Andrew (host)
speaker
672 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Andrew (host)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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And on the night of June 8th, 1917, the hill collected its like most terrible toll.
So deep in the granite mountain speculator mine, a lamp set fire to the insulation on the electrical cable and flame and poison gas tore through the tunnels where men were working half a mile down below the surface.
By the time it was over, 168 miners were dead.
And it was the worst hard rock mining disaster in American history.
Some died trying to wall themselves off from the smoke and were found with their last notes to their wives and children scrawled in the dark.
The disaster did what years of grievance had not.
It lit a fuse.
Butte had once been the most unionized city in America, home to a miners local so powerful, like a local... Local union?
So powerful it was known simply as number one.
But by 1917, the Anaconda Company had broken the union's back.
In the fury after the fire, the miners walked out and organizers came to help them stand again.
One of them was a man by the name of Frank Little.
He was a fearless agitator for industrial workers of the world who arrived in Butte and threw himself into the strike.
Unfortunately, he did not last the summer.
In the early hours of August 1st, 1917, six masked men broke into the boarding house where Little was staying, beat him, and dragged him into the street in his underwear.
They tied him to the back of a car and hauled him over Butte's stone streets, then hanged him from a railroad trestle at the edge of town.
Pinned to his body was a note reading, first and last warning, along with the numbers 3777, the old mark of Montana's vigilantes, and the initials of other Union men, a promise they would be next.
No one was ever charged.
Of course.
It was the first lynching of a labor leader in America since Haymarket three decades earlier.
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