by Gregg Olsen
ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN:
Abandoned Prayers
Bitter Almonds
If Loving You Is Wrong
Confessions of an American Black Widow
Mockingbird
Starvation Heights
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Gregg Olsen
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Sunshine Mine Map
Prologue
Book One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Book Two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Epilogue
In Memoriam
Acknowledgments
About the Author
IN MEMORIAM
Jack Olsen
1925–2002
Author, mentor, and friend
Author’s Note
HEARSES WERE IN SHORT SUPPLY IN KELLOGG, IDAHO, IN MAY 1972. A pickup hauled a dead miner to a hillside cemetery slashed with freshly turned earth. Another arrived in a station wagon. Still others waited on an assembly line to meet their maker. Just after the tragic outcome of a fire that trapped almost one hundred hardrock miners in Sunshine Mine, my salesman dad passed through Kellogg on his way home to suburban Seattle. He saw the coffin in that pickup bounce up and down, threatening to pitch out onto the road. That bumpy ride was the culmination of a cruel eight-day wait—a vigil, both stoic and shattered, that was captured in the media. For outsiders, the serial funerals were the end of the story. For those living there, resolution has not been so easy. In the world of hardrock mining, a volatile place of explosions gone awry, cave-ins, and fortunes made and lost overnight, nothing has ever been easy.
Northern Idaho was the epicenter of America’s hardrock mining industry. Within the region were the nation’s largest, deepest, and most prosperous silver and lead mines. Bunker Hill had more than 180 miles of tunnels honeycombing the craggy mountains faced with yellow tamarack. The deepest was Star-Morning at 8,100 feet—halfway to China, locals insisted. And the richest, Kellogg’s Sunshine Mine, had given up more than 300 million ounces of silver—one-fifth of America’s total output. When ore prices were good, Sunshine was a treasure trove of staggering wealth.
In good times, the most ambitious and, some would say, luckiest miners—those who had the very best contracts with the company—drilled and exploded their way to paydays of $1,000 or more a week. In less prosperous eras, during labor strikes or when operations were cut because high-quality ore was scarce, families only just squeaked by. And yet, no matter how long the downturn, men stayed because mining was about being a man as much as it was about bringing home a paycheck. Fathers like my own put in long hours and worked hard. Driving from Seattle to Montana several times a year and back again, my dad covered a substantial sales territory. But his job was air-conditioned. Highball-lunched. Miners didn’t push paper. Their work was the type that we mimicked when we played at being men—firefighters, policemen, soldiers, and the rest. Though we were destined for desk jobs, we still pretended to catch the robber. We fantasized about blowing up a mountainside. Dirt clods were bombs. Nobody played at being a sewer-pipe salesman, my dad’s occupation.
MORE THAN THREE DECADES AFTER THE FIRE, I WENT TO MEET THE people whose faces I had seen in the news when I was young and had first understood that for some, being a man meant your job put your life on the line. I checked into the Sands Motel in Smelterville, a fading town buried in the mire of a past from which it took its name. Today there is no smelter. Beyond the Wayside Grocery and the Happy Landing Bar, there isn’t much of anything at all. The Sands’ front-desk clerk, a young woman with a pleasantly askew smile, said I’d have to jiggle my key in the lock.
“Your room is twelve, but the key tag says nine. It’ll work.”
I went upstairs, twisted the key, and stashed my bag. A few minutes later I was in Kellogg, the heart of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, driving past McDonald’s and the Super 8 Motel. A multimillion-dollar gondola and ski slope, the crown jewels of an attempt to turn the town into a tourism center, beckon riders to the top of Silver Mountain. Those who live there feel it is too little, too late.
Kellogg has always worn its good times with brisk sales of new cars, its bad times with vacant storefronts. Soaped-out windows and ample parking on the main street reveal a town in the midst of another, deeper economic dip. At 10:00 a.m., the busiest place in town is a tavern called the Long Shot. A queue of graying men, beaten and battered by the elements underground, commands the barstools from one end to the other and cigarette smoke hangs like a canopy. While some involved in the Sunshine fire fled, many more, like the men at the bar, stayed—miners to the end. One woman runs a Kellogg pool hall while her ex-husband lives in a Smelterville neighborhood wrapped in Cyclone fence and lined with ancient RVs, their bumper stickers recalling a past when all were younger and their billfolds heavier. The woman can’t shake the days of uncertainty and tragedy from more than thirty years ago, and still wells up with tears at the mention of the fire. But her miner ex-husband gets right to the point.
“I wanted to get out of there alive,” said the man, now in his late fifties. “I’m sure all of the guys felt the same way.”
Another miner shares the bond of survival with the Smelterville man, but seldom sees his old pal. Their lives, however, remain parallel. When they walk through Kellogg, people still regard them with mixed emotions. Why them? Why did they survive?
