The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  The Jewell, a timbered, four-compartment shaft, was not only the gateway for men and machines, but it was also the mine’s single most important source of fresh air, the life-giver of any mining operation. Jewell was the surname of the supervisor who sank the shaft back in 1934, though most assumed—obvious misspelling aside—it commemorated the wealth deep in the mine’s gullet. The Jewell dropped from the surface to the 3700 level. Sunshine was a web of passageways that, if accurately depicted, would look more like a near-blind grandmother’s worst crocheted potholder than a grid made with a ruler. Drifts or tunnels followed ore bodies set off by bands of snowy white quartz that, in the bright light of a motor, appeared as swirls of silver tetrahedrite folded into a metamorphic meringue. Spaced every two hundred feet, horizontal drifts were intersected by vertical cuts called “raises” that led miners from one working level to the next. Around every turn of the underground maze were old stopes that had been emptied of ore and gobbed—packed with waste rock and trash—to protect against collapse. By the early sixties, most Idaho mines had switched to backfilling mined-out voids with sandfill, a slurry of water and tailings, the by-product of the milling process that chemically and mechanically separated precious metal from waste rock.

  Safety engineer Bob Launhardt considered Sunshine no more convoluted than any other district mine, although it did operate with multiple shafts. The Jewell Shaft was the main way into the depths of the mine, and it carried miners and other underground workers in a single-drum chippy hoist; muck and equipment traveled the Jewell in the larger double-drum. The Jewell bottomed out just below the 4000 level, but its role was to get men and machines to the most important levels, 3100 and 3700. If the Jewell was the way into the mine, 10-Shaft was the route down to the current production levels. The deepest level being developed was 6000. The 200-foot-spaced drifts that followed the veins were fed by 10-Shaft. They no longer were identified by descriptive names like Yankee Girl or Chester Vein but with numbers and letters to mark their location. Men took 10-Shaft from 3100 to the deepest working level of the mine, 5600. By 1972, the route to 10-Shaft from 3100 was seldom used. The 3700 level was preferred. In fact, most Sunshine miners had no familiarity with 3100 whatsoever.

  A mile’s train ride east of the Jewell, 10-Shaft was powered by a 900-horsepower double-drum hoist that carried ore and waste muck from lower levels to cars that ran on a track to the Jewell. The double-drum configuration also allowed for two single-deck cages. Each deck held nine men—one deck coming and one going on a counterbalance system. On the 3700 level, a single-drum chippy hoist had a four-deck configuration that transported forty-eight men at full capacity. Cages had next to no clearance from the jagged shaft, maybe four inches at best. Both the shaft and the cage were gated, a necessity given that one slip was a rocket ride downward. The conveyance’s trajectory was steadied by four-by-six-inch mahogany guides bolted to timbers that defied gravity with rock bolts and timber spikes. To ride the cage was to experience a seemingly endless free fall, a long, dark descent through a great empty space. Men traveled at about 900 feet a minute; muck and supplies hurtled at about 1,800 feet a minute. Speed depended on three things: the state of the equipment, the government’s regulations, and what kind of night the operator had the night before. Sunshine cages had an excellent safety record; not all mines in the district did. In October 1936 at the Morning Mine in Mullan, a hoist cable snapped, the backup safety dog catches failed, and a cage with ten men plummeted downward. The cage was forty-three feet tall before the accident. When the crew recovered it, it was a six-foot steel sandwich spread with a paste of dead miners.

  Clustered around the station at 10-Shaft on 3700 was a cavernous space that served as a warehouse, a shaft repair shop called “the chippy doctor’s room,” and, a little farther down the drift, a pipe shop known as the “08” because of its proximity to the defunct 8-Shaft. All were lit by dangling banks of fluorescent tubes.

