Butte, America’s Story Episode 214 - Earthquakes of 1925

Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.

The last week of June 1925 was dominated in Butte newspapers by reports of earthquakes.

The week began June 23 with the immense Gros Ventre landslide just east of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Heavy rains and small quakes triggered a slide whose scar is still visible, and when the dam it created on the Gros Ventre river partially collapsed two years later, the flood wiped out the town of Kelly, Wyoming.

Of far greater import in Montana were the earthquakes centered near Clarkston, north of Three Forks, beginning on June 27. Estimated today at about a 6.6 magnitude, they were the strongest and most damaging quakes in Montana’s history to that point. Damage was significant in Three Forks, Manhattan, and other nearby towns, and while there were two minor injuries, there were no deaths reported.

The quake was felt from Seattle to South Dakota, and from Calgary to Boise and Casper. Butte and Helena were the nearest large cities, but damage there was surprisingly light. The shaking at Butte just before 6:30 p.m. was estimated variously to last between 45 seconds and a minute and 39 seconds, with a quick, strong aftershock of 30 to 45 seconds duration just after 7:00 p.m. Although bricks falling from buildings were common and there were some close calls, no one was hit. Most of Butte’s underground miners didn’t even notice the quakes and there were no reports of any collapsed mine tunnels.

Butte’s telephone switchboard was overwhelmed with 25,000 calls an hour, four times the capacity. Even with off-duty operators called in, all 28 were unable to handle all the calls, and seven girls fainted but were revived and returned to work.

The worst damage in Butte was collapsing brick veneer, notably on boarding houses at 330 S. Montana (site of Subway Sandwiches today) and 1024 Utah. One lady on Park Street became so confused that she dropped her baby and picked up the cat to run outside, and in squeezing the cat too hard was attacked. She thought she had a brick in her neck, but it was the cat’s claws. A drunk in a speakeasy reportedly threw his shot to the floor and swore off alcohol at the sight of swaying light fixtures and the ghostly jiggling of glasses on shelves.

In Anaconda, the walls of the Electric Building and an adjacent structure rubbed together so intensely that clouds of dust rose. The only significant damage in the Butte-Anaconda-Deer Lodge area was at the Warm Springs Hospital, where two buildings were badly damaged, with one wall collapsing.

Within three days at least 41 aftershocks were reported.

The Montana American, a short-lived weekly newspaper based in Butte, boasted that “this rock-ribbed city doesn’t mind a little thing like an earthquake, a cyclone, a typhoon, or, for that matter, a monsoon—if they should happen to come our way.” That was 1925’s version of “Butte tough.”

The end of that week of earthquakes was marked by a magnitude 6.8 quake in Santa Barbara, California, which killed 13 people and destroyed the city center by shaking the “city of millionaires like terrier would shake rat.”

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.