Back in my room at the Sands, I wondered about their lives, how different the place might be if so many hadn’t perished at the same time. A Top 40 band played downstairs and the music thumped like a bruising fist against the wall of my room. I followed the music downstairs. The patrons were mostly in their twenties, about the same age as the youngest who died in the fire. Fewer of them work in mining today, though some who do call it mineral extraction. They are not as tough as their fathers were. Sons seldom follow their dads deep into the darkness for a seesawing paycheck and a chance at a hard-fought dream. Some lie and say they are smarter and mining is too dangerous; there are other ways to make a so-so living, better ways to get an adrenaline rush. Those are excuses born of a catastrophe that vanquished the soul of a town and hastened the end of a distinctly American way of life. Every day, people remember the date, May 2, 1972. It is their local “when Kennedy got shot” touchstone. It rewrote the lives of everyone, and even now its extraordinary legacy of unity and divisiveness is palpable. It is as if the smoke never really cleared.
Gregg Olsen
Ol
alla, Washington
Prologue
NOT FAR FROM WHERE A MINER GUTTED THE EARTH, A THIN haze curled through the hot, moist air and fluttered teasingly. At first the wispy cloud hesitated and hugged the edges of the stope, the blasted-out chamber where men extracted muck, rock, dust, and silver-laden ore. Then it swirled onward, deeper into the void. In the beginning, the miner who first smelled it might not have paid much attention. At depths of more than a mile, smoke was a constant element of the subterranean environment. Engines that crushed and carried muck, and blasts from ammonium nitrate and nitroglycerin, released thin smoke throughout the mine every day. The scent of burning tobacco also permeated the air. Deep underground, on the hunt for silver in the famed Sunshine Mine near Kellogg, Idaho, close to two hundred men were in grave trouble.
The fingernails of the miner who first noticed the smoke were cracked. His busted-up hands were calloused from rotating rock into position through a heavy steel grate over a chute that sent everything crashing down into hungry cars on the track level below. The man’s eyebrows were coated in dust, and the grime of his sweat ringed his neck. He worked on the 5,000-foot level—the figure designating its depth below the surface. He wore coveralls so stiff from ore dust and drill oil that his pant legs remained tubular when he took them off at the end of his shift. On his head was a miner’s hardhat; its lamp shot a beam through the dark emptiness that awaited him at every turn. He looked up from what he was doing and realized he was in danger. His gaze still fixed on the oncoming smoke, he reached for the valve of the oxygen cylinder on a portable cutting and welding cart. He felt for the hose.
Initially, most men working underground passed off the smoke as a motor fire somewhere down the drift where others were mining silver ore. That happened all the time. By the time smoke made its way through the mine’s vast ventilation system, its source had usually been extinguished. No one worried about a fire getting out of hand because of the mine’s notoriously wet floor and sodden rock walls. In some places the mine floor was a gritty layer of mud; in others, coffee-colored water stood ten inches deep. The very geology that brought the men so deep into the earth also lessened the worry of fire. Hardrock mines were blasted through mountain walls of solid metamorphic rock to reach slightly shimmering veins of gold, silver, or copper. Unlike coal mines, hardrock mines had no naturally occurring fuel to stoke a fire.
Men working up on the 3,700-foot level observed a slim channel of blackened air start to seep through vents used to feed fresh air into the mine. They attempted to seal it off. Working quickly, the miners piled up what they could find—wood, a steel drum, and scraps of the bric-a-brac that collected in the mine. Not all of them would get out on the hoist to the surface. Only a handful could make each trip, a thousand feet up, then a long walk to a second hoist, then up again to a tunnel toward daylight.
As the veil became a dark and lethal shroud, the miner who had been working near the welding kit bought himself some time. The others began to slump to their knees as if pins that held joints together had been yanked out. But he opened the valve and put a rubber tube into his mouth and sucked like a baby, consuming the contents of a tank of clean, smokeless oxygen. Even with limited knowledge about combustion, the man correctly deduced that there was something poisonous in the air. It couldn’t be the smoke alone—there was so little of that. He drew in more oxygen as the canister hissed.
Like the petrified figures of Pompeii, a bunch of men were frozen in their places. A coffee cup rested on one man’s knee, his body limp on a crate that he had used as a chair. Others were stiffened in their attempts to save their own lives. One fell running, his arms and legs stuck in full stride.
As darkness slowly devoured the shrinking space of the underground, the last man standing in that part of the mine threw his hardhat to the ground, its light still casting a thin line through thickened air. He watched his fallen friends as they began to die, their skin taking on a reddish hue as carbon monoxide replaced oxygen in their bodies. His blood pressure skyrocketed. Panic seized him. The others were dying or dead, en masse, from something no one could see. A group of motionless men lay by a telephone with a direct line to the surface. Even in death, one clamped the receiver in his hand. Down in the mine, where cap lamps were eclipsed by ever-thickening smoke, the miner took in measured gasps, certain he was about to die.
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE FIRE, IN DECEMBER 1972, THE U.S. Department of the Interior declared Sunshine Mine safe to reopen. The closure had cost the Idaho panhandle communities of Kellogg and Wallace more than $3.2 million in wages, and the country’s mineral supply about $11 million in silver, copper, and lead. That was nothing, of course, compared with the human loss.
