The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  THE DEEPER LAUNHARDT DESCENDED TUESDAY MORNING, THE hotter the rock became. Each hundred-foot drop brought an increase of one degree. At the surface, just past the opening of the Jewell Shaft, the temperature held steady at about 55 degrees, whether it was a hot summer day or a frigid Idaho winter. At the deepest part of the mine, the 5600 level, it was a sweltering 127 degrees. Mammoth booster ventilation fans and refrigeration units pushed more than 130,000 cubic feet of air through the mine to keep the conditions bearable at the lower depths. Cold water from Big Creek pulsed through the mine and emerged as hot as coffee when discharged into a tailings or waste pond on the surface. Even with all that had been learned in a century of mining at that location, the cooling system was far from perfect. Miners knew where the hotspots were at Sunshine—or at any other hardrock mine, because all mines had them. Only unlucky or inexperienced miners got stuck working in the devil’s breath. Whenever the ventilation system failed, temperatures rose quickly and the air grew uncomfortably thin. Rapidly. Miners working farthest from a ventilation or intake airshaft to the surface, especially those in Sunshine’s deepest reaches, would be in unbearably sweltering conditions in less than half an hour. The air temperature would surge to rock surface levels. Enduring temperatures close to 130 degrees for any amount of time was very risky.

  Miners heard bosses talking about the importance of ventilation. But for those guys underground busting rock, the very idea that there was some great ventilation system bringing air throughout the working areas was nearly a joke. Large fans—the kind that made hurricanes howl on movie sets—huffed and puffed air through the mine the best that they could. But the air in the stopes and raises sometimes forced the thermometer to 115 degrees. A 50-ton chiller was installed on 4600 to cool ventilating air, but it didn’t do all that was hoped—or promised. Men working in the lower levels used whiz-bangs—blowpipes with broad nozzles punched with holes—to spray cool compressed air into stifling work areas. Many actually preferred stope fans shut off because all they accomplished was to blow hot air at them, dry them out, and sap them of their strength. Fans also kicked around dust, which was bad enough without the high velocity of a blower. Many times, a foreman would return to a stope to find fans off and the men using compressed air. He’d raise a big stink about it, ordering the fans turned back on. The goddamn compressed air is to run the machines. The fans are to cool off the men! The minute he’d disappear down the raise, the fans would be shut off again.

  Besides a money-producing ore body, nothing was more important to the workings of a hardrock mine than fresh air. Before compressed air, men collapsed from what was assumed to be heat and exertion, but was actually oxygen deprivation. Even with compressed air, the air in deep mines was thin and replete with residual gases from blasting.

  6:30 A.M., MAY 2

  Smelterville

  CONTRACT MINER RON FLORY STOPPED IN AT HAPPY LANDING IN Smelterville, a town surrounded by a dead ring of skeletal vegetation from Bunker Hill’s towering and noxious lead smelter. Flory, a big man with a gate-jaw and a goatee, filled his water jug with ice from the bar’s icemaker before catching a ride with his partner Tom Wilkinson. Over in Woodland Park, outside of Wallace, mine sanitation nipper Don Beehner picked up three Sunshine miners in his red-and-white Volkswagen bus. Buz Bruhn’s Mullan carpool pulled over to give a lift to a Sunshine miner hitching to work on the highway to Big Creek. Though it was only Tuesday morning, day-shift silver miners had already discussed what they would be doing on the weekend—or even that day, instead of working.

  Wilkinson, Flory, and the others changed from their street clothes to their diggers in Sunshine’s dry house, usually called just “the dry,” an enormous building of lockers, urinals, toilets, and communal showers. Wet boots, diggers, and towels were suspended on hooks and raised up to the ceiling by chains and pulleys, making for a kind of hanging garden of miner’s gear, drying in the breeze of a forced-air furnace. Each shift was bookended in the dry. It was the place where the men lightened the prospects of the day ahead, or blew off steam from a disappointing dig that had yielded fewer muck-car loads than expected. An average blast typically dumped thirty to forty tons of ore and rock to be hauled out; anything less was a frustrating money loser. More so than any other place outside of the bars, the men’s dry was the place where miners could get to know each other. Snippets of life echoed through the mammoth room. Sometimes there were fistfights and angry altercations. A few times, things were revealed that no one expected. A man who had custody of two preschoolers worked a shift opposite his father, the kids’ grandfather. Every day the dad brought the kids into the dry. They’d sit and wait under the hangers while the shift diggered up. Then their grandfather would come out of the mine, shower, change, and take them home. This routine went on for quite some time. One searing summer day, a cager asked the kids if they wanted to cool off in the shower.

