by Gregg Olsen
We’re not going to make it, Launhardt thought, just as a headlight appeared.
“Look!” Hawkins said.
A motor pulling a couple of muck cars and a timber car, each packed with hacking and nauseated miners, edged toward the station. When it stopped and the men got off, Launhardt’s crew loaded the helmets and took off. Hawkins ran the motor, with Beehner climbing onto the back end and Zingler on the timber truck. Launhardt took the lead in the front car. About a quarter of a mile out, he moved his head back and forth, streaking his light from over the blasted-out drift. Hawkins stopped the motor.
“Look,” Launhardt said, “those guys told us the smoke was really bad past the timber station. Let’s put on the apparatus here, where the air is still clear.”
They checked their air hoses and face masks, ensuring that everything was snug and in order. The seal around a man’s face was as important as a good oxygen hose; a leak could kill a man faster than getting no oxygen at all.
Hawkins put the motor into gear. None aboard could be sure what they would find, but each knew they could be the last chance for some to survive. The sooner they reached the men, the better their chances. But a moment later it was as if someone had shut off the lights. It was a wall of smoke, astonishingly thick; a solid darkness emptied onto the drift and consumed everything behind it. It appeared that the smoke was coming from a crosscut intersecting with the drift near 5-Shaft.
Launhardt signaled again and Hawkins stopped the motor.
“There’s heavy smoke here,” he called out through his face mask. He turned his attention to his flame safety lamp and gas detector. “I’ll check it out.” It was like nothing Launhardt had ever seen. It was nearly tarpaper black. Wood smoke, he knew, was often a brownish hue. What’s burning down here?
12:16 P.M., MAY 2
4400 Level
THE NORTH COMPARTMENT OF 10-SHAFT’S DOUBLE DRUM STOPPED at 4400 and picked up nine men, including shaft repairman Robert Barker and welder Jack Reichert, the ex–police chief. A minute later it stopped on 3700. The cage’s movements were recorded in the hoist room by a device called a tattletale. Like the jagged lines of a seismic scale, a needle marked a sheet of paper whenever the north or south compartment stopped or started. It also logged how long a cage paused on a particular level.
12:20 P.M., MAY 2
5000 Level
FORMER HOMESTAKE GOLD MINERS HOWARD MARKVE AND BOB Follette were working off 10-Shaft at 10 stope. Markve was up 125 feet over track level, drilling and preparing to blast, when Duane Stephens, nineteen, came and flashed his light. Markve climbed down to learn about the fire and the evacuation. He noticed some smoke, but remained unconcerned. He worked on repairing a bad jackleg for a few minutes before taking off and riding a bucket down on the timber slide to join Follette, who had already climbed down to track level.
Through the smoky haze, the motor’s headlamp appeared deep yellow. The color was curious. Markve put the jackleg in need of repair on the back of the motor. The station was 1,500 feet down the drift.
Fourteen
12:21 P.M., MAY 2
4400 Level
TIMBERS DECAYED QUICKLY IN SUNSHINE’S HOT, MOIST ENVIRONMENT, and crews were forever replacing disintegrating wood and hauling it off to abandoned stopes as gob, or filler. The day smoke poured through the mine, twelve-by-twelve timbers and steel plates as solid as the hull plating of a Navy frigate were in the midst of being bolted in place for a new station floor on 4400. Bill Mitchell brooded over the possibility that welders working on the job had inadvertently touched off a fire. As Mitchell waited on the station for the guys on the east side of the drift to arrive, he began to believe the fire was somewhere on their level. The smoke was so damn intense, its source couldn’t be far. Could a hot bolt have fallen somewhere from the station? Other miners on 4400 searched, but failed to turn up anything. Sinuses were running and eyes were burning, yet the seventeen men clustered on the smoke-filled station stayed remarkably calm. The wait seemed long, and the smoke sent nearly every man into a coughing fit—some to the point of retching.
Mitchell soaked his shirt in water and wrapped the sopping garment around his face. At the same time, his partner, Bob Waldvogel, was working his asthma inhaler with unmitigated ferocity. Mitchell, who had no respiratory problems, could barely fill his lungs without gagging. The deep puffs from the little cylinders Waldvogel clutched seemed to provide little relief. But it was hard to tell just how badly he was doing. It was taxing to see much of anything at all. When the double-drum cage finally stopped at the station, Mitchell, Waldvogel, and the rest lined up. Several men from another level were already packed into the rear.
“Oh, I forgot my dinner bucket!”
It was Waldvogel. He could be forgetful. He had even earned a nickname in younger days as a Bunker Hill drift miner. Miners there called him Dumb-dumb.
Mitchell understood the real significance of the declaration. Waldvogel wasn’t fretting over leftovers. He needed his bucket because a moment before the cage came, he stashed his inhalers inside and set his bucket on the floor.
