“Fire in the Hole”:

The 1914 Butte Miners’ Union Hall Explosion

On the evening of June 23, 1914, the Butte Miners’ Union Hall—an imposing brick landmark on North Main Street in Butte, Montana—was ripped open by dynamite. The blast tore out the building’s heart and symbolically ended nearly three decades in which this copper camp styled itself “the Gibraltar of Unionism.” By dawn, the hall was a blackened shell and Butte’s long-dominant Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was in free fall. The explosion capped two weeks of factional violence and ushered in years of military rule, blacklists, and open-shop dominance by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. 

Butte before the blast

By 1914, Butte sat atop “the Richest Hill on Earth,” a rough-edged city whose copper powered modern America. It was also one of the most unionized places in the United States. The Butte Miners’ Union (BMU), founded in 1878 and reorganized in 1885 as Local No. 1 of the WFM, had been central to building that power. Its hall, completed in the 1880s, was more than a meeting place; it was a civic center and a shrine to labor. But years of bitter fights with mine owners, a “rustling card” blacklist system, ethnic factionalism, and tensions between conservative WFM loyalists and insurgents sympathetic to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had frayed solidarity. 

Even before 1914, signs of stress were obvious. In 1912 the company tightened screening of “agitators,” while Pinkerton and Thiel operatives seeded suspicion on the hill. Wages lagged behind rising copper prices, safety remained precarious in deep underground workings, and the BMU’s leadership was increasingly accused by rank-and-file miners of being too cozy with management. Those grievances created a combustible atmosphere in which a parade scuffle could metastasize into a civic breakdown. 

Miner’s Union Day turns into open rebellion

The immediate crisis began during Butte’s annual Miner’s Union Day celebration on June 13, 1914. What should have been a show of unity turned into a riot as dissidents clashed with BMU officers. Crowds stormed the Union Hall, threw the acting mayor out a second-story window (he survived), dragged the union safe into a field, and dynamited it open. The episode shocked the city and showcased how far discipline had eroded inside Local No. 1. 

In the following days, insurgents set up a rival organization, vowed to purge “grafters,” and demanded that all miners join the new body or face rough treatment or expulsion. Whether they were a large majority or a militant minority remains disputed; what’s clear is that the WFM’s local authority collapsed. Company managers watched and waited. With the union tearing itself apart, they had little incentive to intervene. 

June 23, 1914: Dynamite on North Main

Ten days after the parade riot, the conflict reached its catastrophic climax. On June 23, WFM president Charles Moyer reportedly came to Butte to mediate—but by evening a mass meeting at the hall had devolved into chaos. Shots rang out; accounts differ on who fired first. As night fell, dissidents commandeered explosives—contemporary accounts say dynamite was taken from the nearby Steward Mine—and set to work demolishing the building that had once embodied union power in the Rockies. One man was killed and several were injured in the violence. When the dust settled, only scorched walls and a shattered roofline remained. 

How much explosive was used? Reports vary. Some sources describe multiple charges detonated in sequence; others specify “over twenty blasts,” including one that blew out the hall’s façade. The number of sticks is likewise debated—figures of roughly two dozen appear in several summaries. Such discrepancies are typical of chaotic events reported at speed, but all agree the destruction was deliberate, extensive, and terminal for the old order. 

A city under the gun: martial law and the open shop

The explosion made national news and forced the state’s hand. Within days, troops arrived; by late summer, Butte was under military occupation. The county today recalls that martial law, imposed in response to the 1914 labor conflict, stretched in phases through the decade—“the longest period of military occupation in the U.S. since Reconstruction,” as local authorities describe it. Whatever the exact start-and-stop dates for various deployments, the presence of soldiers, armed company guards, and state power became a defining part of daily life. 

Anaconda seized the opportunity. In September 1914 the company declared an open shop and refused to recognize the WFM or any union in its mines. Butte’s storied “closed shop” era was over; union recognition would not return until 1934, after the New Deal revived labor’s legal footing. In the short term, blacklists and a revamped “rustling card” regime ensured that suspected radicals or ex-WFM loyalists found themselves off the payroll. 

“The Gibraltar” crumbles—and a new labor landscape emerges

The Union Hall explosion was not an isolated flare-up but a pivot point in a longer arc of struggle. Three years later, in 1917, the Granite Mountain–Speculator fire killed 168 men—the deadliest disaster in U.S. hard-rock mining—and triggered a strike wave that brought the radical Metal Mine Workers’ Union to prominence. That same summer, IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, a notorious crime widely believed to be linked to his organizing against the company and the war. In 1920, guards opened fire on strikers on the Anaconda Road, an episode remembered as the Anaconda Road Massacre. These events were shaped by (and in turn reinforced) the post-1914 erosion of union power. 

Why the hall became a battlefield

What made the Union Hall itself such a target? In the mining West, union halls were nerve centers: places where dues were collected, benefits disbursed, funerals planned, and culture forged. They were also symbols—brick-and-mortar proof that working people could build institutions as imposing as any bank or courthouse. When dissidents labeled BMU officers “grafters” or “company men,” destroying the hall sent a message that the old leadership—and its cooperative posture—had to go. The choice of dynamite, the miners’ everyday tool, underscored the bitter irony: the same explosive used to break ore would be turned on the building that once united those who swung the hammers. 