  One immediately peeled off his clothes and started running around, laughing and having the time of his life. The younger kid thought that it looked like fun, too. In a split second there were two kids laughing in the shower, which was fine, except for one thing.

  The smaller of the two was a girl.

  Men around the shower towers grabbed washcloths and frantically tried to cover up. All those months of men wearing nothing but shower shoes playing grab-ass flashed through the mind of the man who’d made the offer. Who knew that tot was a girl? And she’s been running around here?

  Wilkinson’s best buddy, Johnny Davis, was among the men in the dry getting ready to go underground on May 2, his twenty-eighth birthday. Davis was local through and through. He’d graduated from Mullan High School, enlisted in the Army, and, like so many of his classmates, returned to the district and the mines. He’d started as a weekend smelter helper at Bunker Hill and had done a small stint for Hecla mines before coming to Sunshine in November 1967.

  Wilkinson tried to cajole his pal into skipping work. If Davis said yes, Wilkinson was sure Flory would probably give in, too.

  “You ought to dump shift. Let’s go get drunk,” Wilkinson persisted. “It’s your birthday, man.”

  Davis was tempted, and it seemed that he was going to say yes from under his thick mustache, but ultimately family obligations won out. He was married and had a kid of his own and two stepchildren.

  “Nah,” he said, “can’t do it.”

  Wilkinson was only mildly disappointed. He’d figured they’d catch up for a few beers after shift.

  WHATEVER MEN OF THE DISTRICT TOLD OUTSIDERS WAS THEIR reason for going mining, Ron Flory’s reasons were twofold. Yeah, the money was good, but he loved it even more because between the cage rides up and down, every day underground was different. Every day he felt privileged to work in a world that few ever see. The underground was a mystery to topsiders. They saw it as a dark, dank, unpleasant world of rock faces and brutal sameness. Those who didn’t know metal mining, or who didn’t respect where the silver came from for their camera film or for the conductive strands of metal that fired the circuitry on their cars or TVs, talked trash about the underground. Cold as stone. Rocks in your head. Dumb as a rock. Where the sun don’t shine. The miners, many believed, were a born-to-lose, scruffy rabble who toiled with a pick and a shovel because they weren’t smart enough to do anything better where the sun did shine. Good gyppo miners knew better. And those who couldn’t gyppo and plugged away as pipe men or water guys looked at gyppos with deserved respect and even awe. Men like Flory saw great challenges in working a stope, shooting a face down just so. Meeting the unknown head-on was one of the rewards of mining. Understanding what the rock was saying when it talked was more relevant than speaking three languages and knowing what wine went with steak. Flory knew which formations meant good money and, conversely, what clues signaled a difficult and ultimately less profitable stope. Besides mere muscle, it took skill and fearlessness to get a round drilled and blasted, muck pulled, and the stope bolted, and then to do it all again.

  No on
e knew it, of course, but on May 2 a man needed more than strength and daring. Ron Flory, his partner Tom Wilkinson, and 171 others were on their way to discovering just what it took to be a Sunshine miner, the Marines of the underground.

