The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  Every week contract miners gathered to pick up their gyp sheets—forms kept by the Sunshine office that showed just how much rock they moved by the cubic foot or by the ton, depending on the contract. Even more important, the sheets put a dollar figure to their efforts. This wasn’t done in secret. The sheets were fanned out and handed over in a free-for-all that let everyone know how much money a man made. Status came with the money. And top miners were never shy about saying how big their checks were or how they were going to blow their cash.

  Gyppo miners hated it when Sunshine adopted its “bank system,” which held gyppo money until a job was done. Anything beyond a double day’s pay was put in an account managed by the company. Sunshine held on to the dough until the entire stope—two hundred feet, level to level—was mined, thus completing the contract. Mine managers positioned the program as something good for miners, who frequently and frivolously wasted paychecks on toys and booze. But in actuality it was simply a way for the company to improve its cash flow and keep the best gyppos from tramping out to work at another mine. Walking away from the job could mean walking away from a small fortune. Gyppos working especially tricky stopes were the most irate about the system. It could take a year or more to get the money they earned. The system, they insisted, was about controlling the men who put their lives on the line and made a bunch of money for guys who never sunk a jackleg’s steel into a wall of rock in their lives. With the bank system, the most a guy could bring home was $48 a day—no matter how much he slushed out. And to make matters worse, if a miner got mad and quit, he forfeited whatever remained in his account. The union fought against the provision but failed.

  Some guys got around the bank system by “high grading” or stashing some particularly rich chunks of ore into their buckets and selling them to a processor, thus cutting out Sunshine. Irate contract miners hid good veins and came back later. They’d timber over it, wash it down, and cover it with mesh or mats—anything to make it look as though a stope was either depleted of decent ore or downright worthless. Sometimes they’d rework the area after hours or on weekends, taking whatever they could haul directly to processors. Some of the most respected Sunshine miners did that a time or two. A very few made it a general practice and earned more money that way than they did mining for the company. A man could make some cash and say fuck you to the company at the same time.

  WITH A YOUNG WIFE, THREE KIDS TO FEED, AND BARELY ENOUGH cash to get him from here to there, Wilbur “Buz” Bruhn needed a job. In mid-1962, the curly-haired man with a Vise-Grip handshake stood in a Seattle unemployment office and studied job listings on a board. A placard indicating Idaho mining operations were short on muscle caught his eye. Bruhn had recently mined for quicksilver in Guerneville, California, and dug for iron ore in Minnesota as a teen. The next day he zipped across the state and got in the queue with another two or three dozen other scruffy job seekers at Sunshine’s Wallace hiring office. Despite the optimistic job flyer in Seattle, it didn’t look good. The line was at a standstill.

  I’ll never get a job here, Bruhn thought. Now what am I gonna do? But just before packing it up for more uncertainty in Seattle, Bruhn noticed something. Every now and then a man would slip into the office and leave looking satisfied, even cocky. He followed their lead.

  “You have something for me?” he asked.

  The hiring man looked up and regarded Bruhn with unmistakable wariness.

  “You ever work in a mine?”

  Bruhn said that he had, and the man seemed faintly impressed.

  “Come back Wednesday. I’ll have something for you then.”

  Bruhn wasn’t about to be put on ice. “If you ain’t got a job for me today,” he said, his voice booming as he made his play, “you ain’t going to have one for me come Wednesday.”

  The man smiled a little and proceeded to fill out a card.

  “Put this in your pocket and don’t say nothing to nobody,” he said. “Just walk out.”

  Damn, I got a job. With a few bucks and that little card in his pocket, Bruhn went looking for a place to crash. A Wallace madam had a good chuckle when he asked for a weekly rate at what he thought was a hotel but was actually a whorehouse. He footed it over to a hotel that boarded miners in a ramshackle warren of spartan rooms. He had cash for the night, but no money for food. An easygoing woman running a café in the basement agreed to feed him that night and even make him a sack lunch for work if he’d pay her back on payday—something she did for a handful of miners every shift of the week.