  6:15 A.M., MAY 2

  Fourth of July Pass, West of Kellogg

  THE KITCHEN MEN—DELMAR, THIRTY, HIS EIGHTEEN-MONTHS-older brother, Dewellyn, and their fifty-four-year-old father, Elmer—drove in from the western town of Coeur d’Alene and the surrounding area where most of the Kitchen clan lived. Delmar, who lived the farthest out, near Hayden Lake, was always the last and first link in the family carpool. As the only nonsmoker of the three, Delmar kept the window cracked no matter the weather or the season. The men in the ’65 Ford on the morning of May 2 were mining elite. For some in the mine, the name Kitchen was revered for the fear it evoked among lesser miners. Challenging a Kitchen was a fool’s death wish. Led by Dewellyn, the pecking order of any mine started with a Kitchen and went down from there. Men underground would pass their lunch hour by betting on who could bend a timber spike, a long, pencil-thick nail. The best at the challenge was nearly always Dewellyn. He’d take out his handkerchief, wrap it around the spike, and turn it into a horseshoe. Others practiced with spikes for hours, trying to make them give. Few could.

  Guys in the Shoshone County Mountaineer Motorcycle Club admired thirty-one-year-old Dewellyn, although not so much for his riding ability, because he was only so-so at that. Fellow riders were spellbound by Kitchen’s casual display of his Samson-like physical strength. One time Kitchen and a buddy were out riding a steep hill, their motorcycles sputtering up the incline. Kitchen had enough, got off, and put his motorcycle up on his shoulders and carried it to the crest. He was going to win that race, and if it meant packing his motorcycle up the hardest part of the course, so what? That’s what muscles and stamina were all about. The Kitchens were solid blocks of grit and don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. If there was a tougher man, a harder sonofabitch than the Animal, as Dewellyn was respectfully known, he’d yet to make his presence felt anywhere in the district. Kitchen was Mullan miner Buz Bruhn’s partner. Bruhn had seen with his own eyes what the Animal could do. One time they were working on a raise prep that involved putting in upright fourteen-by-fourteen timbers. The timbers were so massive that a motor was used to lift them into place. Kitchen sized them up one morning and told his partner that he thought he’d be able to lift one and put it into place. By himself.

  Sure, pard, thought Bruhn, a man who’d paid a printer twenty dollars for a fake birth certificate when he was sixteen so he could join the Marines. Bruhn, thirty-nine, was no slouch himself when it came to physical strength. He’d known Kitchen for years, but wasn’t sure any man could move those massive timbers. Bruhn offered a hand to get one lifted, but without so much as a grunt, the Animal dismissed the help and took it the rest of the way. His forearms were a pair of fire hydrants, stout and bulging under the taut sheath of a grungy T-shirt. He picked up that timber as if it was a campfire log.

  This guy’s a walking winch, Bruhn thought.

  The morning of May 2, in a routine followed by all the men of the mine, the Kitchens checked in with the bosses at the shifter’s shack, a corrugated sheet-metal building with a peaked roof facing the portal. Overhead, the cables of the hoist ran from the hoist room to the Jewell’s headframe, where huge steel wheels and massive pulleys with cables supported the cage—the vertical transportation system that miners always told outsiders was like a high-rise building elevator.

  The Kitchen boys made another play for working on 5400 on Tuesday. They had been bugging their foreman for the past week or so about the heat on 5000 and how they’d prefer to go work on the cooler 5400. Their father, Elmer, was down there, and the three Kitchen men thought it might be good to work on the same level.

  “I’m not going to argue with you guys no more,” the foreman said. “Just go down to the 5000 and finish what you’re doing. All you have to do is slush it out and you’re done with it.”

  The Kitchens knew how to pick their battles, at least when the boss was calling the shots. They backed off.

  From the Jewell station they took the cage down to 3700 and scrunched up to fit into the tight and low confines of the flame-orange, battery-powere
d train for the mile-long ride to 10-Shaft. Guys sat on benches two abreast facing each other. So tight was the fit, men interlaced their legs for the duration of the ride. Some smoked, some talked, a few even slept as the train lurched through the drift, its wheels scraping against the rails and screeching as it ran along a drift, parallel with the ore body. At the station, another cage was waiting to ferry the miners to their working levels. Delmar and Dewellyn got off on 5000 and passed through two air doors on the east side of the shaft, where they were working a raise prep with their respective partners. Elmer continued on down to 5400.