What the sources say—and where they diverge

Reconstructing the night of June 23 requires triangulating between contemporary reportage, later histories, and local memory. The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives’ concise account, aimed at classrooms, emphasizes the Stewart/Steward Mine as the source of explosives and tallies the toll at one dead and four injured. The Wikipedia synthesis of the 1914 labor riots (drawing on period newspapers and secondary works) highlights the factional context, the creation of a rival union, and the building’s destruction by “dissident miners.” A local history project, Story of Butte, places the blast within a broader public tour about Frank Little and the city’s labor heritage. Together, these sources agree on the basics—date, location, intentional destruction—while differing on details like the precise number of charges or the sequence of gunfire and evacuation. 

More granular context comes from scholarship and official surveys. A University of Montana thesis on the labor movement situates 1914 within a decades-long contest between company control and worker organization, while the National Park Service’s National Register documentation for historic Butte repeatedly notes the 1914 violence and the hall’s demise as key moments in the city’s built environment and social history. Read together, these materials show how the blast reshaped not just a façade but an entire urban order: in the weeks that followed, the spaces of labor—halls, saloons, sidewalks—were newly policed and politically redefined. 

Memory on the hill

Walk Butte’s Uptown today and you won’t find the Miners’ Union Hall standing. What you will find is a landscape thick with reminders of labor’s rise and fall: interpretive markers, preserved headframes, and, on the ridge above town, the Granite Mountain memorial. Local historians and enthusiasts keep the 1914 story alive through tours and essays; one widely shared narrative by longtime Butte chronicler George Everett, for instance, weaves the timeline from the June 13 riot through the June 23 demolition and on into the grim years that followed. In the city’s cultural memory, the hall’s destruction functions as both tragedy and cautionary tale about internal division and outside manipulation. 

Causes and consequences, revisited

Historians usually emphasize five intertwined causes for the 1914 explosion:

-Factionalism inside the BMU. Disputes over dues, benefits, and charges of corruption splintered the local. The IWW’s appeal to radicalized miners sharpened the break with WFM officers. 

-Company power and surveillance. Blacklists and the “rustling card” system undermined solidarity, while private detectives stoked tensions. Even without direct company involvement in the blast, the climate they cultivated mattered. 

-Economic pressure and safety fears. Stagnant pay amid high copper prices and the relentless toll of deaths and injuries made rank-and-file miners impatient with incrementalism. 

-Municipal weakness. The June 13 riot—complete with an official literally defenestrated—showed how little authority city leaders retained over a labor dispute that had become a civic crisis. 

-Symbolic politics. Blowing up the hall was theater as well as tactic: it physically erased the rival faction’s institutional base and sent a message to both company and community. 

The consequences were immediate and long-lasting. In the short term, the WFM’s expulsion from Butte and the company’s open-shop declaration broke the city’s union stronghold. Over the next decade, military and paramilitary force repeatedly entered labor conflicts. In the long term, however, Butte’s labor culture proved resilient; by the 1930s, under the New Deal, organized labor reemerged with new legal protections. The arc from 1914 to 1934, then, is not one of simple decline but of rupture and reconstitution. 

The view from the street—then and now

Period photographs show crowds posing amid the hall’s wreckage—men in caps and work clothes standing before a torn-open façade. It’s a jarring tableau: ordinary citizens treating a civic catastrophe as a spectacle. That visual record matters because it captures the social drama of 1914: this was not a clandestine bombing by anonymous saboteurs but a public un-building carried out in the heart of town, watched by neighbors and, in some cases, cheered. The images and markers that circulate today keep that unsettling truth in view. 

Why it still matters

The Butte Miners’ Union Hall explosion speaks to enduring questions in American labor history: What happens when rank-and-file anger outruns institutional capacity? How do employers exploit internal divisions? What does it take to rebuild trust after violence? In Butte, the answers are written into brick and memory. The blast of June 23, 1914, shattered a building, but its shockwaves remade a city’s politics, its policing, and its sense of itself. To study that night is to reckon with the precariousness of solidarity—and with the hard work of putting a community back together after the dust settles. 

Sources

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, “Miners’ Union Hall Explosion.” Concise account with educational materials; notes the dynamite came from the Steward Mine and lists casualties. 

Wikipedia, “1914 Butte, Montana, labor riots.” Synthesizes period reporting and scholarship on the factional conflict and its aftermath. 

Story of Butte, “Butte Miners Union Hall (Frank Little Tour).” Places the 1914 demolition in the context of local labor heritage. 

Libcom (George Everett), “When toil meant trouble: Butte’s labour heritage.” Narrative timeline detailing the June 13 riot, the safe dynamiting, and the June 23 demolition. libcom.org

National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Butte–Anaconda National Historic Landmark District (2019). Establishes 1914 violence, including the hall’s destruction, as key to the district’s significance. 

City & County of Butte–Silver Bow, “History & Culture.” Local government overview noting extended periods of martial law after 1914. co.silverbow.mt.us

Historical Marker Database, “Butte Miners’ #1 Union Hall.” Street-level interpretation summarizing the June 13 riot and the subsequent demolition. 

Montana Memory Project, photo collections of the 1914 wreckage. Visual primary sources documenting the building’s fate and public reaction. hdl.loc.gov

(Note: Because contemporary reports differ on details such as the exact number of charges and the sequence of gunfire, this article foregrounds points of consensus while acknowledging disagreements among sources.)