  A few days later Bruhn’s wife, Ginny, and their children joined the newest Sunshine miner and moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette on the east side of the district. They’d never had it so good. When Ginny paid the bills, there was still money in their bank account.

  AFTER SERVING AS AN ARMY MEDIC, PINEHURST NATIVE KENNY Wilbur trailed his dad to the cell room of Bunker Hill’s zinc plant, where he stripped plates of bluish-white cadmium. It was a repetitive and low-paying job, so when summer warmed the valley, Wilbur headed for the Idaho woods to hook logs on the jammer. Working as a gyppo in a lumber camp could earn a man half again a day’s pay or more. When fall weather arrived, Wilbur went underground at Sunshine Mine. At first the young man reveled in that kind of back-and-forth rhythm which so many district men embraced as a good way of living. After a couple of years, however, Wilbur, who had a young wife and an infant son, saw it was not the way to sustain a life with responsibilities. In 1969 he became a permanent Sunshine employee, though he knew his connection to mining was tenuous. The bug hadn’t bitten him. His carpool buddy couldn’t stop yammering about mining, and Wilbur wanted to talk about hunting or fishing. About anything else. After spending all day underground, he wanted to get his head out of the dark hole and into the light.

  Wilbur noticed right away that longtime miners paid a huge price for that fat weekly paycheck. He even played a little game, asking veteran miners their ages. When they said they were thirty-five or forty, Wilbur stifled his shock. He watched as the older guys worked harder and harder, faster and faster, until heatstroke knocked them down in a clenched, fetal position. A veteran miner might think he was running a mile in a darkened sauna, but he was only walking. Men who had once been gyppo miners with big incomes and balls the size of grapefruits no longer had much stature. Miners knew the fragility of their place in the mine. All they had to do was look around at the men older than forty-five to see what most of them were doing underground or on the surface. If they hadn’t shown some kind of indomitable presence, some leadership, most who could no longer mine plummeted in the hierarchy of Sunshine—even though they knew a hell of a lot more than the young guys with quicker reflexes and greater muscle mass. It was like the pro-football player who was stuck selling insurance or new cars; their glory days were known but irretrievably lost.

  “Holy smokes,” Wilbur told his wife, Judy, one day after work, “these guys look like they are twenty years older than they are. This ain’t good. I don’t want to do this forever.”

  Kenny Wilbur wanted the kind of job that made him more valuable over time, not less. He put his name on the list to be an electrical apprentice at Sunshine. Get a trade and get out of the mine was his plan. On May 2 he was still in the mine, waiting on the list, looking for a way out.

  EVERY NOW AND THEN IT WAS NEITHER TRADITION NOR NECESSITY that took men into the earth’s crust for money. For Californian Bill Mitchell, a marine serving in Vietnam, the road to Sunshine came in the form of love letters from a Smelterville girl. Bill Mitchell wed Vicki Johnson in 1969, and the Bay Area transplant rustled a job at Sunshine and bought a house on Riverside Avenue, a street of modest homes on the eastern side of Kellogg. Right away, Mitchell felt the pull of the underground. Certainly the subterranean was different from what he’d imagined—unlike, say, Journey to the Center of the Earth, with James Mason and Pat Boone wandering around twinkling masses of glittery crystals. A hardrock mine was a man’s world, created by men. It was gray
, dark, damp, and grimy. Yet everywhere Mitchell looked, men earned an income as big as their ambitions. He embraced that kind of accountability and freedom. He alone controlled how much money he brought home to his wife and, later, his two daughters.

  Across the district, Buz Bruhn, Kenny Wilbur, and Bill Mitchell downed some coffee and dressed for work. Bruhn carpooled from his little red house in Mullan with three other miners he’d known for years. Wilbur rode in with a buddy from Pinehurst. Mitchell, the closest to the mine, drove east from Kellogg. In less than five hours, everything each knew about hardrock mining would change forever.