  Five

  6:25 A.M., MAY 2

  Jewell Shaft

  BENNIE SHEPPARD AND GLEN SHOOP HAD BEEN REPAIRING SHAFT guides on the 3400 level off 10-Shaft. They were coming off an uneventful graveyard shift, typical of their routine of track and shaft repair. A little after 6:00 a.m., the pair made their way to 3700 station for the man train out of the mine. Foreman Ray Rudd ran the motor, and Sheppard and Shoop joined the others and got on. As the train passed an electrical substation, Shoop, twenty-one, turned to his partner and sniffed.

  “Do you smell smoke?” he asked.

  Sheppard indicated he did, but he pointed out Rudd had just lit a cigarette with a wooden match.

  “That must be it,” Shoop said.

  But the scent niggled at Sheppard. He knew that a match’s odor could be distinguished from most any other burning smell. Miners had particularly acute olfactory senses. A man underground could tell the scent of a burning mahogany guide over one made of fir.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t smell any sulfur,” he finally said.

  The man train continued to the Jewell, and the graveyard guys aboard walked out toward the light of a brand-new day. Topside, near the portal, they came across foreman Gene Johnson and told him about the smoke. Johnson was a breath under six feet tall, but he had the kind of personality that made him seem even bigger, the way a blowfish can puff up. Those who worked under him sometimes considered it hot air. He had the ramrod gait and air of authority that broadcast immediately that he was a military man, a man deserving of respect. His dark, curly hair crowned a ruggedly handsome face, punctuated by dark eyes that could flash fire or charm whenever he needed to summon either.

  Johnson promised to check it out. No one could say for sure if he ever did, or even had the chance.

  SAFETY ENGINEER LAUNHARDT WAS HEADED FOR UNDERGROUND Tuesday morning to inspect safety equipment, including any fire extinguishers and BM-1447 self-rescuers. Filter breathers of charcoal and hopcalite, BM-1447s were small lifesavers about the size of a tuna can, though twice as thick, with a rubber mouthpiece and nose clip. Used all but exclusively in coal mines, where fires were frequent and often deadly, the device chemically converted deadly carbon monoxide in smoke to harmless, breathable carbon dioxide. Launhardt had been the first to order Bureau of Mines–approved self-rescuers in the district about halfway through his first tenure as safety engineer in the mid-sixties. By the time Launhardt left for Spokane to sell life insurance, Sunshine was one of only two district mines to procure BM-1447 self-rescuers, the other being the Page Mine. Lucky Friday, Bunker Hill, and Galena—all big, busy operations—didn’t have a single one.

  When he’d returned to the district in February of ’72, Launhardt had found many of the mine’s self-rescuers in poor condition, if not completely worthless. In ideal conditions—when the vacuum-sealed lid was not popped, accidentally or intentionally, by a curious fellow testing the plunger on the opposite side—the units were supposed to last a decade or even longer. But not so, it seemed, at Sunshine. In a mine environment akin to a gigantic steam bath, moisture seeped readily into the self-rescuers’ hopcalite chambers, turning the chemical to sludge and destroying its effectiveness. Storage was part of the problem. Leaky wooden doors had replaced the glass fronts on the storage cabinets he’d installed in the early sixties. Locking solid-paneled doors stenciled with SELF-RESCUER replaced shattered panels. Launhardt learned that during his absence, self-rescuers had rarely been replaced after being corroded or pinched by a few miners who’d take just about anything from the mine that wasn’t nailed down, whether it was useful topside or not. New locks and solid wood panels weren’t meant to keep men out during a fire, but only to deter the weekend auto-body painter who found the units good protection against the CO by-product of spray-painting. Besides, most miners regarded self-rescuers with little if any interest. The devices were viewed as unnecessary because metal mines had had little or no fuel to sustain a fire.

  Many of Launhardt’s trips underground lately had brought the same disappointing discovery. Ignored for years, some self-rescuers had been damaged in the hot and humid underground. Following an inspection on February 24, he wrote: “It is obvious that a serious problem exists in mine fire protection . . . according to the record card, the unit at #4 was last inspected on 2/5/68.”

