by Gregg Olsen
In the late 1950s some Butte mines faltered, while most of Idaho’s held steady. Kenny “Ace” Riley, eighteen at the time, couldn’t rustle a job where his father mined. When a referral came from his brother-in-law, already at Sunshine, Riley, a reed of a young man at only 135 pounds, fibbed about his weight on his job application and was hired as a miner’s helper.
Before he left town, his dad offered a warning.
“Once you’ve mined,” he said, “you’ll never get out of it. It’ll grab ahold of you.”
The senior Riley’s words were prophetic. Every day was an adrenaline fix, like a motorcycle on Lookout Pass at speeds above ninety miles an hour. Take the turn a little tighter, go a little faster. Feel the air and watch the world blur right by. Working underground provided a rush, with blasts shaking the mine, rock tumbling down, and the certainty that anything could happen. After a shift, in the back of a miner’s mind there’d always be the thought: Cheated death again today, and got paid pretty good for it. Riley loved it, and life was good.
Competition was another draw of working underground. Men pushed it even harder, maybe even took a few chances that they shouldn’t, because they had something to prove. And being the biggest, strongest, and toughest was the brass ring. A miner’s identity, his reputation, was based not only on how much muck he pulled and therefore how much money he made, but also on the size of his balls.
When he was thirty, married and the father of five sons, Riley learned that the price of the rush could exceed its value. Sometimes devastatingly so. In March 1970 he was partnered with Bernelle Brown, a forty-two-year-old dreamer with a college education and a love for the big fat stack of cash that came with the mining life. It was a hellish 100-plus degrees in their stope on 4600, a wet atmosphere that sapped energy like a virus. At around 9:30 they opened a water line and let it run over their heads, shaking off the excess like dogs out of the river. They made small talk, smoked, and returned to drop more ore, but found that the chute was clogged. Lagging, or boards, had been carelessly placed across the chute by the night crew, but neither man knew it. Brownie started poking at the rock with a steel, and in a second, a thunderclap of rock and muck sounded as the world gave way to gravity and pressure. Riley lunged for Brownie, but no man could have been fast enough. Brownie, the muck, and the lagging under his feet swirled down the chute like a backed-up sink drain that had finally found relief, instantly killing the father of five. Neither man had worn a safety harness because both had believed the area was stable, and belts were too much of a bother anyway.
No one who lost a partner was ever the same afterward. The event kidnapped the survivor’s psyche for the rest of his life. It was a footnote that never vanished. Whenever Riley heard the song “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” he’d think of his fallen partner. For some reason, Brownie had been singing that song that day.
IF DANGER WAS A MINER’S HEROIN, MANY WHO WORKED UNDERGROUND were junkies. For Howard Markve, a week shy of turning twenty-nine, the suggestion that his life was on the line every minute underground became a compulsion. Standing on the raise climber’s steel deck, two hundred feet above the track, a light from a cap lamp casts a beam into a darkness of rock, talking and popping. The raise climber’s deck is the size of a dining table, and the miner standing on it doesn’t really know, with complete certainty, which way that quarter-ton rock will fall, or if the rock that rains down will be small and just a nuisance, or like a load of bricks being hurled from above. Miscalculate a pivot, and a wife is a widow. It was that live-or-die thrill that held Markve, husband and father of two, spellbound. He understood how sky divers felt when parachute cords felt a little sticky.
At fifty-three, Bob Follette was considerably older than Markve. Most men his age had been exiled to the surface, but Follette wasn’t ready to concede to the inevitable. He’d been a Sunshine miner since 1967, having first proved himself as a contract miner at the famed Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. Homestake miners like Follette, Markve, and Markve’s father-in-law, Louis Goos, were among the best in the district. Homestake’s rock was harder than Sunshine’s, and pulling an eight-foot round there gave a man serious bragging rights. Part of what brought Follette and others to Sunshine was its reputation for putting contract miners above all others. Homestake bosses hovered like flies on roadkill, telling a man what to do and how he ought to do it. At Sunshine, not only was a man compensated with a decent paycheck, but he was left to do things his way.
