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If average Canadians were asked to name Canada’s worst mining disasters, many would answer with the terrible tragedies that happened in Nova Scotia — the Springhill disasters of 1956 and 1958, which killed thirty-nine and seventy-four men, respectively, or the more recent Westray mine accident that killed twenty-six miners on May 9, 1992.

However, as tragic as they were, these three calamities added together were still smaller in terms of loss of life than southwestern Alberta’s Hillcrest mine disaster. In all, 189 miners died after an explosion rocked the Hillcrest coal mine on June 19, 1914. It remains Canada’s largest mine disaster to date. Yet it never stuck in public memory, in large part because it was soon overshadowed by an even greater calamity — the First World War.

Little was written about the disaster until Steve Hanon’s The Devil’s Breath, which looks not only at the backdrop of early twentieth-century coal mining but also at the personalities involved. Most of the miners were recent immigrants, and explosions were not uncommon — an accident at the nearby Bellevue mine killed thirty-one men in 1910. Hanon provides a thorough account that is informative while including gripping tales of human courage.