  As he worked his way through the various levels in the last weeks of February 1972, the lanky safety engineer recorded which locations were in need of a new supply. He replaced what he could from the safety office’s rather limited supply and discussed ordering more with his predecessor, Jim Atha. Atha ordered three dozen of the Mine Safety Appliance Company’s W-65s—an improved one-hour unit that was in the works. But there had been a delay. The government had recently mandated that all coal mines use the newer, longer-lasting self-rescuers. To meet the requirement, the Pittsburgh-based manufacturer had diverted its production to coal mining companies. Sunshine’s purchase order was on hold. Launhardt was as troubled by the quantity ordered as by the delay. He wanted every Sunshine man to have access to a self-rescuer. An additional three dozen would hardly do it.

  On the morning of May 2, Launhardt was a man with little time to spare. He had a lot of ground to cover in the mine, and adding to his workload was a big project waiting on his desk. Launhardt was in the process of redrafting Sunshine’s decade-old safety rule book, and its deadline loomed. The draft was due before the joint safety committee on Friday, and the following week it would be shared with representatives of the union for their comments. Launhardt and development foreman Salyer rode down the Jewell in a cage to the station at the 3700 level. The trip took less than five minutes, the cage traveling through the shaft at almost 1,000 feet per minute. From there, they took the man train for the mile-long ride to 10-Shaft. At 10-Shaft, they climbed on the cage powered by the chippy hoist. “Chippy” was the term used in the Coeur d’Alene Mining District to denote an auxiliary hoist, one that carried men and materials, not ore or muck. Sunshine’s chippy could haul as many as forty-eight men at a time. The other hoist, the double-drum on the 3100 level, was used to haul muck, ore, and rock. The double-drum hoist was also outfitted with a twelve-man cage.

  The chippy moved miners at a decent clip, between 500 and 750 feet per minute, depending on the hoist operator and the need to get the men down or out. Ten miners was considered a full load on a single deck of the chippy, but at that time of the morning Launhardt and Salyer were the only two passengers for the ride down to the level Launhardt had targeted for inspection—5600. Launhardt’s cap lamp illuminated the blur of the shaft’s timbered walls as the hoist dropped into the darkness. Every 200 feet a strobe would flash as the cage passed through a lighted shaft station on its way down, about a mile underground in the deep dark of the mine.

  A man’s senses were bombarded underground. Sunshine, like all deep mines, was damp and musty, accented with the stink of powder smoke from explosives. Some thought parts of the underground where timbers rotted and sent off methane gas reeked like sneakers stored in a plastic bag, or like the foulest, wettest farm dog. Others—owners and top gyppos—smelled money. Beyond the intake air shafts, humidity at Sunshine was at 100 percent, and whatever odors percolated through the underground hung heavy in the moist air. Bob Launhardt, for one, could even detect the tang of specific chemicals found in the sandfill. All tailings, and therefore all mines, were unique in their odor becau
se all companies used different chemical combinations to process ore.

  Outside might be cold, but the underground was always hot. Outside dry, inside the mine, dripping wet. Fresh air versus the heavy smell of blasted ammonium nitrate powder. A thousand miner’s lamps could never capture the light of the sun. It was easy for some to forget worries and phobias because their work world was always on sensory overload. All around were enormous pieces of heavy equipment that seemed incongruous, given the space around them. It was a ship in a bottle. Outsiders expect working in a mine to be claustrophobic, but that phobia was rarely the reason men quit. Certainly the back end of a stope could get tight, shrinking down to maybe six feet in height, but it wasn’t nearly as tight a squeeze as coal miners faced. They were often forced to crawl to chase a coal vein. In hardrock mines, vast sections of the underground were blasted into cavernous spaces that miners referred to as “rooms.” There were hoist rooms, machine shops, and storage places scattered throughout hundreds of miles of working levels. Underground, coffeepots with stains so deep and dark no bleach could clean them perked all day long, and newspapers and magazines were stacked with the precision corners of a neat freak. Launhardt knew of one hoistman who actually waxed the floor every week. Pity the miner dumb enough to enter without making sure his boots were clean. Another man whose job was to service a hoist carried a grease rag in one hand and a polishing cloth in the other.

  Some guys figured they could almost live down in the mine, and it was true. In the days before muck cars and rails, mules actually did live underground. Stone corrals beneath the surface contained the animals used to pull carts of muck to the hoist. Once pressed into such service, most mules never saw daylight again.