On the morning of May 2, Ace Riley grabbed his dinner bucket and left Wallace for Sunshine, where he’d connect with his partner, a tough sonofabitch named Joe Armijo. Howard Markve and Louis Goos drove in from Wallace and Osburn. Bob Follette picked up his son, Bill, at the Rose Lake exit off the interstate. The younger Follette was partnered with Goos. They all met up at the portal to ride the cage to working levels.
7:45 A.M., MAY 2
Smelterville
HER HUSBAND HAVING GONE TO WORK, MYRNA FLORY FINISHED her smoke and looked in on her toddler, Paul, nicknamed Tiger. She glanced at the laundry and planned her day. Though only eighteen, Myrna Keene Flory had the kind of weary eyes that told others she’d seen it all. She had been used and abused. She’d had a baby as a teenager. Though some would say she’d been scrunched up and dragged through a knothole, Myrna was still a fighter, the kind of survivor who had the ability to tap into hidden mental and physical reserves when circumstances required it. Myrna was born in Butte, one of ten kids of a West Virginia coal miner who’d made his way out west to try his hand at hardrock mining. In 1968, when underground jobs in Butte gave way to surface jobs associated with pit-mining operations, Myrna’s parents had loaded up their belongings and moved to a little house on Riverside Avenue in Kellogg. Kellogg and the rest of the district was a job hunter’s paradise. Every place with a halfway decent ore body was hiring. A job at the zinc plant or mining at Bunker Hill or Star or Sunshine could be had by anyone with a little experience and the ambition for a regular paycheck.
During Myrna’s teenage years, Kellogg was also a place where turbo-jetted hot tubs froze over in winter because miners couldn’t scrape up the cash to pay both the utility bill and the snowmobile dealer. Months making ends meet were followed by spending sprees that promised never to end, though they always did. And while seesawing bank accounts were a part of living in Kellogg, a few things remained constant, too. Each night when the sun dipped low, miners crammed into local taverns to drink away the day’s profits and to talk about mining. From stools in front of beer-sloshed bars, men relived every moment of their hours in the dark.
There wasn’t much for teens to do, except drink and party up in the hills or on a sandbar along the Coeur d’Alene River. Every day in the summer, carloads of kids went down the river from one keg to the next. It was a mining town with mining kids, and drinking was more than a right of passage. Parents played rough; so did the kids. A pretty girl with precision-parted long hair, Myrna had grown up with the belief that most miners’ kids could drink an adult under the table. Certainly any adult from outside the district.
Throughout the district, it only took three things to be considered cool. A guy had to have a pickup, a gun, and a dog. A girl just had to have the guy.
Myrna Keene was sixteen and pregnant when she met Ron Flory, a twenty-six-year-old miner with the kind of booming voice that effortlessly cut through the raucous clamor of the underground. Myrna always knew she’d end up being a miner’s wife; she just assumed that the man who had made her pregnant would do the right thing. He didn’t. Ron Flory came along at the right time to pick up the pieces. In Myrna Keene, the shy miner saw a young woman, though in some ways she was still very much a girl. She needed a decent man to look after her. So did the baby. They married on Christmas Eve 1970 in Coeur d’Alene. Flory made a good living, and whatever his very young wife wanted, she got. When he arrived home from the mine, he worked on their modest trailer or tinkered with his car. On the weekends they followed the music to the Happy La
nding or to the Sunshine Inn’s Jackass Room—named for the small burro that 1880s prospector Noah Kellogg said led him to a galena outcropping that founded the great Bunker Hill. The legend gave rise to a common refrain among out-of-district mudslingers: “What do you expect from a town discovered by a jackass?”
Though most men would be loath to admit it, Ron Flory loved to dance. Myrna never had to beg him to come out on the dance floor. As a big guy, a barrel-chested fellow with Popeye forearms that went white at his biceps, Flory could handle his booze. In turn, Myrna could handle him. The match was good. Mining was a dangerous wild card, and all young wives like Myrna knew it. And so when the mine siren called from the mountain, or when word got out that an ambulance had blazed up to the mine, Myrna joined other wives as miners’ wives had done for almost a century. They waited. Some worried. Some agonized. And over and over inside their heads, as they fed their children and did their laundry, they’d think of their men: Call me. Come home.