There were clues everywhere that something catastrophic had taken place. Most of the reminders came in the form of who was no longer there. Unclaimed street clothes still hung on hooks near the showers in the men’s dry house. No one was sentimental about a greasy pair of Levi’s and a frayed chambray shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. But there were other signs, too. Deep underground in the mine, some of the rock was now coated in thick, black, velvety soot. In other places, rock with its foot-thick vein of high-grade silver and lead had turned molten and oozed like a lava flow, until it cooled into a thick, bubbly mass that resembled the shiny bark on a fallen cherry tree.
On one of the deepest working levels, there was another memento of the fire.
Near a battery barn, not far from the station where the men gathered to yak and wait for the ride up after shift, a miner noticed that when his cap lamp was turned off, the silhouettes of three bodies would reveal themselves in a ghostly glow. Johnny Lang, a stope miner and one of the men who’d worked on the rescue and body-recovery crew, heard about the eerie phenomenon and went to take a look. He switched off his light and stared down at the damp, smelly ground. And he saw them. Three men had been splayed out there, arms and legs akimbo like fallen soldiers caught unawares and shot in the back. The only part of the human forms that didn’t reveal itself through the darkness was their feet.
Must be the rubber from their boots, Lang thought. It kept whatever leached out of them from pooling there.
The scene at once disturbed and fascinated. How could this happen? What was it in a man’s body that would glow like that? Lang wasn’t a biologist, but a miner with a high school education. He wondered if a man’s body contained phosphorus. Or had foul secretions fed some kind of subterranean mold as the dead silently waited to be sacked up and taken from the mine?
This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, Lang thought. It just isn’t right.
He turned on his headlamp and left for a niche blasted out of rock that had been outfitted with a bucket for men to use as a toilet. Adjacent to the shit bucket was a drum of miracle lime used to cover excrement until the bucket was full and was sent out of the mine by the nipper. Lang scooped up a shovelful of lime and returned to the place where the three men had fallen on the day the mine coughed smoke through its miles of drifts and raises. He scattered the chalky powder. It fell like sugar off a spoon and melted on contact. He wasn’t trying to erase their memory—which he knew could never be done. It was just creepy and wrong to leave the eerie traces of those three men in the sodden muck. He leaned his shovel against the drift wall and went back to his stope to blast out some more rock, going after more silver.
One
SUNRISE, TUESDAY, MAY 2
Coeur d’Alene Mining District
MORNING RUSH HOUR IN THE IDAHO PANHANDLE WAS A STREAM of primer-splattered bombers and gleaming pickups on big tires that pushed the cab halfway to the sky. All were driven by miners hurrying to get underground. Many rode together so their wives and girlfriends could use their cars to run errands during the day. Some smoked and nursed hangovers with coffee as they planned their day underground: how much they’d have to blast, and how much muck they’d haul out. Some of the best of them took the Big Creek exit between Kellogg and Wallace. Around a sharp curve on the edge of the
Bitterroot Mountains, buildings congregated among the steep folds of stony terrain bisected by the rushing waters of Big Creek. A giant green structure clad in sheet metal was planted as though a twister had dropped it in on the edge of the parking lot. A few other buildings flanked the green monster, though none was nearly as commanding. On the other side of the creek was a backbonelike array of metal and wood-frame buildings that included a mill, dry house, machine shop, warehouse, hoist house, assay office, electric shop, drill shop, and compressor shop. The most visually pleasing edifice was the personnel office, a two-story, variegated redbrick structure with a peaked roof and a walk-up pay window. A sign proclaimed that the property belonged to the Sunshine Mining Company, but the biggest billboard faced the mine yard. In demi-bold letters it read, TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE—LIVE IT SAFELY.
Sunshine has long been legendary, even sacred, among miners. Maine brothers Dennis and True Blake discovered what would become Sunshine in 1884 when a soft glint beckoned from an outcropping on the eastern ridge of Big Creek Canyon. Assaying indicated tetrahedrite, a superior silver ore, and not galena or lead, which was scavenged by other area mines. For a couple of decades the former farm boys worked underground by candlelight while mules hauled out ore and dragged it down Big Creek Canyon on skids. They quietly made a small fortune, calling their discovery the Yankee Lode. Later, in 1921, when they sold their stake to Yakima, Washington, interests, it was renamed Sunshine Mining Company.
IT WAS ANOTHER DECADE BEFORE SUNSHINE CAME INTO ITS OWN, when, at a depth of 1,700 feet, an ore vein of astounding breadth—23 feet—was discovered. In time, the mine would give up more silver than any other mine in the world, a distinction it would hold for decades. In addition to lead and copper, it was also a leading producer of antimony, a metallic by-product primarily used to harden lead. Sunshine’s triumph was the result of the development effort led by the go-for-broke, risk-taking owners from Washington State. Most silver mines followed veins from outcroppings that eventually became stringers and petered out. Outside of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, it was a rare operation that extracted ore at depths greater than 1,000 feet. Not only did Sunshine have viable ore below 1,200 feet, but in the decades that followed, crosscuts chased high-grade ore bodies all the way to the 5600 level. Sunshine by itself was far richer and produced more silver than all the mines on the fabled Comstock Lode combined.
