutes. Dense smoke and deadly gas flooded unpredictably into the labyrinthine workings, trapping hundreds of men who tried frantically to escape. Men were plunged without any warning into critical struggles where a single decision led to life or death.
What would follow would result in the deaths of 168 miners in the worst hard-rock mining disaster in the history of the United States.
The story of that disaster is recreated in “A Darkness Lit by Heroes,” by Doug Ammons. The author will discuss the book at the library Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m. The talk is presented in partnership with The Well-Read Moose, with book sales benefiting the Friends of the Library.
As a kid growing up in Montana, Ammons was all over the state east to west, and north to south, from swimming meets to science fairs, from scuba diving in Flathead Lake to backpacking and climbing in the Bitterroots, Glacier, and Pintlers. Later, he attended the University of Montana for degrees in mathematics and physics, and his doctorate in experimental psychology, and has pursued many other interests such as geology and history.
His expedition kayaking got its start on the rivers of Montana and the Rocky Mountains, then spread to first descents of challenging rivers around the world. He made eight films for National Geographic, ESPN, and Outdoor life, and published two books of adventure stories, while also maintaining a day job as a scientific editor and raising a family in Missoula. He has won an Emmy Award for action cinematography, and his book, “Whitewater Philosophy,” was named by the Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best adventure books.”
In recognition of his extreme kayaking descents, many of them unrepeated, he was named by Outside magazine in 2010 as “one of the top ten game changers in adventure since 1900”, together with such people as the polar explorer Roald Amundson, Himalayan alpinist Reinhold Messner, and seven other prominent adventurers. Referring to Messner’s repeated daring forays into extreme territory, the magazine editors stated, “What Messner did for alpinism, Ammons did for kayaking.”
Ammons has turned his adventure story-telling toward re-creating the dramatic historical events of the Western U.S., and Montana’s colorful history in particular. “A Darkness Lit by Heroes” was published last year in conjunction with the disaster’s 100th anniversary. In October 2018, it received the High Plains Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.
While the literal story is about a mining disaster, the core of the book is about the resilience of the human spirit when men are suddenly thrust into life-and-death situations beyond their control.
“The disaster was a crucible that shows a great truth: when people have exhausted all their physical strength and are at the edge of death, what is left is the core of their love for each other, the most powerful force in the world,” Ammons said.
The book is a documentary, but written as a novel. An immense amount of new information was uncovered which allowed portraying the disaster from inside the miners’ experience. The writing extensively uses the recently found direct testimony of the survivors and the specifics of where they were in the mine.
Additionally, Ammons spent considerable time in the mine yards, at the hoist controls of the old engines, and inside the last existing mines to learn specifics of the scenes, mining methods, and the experiences. The author spent several hundred hours interviewing elderly miners in their late 80s and early 90s, who worked directly with machinery similar to that from 1917, and were familiar with the work methods. He also went underground repeatedly in the Orphan Girl and Orphan Boy mines to experience as close as possible the original events – traveling tunnels filled with heavy smoke from blasting, using only candle light, crawling on hands and knees in pitch blackness along the rails in abandoned tunnels.
“Since the disaster occurred 100 years ago, only the outlines of the event could be told because the information was so limited,” Ammons said.  “For decades, rumors swirled and fed each other. Survivors never spoke of their ordeals, and families of the victims struggled on as best they could. The primary source historians sought was the coroner’s Inquest, where 70 survivors had testified just after the disaster, but the document had disappeared. The only information was from one official government report, and the quickly written and inconsistent newspaper stories during the first intense days. There were no maps of the mine available, so none of the descriptions in the newspapers could be placed.”
The missing coroner’s report was rediscovered three years ago in the attic of the Butte County courthouse and its 600 pages of testimony provided a rich source of information which was combined with other resources to finally recreate the disaster in full detail.
“We can travel distances physically, but we can’t physically travel back in time,” Ammons said. “This is what good storytelling and history do. …  The story is set in another time, deep underground mining around the turn of last Century. But the men and women involved were just like ourselves. The goal of this story-telling time travel, is to join their story and live their experience.”