  SINCE KELLOGG AND WALLACE WERE SO INSULAR—CULTURALLY, geographically, and economically—most boys simply grew up knowing that mines waited on the other side of adolescence. Mines weren’t traps, but they were whirlpools of sorts. Close to the edge, with a father or an uncle going mining, a young man found himself leaning over, curious. Before long, he was inside. It was like that for Ron Flory. His family had shuttled between Montana, Washington, New Mexico, and Idaho as his dad, Richard, worked the tramp miner’s circuit. Home, however, was always Pine Creek in the Coeur D’Alenes. A Nazarene churchgoing woman of tested resilience, Belle Flory had raised five children on her husband’s wildly fluctuating paychecks. The Florys never had a TV, though they always had electricity—when many neighbors and friends didn’t. Whenever the mines went on strike, Richard Flory waited it out while his wife stretched macaroni until it snapped. It was a hard way to live, so when she finally booted him out, few were surprised. Belle Flory didn’t leave the district. She couldn’t. None of her family could leave. Ron Flory’s brother, Bob, had long wanted to move away, but he also found himself working at Sunshine. The district, he began to believe, was like one of those open crab barrels he’d seen one time on Seattle’s waterfront. The containers didn’t have lids because they didn’t need any. If a crab tried to escape, the others would grab it and pull it back.

  Ron Flory had his dumb-kid brushes with the law and two years of Army service behind him when he came home to a miner’s life. His father broke him in at Nancy Lee, a Kellogg-owned lead and silver producer near Superior, Montana. The idea that he could do something else for a living never really entered Flory’s mind. Mining was a dirty, thankless job that someone had to do, and he didn’t mind. The only thing that got to him was the never-ending nighttime. It was dark in the morning before shift, the work was in the dark, and after shift it was dark outside. He was a mole. Sometimes the only way around it was to dump shift during the week.

  Partner Tom Wilkinson went mining later. He’d tried working at Bunker Hill, where his dad had spent most of his career, but poor eyesight kept him topside. Surface jobs were all right, but they didn’t reap the kind of paycheck he wanted—not when he saw the other kids he’d grown up with trading in cars whenever the mood suited them. Wilkinson had seen his father try other jobs, but the old man had always kept coming back to the mines. With each injury, with each downturn or strike, there was always the possibility that the subterranean pull would weaken. The worst of it came when a timber fell on his dad and broke or seriously ruptured several discs. The old man went back, but it was a struggle. He ended his career topside at Bunker Hill. At five feet six and 135 pounds, Wilkinson wasn’t a big man, nor was he a particularly smooth talker. He was a tad rough around the edges and probably knew how to party better than anyone else in Smelterville. He’d dropped out of school, had been raised in part by his grandmother, and had even done some time in a boys’ reform school in St. Anthony, Idaho. Frances Christmann, the daughter of a veteran miner, didn’t care about any of that. If Wilkinson was a bad boy with eight tattoos and a cuss-filled mouth, there was something gentle about him, too. She was woman enough to see it. They dated for a couple of years and married on May 20, 1956. In time they had a daughter, Eileen, and a son, Tommy.

  Wilkinson worked five tedious years smoothing the running grain of centuries-old Douglas fir on a planing machine at a Smelterville mill. Making housing-grade lumber was repetitive, and the income from the job predictably flat. Wilkinson rustled a job at Sunshine in 1970, joining two of his brothers already there. Six months later, he and his old school buddy Flory were partners.

  Six

  7:10 A.M., MAY 2

  Coeur D’Alene Mining District

  VISITORS TENDED TO FUSE TOGETHER KELLOGG AND WALLACE AS rough-and-tumble, hardscrabble, and indistinguishable. But in reality, while the neighboring towns shared origins and economics, they were more rivals than twins. Kellogg was a company town that sprang from the silvery profits and spillover goodwill of the Bunker Hill Mining Company. The lead, zinc, and silver producer was best known for its lead smelter, with its towering stacks spewing smoke, and its strings of lights that made the place look almost Christmas-like at night. Locals referred to the company as “Uncle Bunk.” With a long tradition of local ownership and philanthropy—founding the YMCA, building swimming pools, and funding youth groups—Bunker Hill was the community’s largest employer and most generous benefactor. Uncle Bunk almost always did right by his men. Even after the Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation acquired it, residents still clung to the belief that Uncle Bunk would always look out for them. If a miner—or an office worker, for that matter—worked hard, there’d always be a job and food on the table. But with the shift from local ownership to outsiders, the 3,500 citizens of Kellogg began to understand that unbending loyalty was foolhardy.