MYRNA AND HER OLDER SISTER GARNITA WERE CLOSE IN THE WAY that only sisters who’d survived rough times can be. They had other siblings, but the two had remained especially devoted from the days in Butte when Garnita Keene would help her sister get dressed, or brush out her pretty brunette hair. When she got older, and was no longer the kid sister with the hair in need of brushing, Myrna still sought out her sister as a sounding board. When both were living in Kellogg—Myrna, seventeen, and a just-separated Garnita, twenty—the two took up where they’d left off. They partied together and obsessed about their love lives. And whenever Garnita got into a cleaning binge, Myrna put dibs on anything her sister was going to throw out.
A tiny blond with cobalt eyes, Garnita Keene was the single mother of two little girls, living in an uptown Kellogg apartment and waiting tables at the Sunshine Inn to get by. She’d dated a few locals and did her share of partying. But when she met Sunshine miner Billy Allen, she knew she had met someone who stood out from the others. Allen was a good-looking guy of twenty-four, with a couple of small scars on the bridge of his nose and a head of thick, dark hair. More than anything, it was Allen’s grin that hooked her heart. It was the kind of smile that was both sweet and sexy. Garnita and Allen made a pretty picture—trim, young, and alive. There was one complication, however. Allen was separated from his wife, who had taken their toddler daughter and preschool son back to Arkansas to live with her parents. Divorce papers had been filed in Shoshone County in late 1970, but neither side had taken the final steps.
On Sunday, Allen picked up Garnita for a drive along the north fork of the Coeur d’Alene past Kingston to a riverside roadhouse called the Snake Pit. His ’67 Chevy Impala in a Cataldo transmission shop, he drove a borrowed pickup truck that in reality wasn’t a much more reliable ride. They parked across from what was known by everyone in the district as “the black bridge,” even though it was painted a dark shade of red, and went inside the Snake Pit for a couple of beers for the road. Allen was in a good mood. Fired up, having fun. Garnita half-hoped, maybe even deluded herself a little, that the young miner would eventually fall in love with her and forget about his wife. Actually make her the ex-wife. That Sunday evening, however, it was still as clear as it had been on other occasions: Allen was a long way from that. He was planning a trip to see his on-again, off-again wife and their children. He was back living at home in Pinehurst and sharing a bedroom with his younger brother, but his mind and heart were set on the future. Garnita just didn’t know where, and if, she fit in.
Up the river, the pickup overheated and sent a bloom of steam into the chilly air, and Allen climbed down the muddy riverbank to fill a small container of water. Garnita offered to help, but Allen shook his head, waved her back into the cab, and flashed his smile.
“I can handle it,” he said.
Two hours later, Allen parked in front of Garnita’s parents’ place on Riverside Avenue, where her children were sleeping in an upstairs bedroom. He leaned over and kissed her good night.
“Call you later,” he said, driving away in a cloud of exhaust. And again, the smile.
Seven
MORNING, MAY 2
Big Creek
ITS FAçADE WASN’T IMPRESSIVE, BUT IT DIDN’T NEED TO BE. THE BIG Creek Store was a plain wood-frame building, low-slung, with windows trimmed out by a thick and crackled coat of forest green paint. A pair of gas pumps jutted from the weedy lot out front. The tavern and store was only one of many miners’ hangouts in the district and was only really distinguished by its location. At just a few hundred yards down from Sunshine, it was the easiest place for the miner in a hurry to get a beer. It was also the social center of the Big Creek community. To the right of the front door was a twelve-foot bar with a candy counter and a cash register. Opposite the bar were a pool table and a handful of tables where miners would drink, play liar’s dice, or just talk until they were sure their pissed-off wives had gone to sleep. At the back of the store were the living quarters of perpetually irritated owner George Dietz. Dietz served more draft than root beer, along with pretty tasty chili and cabbage rolls. After shift change, the place burst at the seams.