  Three

  6:05 A.M., MAY 2

  Pinehurst

  BOB LAUNHARDT WAS WELL SUITED FOR THE SERIOUS DEMANDS OF his job. Meticulous by nature, he was the kind of buttoned-up guy who alphabetized and organized most aspects of his life—from his garage tools to his sock drawer. Organizational acumen aside, Launhardt had a miner’s soul and was no stranger to the underground, having worked at Sunshine from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. That’s what brought him back. Launhardt didn’t leave in 1967 because he was dissatisfied with his work or wanted more money. He left because the New York owners didn’t see the relevance of a proactive safety program. They didn’t want anything to get in the way of production. Giving safety-minded employees an electric can opener as a reward for days without any dangerous incidents without really addressing the larger issues of mine safety wasn’t enough. Rather than feel underutilized at Sunshine, Launhardt quit the company to sell insurance for the Lutheran Brotherhood in Spokane, and then went off to Seattle to work as an executive headhunter. Four years after he left mining, Sunshine contacted him with an offer to resume his old duties. It took a little convincing. Eventually, Launhardt saw it as his chance to return to something he loved, but, even more, as an opportunity to start over. He understood the connection the men had to the earth and its hidden wealth. He knew the thrill of hitting a vein that would pay out for weeks and how it felt to work so hard that your muscles passed the point of soreness and ceased aching. Launhardt wasn’t an underground lifer, but he understood those who were. Moreover, Launhardt recognized he was no longer one of the army of men who blasted away the innards of a mountain. As safety engineer, the six-footer was now office rather than underground. A little awkward and deeply religious, Bob Launhardt stood out underground and in the mine yard. Perfect grammar and a clean-shaven face always did.

  It wasn’t that he was smarter or even more educated than those underground. There were plenty of men with college degrees busting rock, who wore belt buckles the size of dinner plates and drove midnight-blue pickups to hunting grounds on the weekends. But those men had adapted to the culture of the job and the district. The physical side of the work felt good. The strain of the mines felt better than the stress of the office—for which there were seldom tangible results. Desk jobs would never feel right to most miners.

  Underground was, quite literally, a world unto itself. It was a realm that fed on competition and practical jokes, the likes of which were seldom seen in any other industry. It was a place of nicknames that were frequently so entrenched that when Blackie, Skinhead, or Doc died and his given name was announced, few fellows knew it was the pal they’d talked to every day. A hoistman earned the name Greasy for playing dirty tricks with the thick black smear used to keep his hoist cable shipshape. His bit was to rub cable dope on the phone receiver and laugh like hell when a fellow picked up the line and blackened his ear. He’d conceal a greasy gob inside the yarn of a mop head and tell a new hire to start swabbing the floor. When he really wanted to get to someone, Greasy would slide a little cable dope on the blades of a man’s windshield wiper and wait for the next rainfall. Another hoistman’s favorite ploy was to pretend to relay an urgent message to an unsuspecting miner. Have to return the call immediately. Right now. The miner would dial the number and get the madam of a Wallace whorehouse. Magic Markers were also put to creative use. Men caught napping woke up to find handlebar mustaches or chin whiskers on their faces. Cager Stan “Talky” Taylor got up after one lunchtime nap to thunderous laughter. Etched on his balding head was a four-speed gearshift.

  While dressing at the end of a shift, guys sometimes got a jet of Right Guard sprayed onto open sores, to unbearable and stinging effect. A hoistman who used a Norelco razor was notorious for dumping his whiskers in drying socks, making a miner’s feet itch the next day like he had the world’s worst case of athlete’s foot. Some tricks were classic and played over and over—dinner buckets nailed to the station floor, the cat-food sandwich trap set for a miner who routinely helped himself to the wrong man’s bucket. But, boys being boys in the fraternity of mining, nothing got a bigger rise than the mix of humiliation and sex. Easter-egg-dye tablets were tucked into hip pockets or the fly of a man’s underwear to turn his butt or genitals green or red. One wife refused to have sex with her husband until he “got the purple off his pecker” after a dye job. One hapless fellow was held down while a band of miners ran duct tape from his chin to his scrotum—and then peeled it off, leaving a hairless racing stripe from “chin to hose.” Getting greased was undoubtedly the most humiliating of the common pranks. One new miner dodged the practice for quite a while, but made the mistake of telling a buddy, “No one can grease me.” Soon after, four burly fellows pinned him down, pulled down his diggers, and rubbed cable dope over his genitals. The thick, waxy grease had phenomenal staying power. Most learned the hard way: The stuff has to wear off.