  The stand-ins for Bunker Hill’s absentee management were often too fancy for local tastes. They weren’t interested in being a part of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District’s insular world. Most executives’ wives shopped in Spokane. Kellogg, most certainly, didn’t have what the well-heeled desired. Even worse was the unspoken understanding that time in Kellogg was merely a stop on a career path. Outsider managers from Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City were always temporary, with roots planted back home.

  A masonry and terra-cotta village that had barely changed architecturally from its 1880s origins, Wallace was fortunate to be the hometown of several mining corporations—Hecla and Day Mines being the preeminent ones. As such, Wallace, with its population of 2,200, wasn’t as dependent on the corporate types who came to scavenge at Kellogg. Wallace’s companies actually lived in, and mixed with, the community. In a Wallace bar like the 1313 Club, it wouldn’t be unusual to have two men in a heated argument over mining or even politics—the only thing remarkable would be that one man was a miner and the other a CEO.

  Those who live in them know that rivalries drive small towns. When boys morph into men, home territory becomes sacred. In the mining district, the battle over which sports teams were better—which town was better—sometimes turned intense. Parking-lot posturing frequently led to black eyes and petty vandalism, sometimes worse. One time a pack of boys wearing Kellogg Wildcats letter jackets took a baseball bat to the windows of a Wallace High School bus, leaving a row of jagged holes and a parking lot that glittered like a Vegas showgirl. The rivals were pretty evenly split in athletic prowess, allowing both towns to claim bragging rights. Most of the time, the Wallace Miners were the football team to beat, while the Wildcats had the upper hand in basketball.

  In the 1940s and 1950s, Wallace billed itself as “the richest little city in the world.” Kellogg would never dare such a Chamber of Commerce slogan. In fact, strangers knew Kellogg as the dirtiest town in America.

  CAREER SUNSHINE MINER CHARLIE CLAPP KNEW THAT HIS ROWDY son, Dennis, was a schoolyard fight away from a trip to St. Anthony’s, and he wasn’t about to let that happen. He moved his family from Wallace to Moon Gulch, seven miles from Kellogg. Dennis couldn’t have been more pissed off, or more dejected. Though only in sixth grade, he was a Wallace kid to his bones. Kellogg reeked. Heavy, leaden smoke ensnared the town. Not only did Uncle Bunk’s lead smelter put a gray lid over everything, but it encroached on every aspect of life—even those most sacred sports fields. The grounds staff made a valiant effort to keep the high school football field Foster Grant green, but to no avail. The smelter claimed the turf. The Kellogg track team had to huff and puff through smoke at home, and frequently did better on road trips outside the kill zone. Rivals hated playing on the Kellogg field of cocoa-powder dirt. Yet, for longtime residents, there was beauty in the discharge from the enormous smokestacks. It was a symbol of prosperity. Coming from poorer t
owns made it easier for most to shrug off the stink, or blink away the stinging air.

  Football saved Dennis Clapp’s childhood. At the time in a boy’s life when nothing matters more, the Wildcats were the better district football team. Miners’ sons battled on the barren Kellogg gridiron, dusting off and putting an end to disagreements their fathers had a mile underground. When Clapp graduated in 1967, he was a member of one of the biggest classes in Kellogg High history, with 299 classmates. And like many of his pals, Clapp took a temporary job at Sunshine while he contemplated what he’d do with his life. When summer ended, he just stayed put. And why not? He had cash in his pocket, and a cherry ’57 Chevy that he buffed to a mirror shine. By working underground, guys like Dennis Clapp had the opportunity to make serious cash.

  MINERS CHAFED A HEAVY BACK-AND-FORTH LINE BETWEEN THE mines in Butte, Montana, and those strung through the Coeur d’Alene Mining District. In hard times, when certain metal prices dipped low, companies cut back on crews and sent men packing for other, more viable operations. Labor disputes also sent miners from one place to another. Even so, men on both sides of the state line were fiercely loyal to their roots and to the guys who came from home. Coeur d’Alene men always thought they were better miners than those fellows from Butte. In Kellogg and Wallace, working three days in a row was known as a “Butte ringer,” as in “I got my Butte ringer in.” District men figured Montana miners took off Fridays to get an early start on the weekend and missed Mondays because they were too hungover to make it to work. Montana miners made similar jibes at Idaho miners.