Yes, tough muthas though they were, arms wallpapered with blurry-edged tattoos and scars that wrapped around like wet jute, the men who lined up at Dietz’s bar were surprisingly tenderhearted—especially when it came to their families. Whether they lived in town with a brood of five or had been on the tramp-mining circuit so long they hadn’t seen them in months or longer—their kids came first. My kid’s doing this. My kid’s going to college. And so on, like grandmas with their photo album brag books, men climbed onto the Big Creek’s barstools and yakked about their kids. They also talked about their cheating wives with tears rolling into a half-empty schooner one minute and the angry promise to even up the score with a Wallace prostitute the next. Mostly, however, they talked of mining. There was always someone to listen. From time to time the tavern became a good place for a fight. Dietz strived to stop things before they started, but many of his patrons thought it wasn’t a good night if there weren’t a couple of fat lips and some bruised egos. The source of most rows was the reason men went there every night. It certainly wasn’t the women. It was mining. Who could pull a better round? Who knew better than anyone how to make the rock do exactly what was needed? Squabbles that started inside the Big Creek Store sometimes ended in the parking lot. The best skirmishes concluded with a trip to the ER or the Shoshone County Jail.
Among the very few who never set foot in that bar was Bob Launhardt. He wasn’t a complete teetotaler, but close. Even when he was a pipe fitter, and among the lower echelon of the mining hierarchy, he stayed away from Sunshine’s favorite watering hole. Had he spent some time there, he might have learned that the Big Creek Store was a training ground for future miners. Boys would sit with colas, listening to miners bitch about their women, brag about their mining prowess, and generally strengthen the bonds that made them more a fraternity than outsiders could ever imagine. By the time a Big Creek kid was ready to go to work, he already had the soul of a Sunshine miner.
IN THE SPRING OF 1972, BIG CREEK NATIVE RANDY PETERSON, twenty-three, had been among a group of laid-off Sunshine workers, part of the company’s cycle of managing the ups and downs of the metals market. But by May 2, he’d been called back and was caging with a coppery-headed nineteen-year-old named Roger Findley. Peterson was one of the few who didn’t want to mine. The son of a hoistman, Peterson had returned to Big Creek after a brutal tour of duty in Vietnam. And while there were other things the capable young man could do, Sunshine paid $1.25 an hour more than a previous job with the highway department. Even better, working underground meant actually working less than six hours a day because travel time from portal to portal was paid, as negotiated by the union. It was just too sweet a deal to pass up.
Even though Peterson and Findley weren’t miners, they understood the pride of being one. It went beyond mind-boggling physical strength and relentless stamina. Certainly the hot temperatures
of mines like Sunshine and Star were given their due by tramp miners from California and Nevada mines. A lot of those men just couldn’t make the grade in northern Idaho mines. To be considered a miner in the Coeur d’Alenes, a man had to know how to drive a drift, run a raise, and work a stope. To be a real miner, a man had to drill, blast, muck, timber, bolt, and do it all in a day’s work. Sunshine miners scoffed at their supposed counterparts down in Nevada. A man down there did only one thing. He might drill all day. He might load explosives all day. He was a cog in a process that kept him from really getting in there and mining. Being a Sunshine miner was being an all-around miner, and that meant working in most jobs before going mining. Running the cage was another step on the way.
Cagers and hoistmen usually came on shift a half hour before other crews showed up. First, in accordance with state and federal law, they’d test the cage by running the conveyance up and down the shaft. The first men down ahead of the working men—foremen, supervisors, and shifters—made up what was known in the district as the “meat run.” Running the cage, or “caging,” was nothing more than an elevator operator’s job. Even so, it commanded a certain amount of respect. The relationship between cage tender and hoistman—one the eyes and ears of the operation, the other the machine-powered muscle—was crucial to any mining operation. Not only did they have to work completely in tandem, separated by thousands of feet of darkly lit shaft with men tethered in cages that hurled from level to level, but the best of them did so with a kind of finesse that recalled the great pitcher-and-catcher pairs of the major leagues. A good hoistman could read his cage tender’s bell signals and know what kind of mood the fellow was in that day, or if in fact it was him ringing or another guy. Same with the cage tender. He knew by the way the hoist stopped at a level if his buddy was running it way up in the hoist room, or if some other guy had taken over while he went to the shitter. The squawker, a buzzer system, let the hoistman know what level they were at when a ride up or down was needed. The bells chimed when the cage tender wanted the hoistman to know just where they were going. It was all done in a rudimentary code. Sunshine’s station signal for traveling to 3700 10-Shaft was three rings of the bell, then a short pause, then four bells, and another pause before adding one more ring for up and two more for down. The electric stroke bells on the main station of the Jewell were enormous and cast from brass. One hit 87 decibels and the other 93. No one doubted the hoistman who said he could hear the bells ringing in his sleep.