  Miners referred to their horseplay as grab-assing, and occasionally things went too far. In addition to stunned pride, miners turned up with broken bones and gaping wounds. Bob Launhardt was put in the position of having to write up some of those antics as safety violations. That pushed him further away from the brotherhood of miners. In truth, Launhardt’s reserved personality made it difficult enough for a close relationship with others anyway. He hunted elk and deer with a couple of pals, but those relationships didn’t last. One of his buddies left for another mine, and another died when the battery hood of his motor caught a muck chute and swung back, slicing his head from his neck.

  ON THE MORNING OF MAY 2, AS HE HAD FOR THREE MONTHS SINCE his return to Idaho, Launhardt drove from Pinehurst through Smelterville and five more miles southeast of Kellogg, to the spur at Big Creek. Filtered sunlight reflected off his windshield as he went up the mountain and past the row of miners’ houses that marched up toward the company gate. He was troubled that morning by something he’d read in the Kellogg Evening News the night before. It was a scathing letter from the local of the miners’ union, the United Steelworkers of America:

  I do not know whether you are aware, that now we have more favorable laws for the protection of underground workers in this state and a more active department for the enforcement of these laws, that several mining companies in this state absolutely refuse to abide by the law and the abatement of orders of the Idaho Inspector of Mines office.

  Launhardt took the comments personally because he took his responsibility to heart. He parked behind the mine offices. It was forty-five minutes before the day shift would start filing underground. After changing into coveralls, heavy woolen socks, yellow hard-toed rubber boots, and a hardhat, lamp, and battery, he met up with Jim Salyer. A no-nonsense fellow with angular features and a head of sandy hair, Salyer, fifty-one, was the foreman in charge of development efforts on the 5400 and 5600 levels, where Sunshine was searching for new ore bodies. By the early 1970s there were additional pressures on mining companies throughout northern Idaho to ramp up production. Mineral extraction was no longer merely the interest of the small towns where shafts were sunk. Mining was going corporate, and pressure to perform was increasing with every quarterly report. Sunshine’s owners wanted the silver mine to pay out, and a stiff-armed push was on.

  Four

  6:15 A.M., MAY 2

  Sunshine Mine Offices

  EVEN IN EARLY MAY, FRAGMENTS OF THE SNOW PACK WERE SCATTERED like b
roken dishes over the mountainsides adjacent to the mine. Icy water drained from the dirty white deposits into Big Creek and gushed under the mine bridge before joining Elk Creek and the south fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. The weather was a yo-yo in May. Days sometimes hit the mid-seventies, with nights plummeting to freezing as the elements battled over whether it was winter or summer—the seasons that rule the district most of the year. On the eastern edge of the thirty-five-mile-long valley, water dammed up by beavers was smoothed flat, and stalks of cattails with the last tufted remnants of coppery fur stood battered but upright.

  But more than any place on earth, mining districts were about what lay beneath the surface, what couldn’t be seen by the day-tripper passing through.

  Mine engineers recorded the world below, but such schematics were a blend of reality and wishful thinking. They depicted an orderly place. In a mine map, drifts often run in straight lines, and raises poke from one level to the next in a perfect, logical trajectory. But no mine is so tidy. Men develop mines with muscle, jackleg diamond drills, and explosives. And as much as they would like things to go exactly as planned, the subterranean has a will of its own. Rocks break, fractures form, and routes are adjusted. To the layperson, the concept of a tunnel speaks of a streamlined and uniform tube. In a hardrock mine, the height and width of a tunnel or drift vary considerably. A drift might start out spacious enough for a Peterbilt, but a hundred yards later it may be just big enough to accommodate an MG. It only has to accommodate a muck car and a man train. Bulkheads along drifts are patched with wood and plastic or polyurethane foam to control airflow and to keep the face from splintering off any dangerous rock. Steel mats are bolted to places that appear especially perilous. Massive timbers shore up intersections or cross-drifts.