Talk and book signing by Missoula author Doug Ammons. A Darkness lit by Heroes is a new novel about Butte’s 1917 Speculator Mine disaster, the deadliest hard-rock mining disaster in American history. Ammons based his novel on extensive research he conducted into six-hundred pages of eye-witness testimony that had been lost for ninety years. The story is carefully told to encompass not only the trapped miners’ point of view but also the emotions of the courageous rescuers and distraught men and women waiting above ground.