“No problem. I’ll get it,” Mitchell said, stepping from the cage and disappearing behind the black camouflage of smoke. Because he could hardly see, Mitchell crouched low on his knees and felt around where they had been waiting. He found his partner’s dinner bucket and returned to the cage. By then the conveyance was full. Mitchell figured he’d catch up with Waldvogel on the train to the Jewell.
“Bob, I got your bucket,” he called out. “See you on thirty-seven.”
The cage disappeared, and a tear in the smoke curtain momentarily revealed that Mitchell and Ed “Speedy” Gonzalez were the only men left from the original group. Randy Peterson had joined them, having jumped off the cage with shaft boss Dusty Rhoads. As they stood in the rapidly swelling smoke, Rhoads outright rejected the suggestion that a hot bolt from his shaft crew had touched off a fire. It wasn’t goddamn possible. No one could find the fire anyway. Only smoke. And it came fast. Cage tender Randy Peterson was the first to realize he was dying. It was as though the smoke had gone solid, lodged in his throat, and created a barrier that good air could not penetrate. Hacking up a cork of mucus could get him breathing, if only there was something to breathe. Peterson left the station for the compressed-air line that ran an air tugger, a conveyance used to load heavy timbers onto the cage. As quickly as he could, he knocked the nut loose that held the air line and released a breeze over his face. Seeing this, others followed his lead. The force of the blowing air peeled off the smoky layer and gave instant relief. It would have been even better had Peterson been able to suppress the heavy coughing that sought to clear his lungs. He was worried.
There ain’t anyone coming back here, Peterson thought. If the cage didn’t get there soon, he knew he was going to die. So would the others. The smoke had built to the point where it could be felt as much as seen and tasted.
Several minutes later, fill-in cager Greg Dionne appeared at the gate on 4600. A tall guy with a sturdy, sinewy build, Dionne was foreman Harvey Dionne’s son. At twenty-three, Greg Dionne was a well-liked go-getter who could size up a fellow and pronounce him a best friend before a beer was half drained. He swung open the gate and removed the mouthpiece of his self-rescuer. He’d come just in time. They loaded and belled the cage to 4600.
12:22 P.M., MAY 2
4600 Level
WITH THE FOUR MEN FROM 4400—BILL MITCHELL, RANDY PETERSON, Speedy Gonzalez, and Dusty Rhoads—on board, Dionne left the cage to answer a ringing phone while Peterson helped Dennis Clapp, Virgil Bebb, Charlie Casteel, and several others climb on. When Dionne returned, he belled them to 3100—not the station at 3700. Mitchell, who had once been a cager, knew the bell system and wondered what was up. The man train was on 3700. The men from his level had gone to 3700.
As the cage passed 3700, the men aboard saw a wall of smoke backlit by lights that normally flooded the station with daytime brightness. Some of the guys groaned when
it dawned on them they wouldn’t be stopping there. They were soaking wet from their own sweat. One complained that his coat was on 3700—and he needed it.
“Shit, it’s cold in the Jewell,” he said.
Around 3550, the cage sputtered and yo-yoed without warning. Bill Mitchell wondered if the hoistman had been smoked out, and had had to clutch out and stop the cage. It made no sense to stop it there for any other reason. The 3550 had been boarded up for years.
“There’s no place for us to get off,” someone called out from the back.
“What’s he doing? What’s he stopping here for?”
One man let out a kind of guttural scream, and Dionne tried to keep order. He was calm, and his reassurance felt genuine.
“He’s clutching out one side,” he said.
A moment later the cage heaved again, upward to 3100, where it stopped. Gene Johnson was there, sitting on a block of wood to the right of the station. Flanking the foreman was Byron Schulz and cager Roger Findley. Some saw Schulz as a goof-off—a kid who didn’t take mining seriously. Schulz, twenty-one, was a cut-up. He’d make a joke, pull a prank, or just kick back a little longer than some thought he ought to. At Sunshine he’d done most of the jobs given to the green guys out of high school. He’d operated the mucking machine, done a little mining, acted as a helper, and run the cages—double-drum and chippy. Schulz was caging on the double-drum the morning of May 2, pulling muck from pockets on 4200 and 5600.
Shift boss Virgil Bebb distributed self-rescuers, but nobody was having much luck getting them to do the job. One miner rammed his against a coupling to activate the breather.
“I want to get this thing working,” another said, as though the force of his will would make it operate.
Seeing this, Johnson got up, his movements slower than the usual quick deliberation he gave to everything. He yelled at the men to get moving and not stop for anything. He told Dusty Rhoads and Arnold Anderson to get down to 3400 and he’d give them the go-ahead to turn off a pair of 150-horsepower fans used to boost the ventilation system. It occurred to Johnson that the fans might be making things far worse—pushing bad air into the mine.
Only two—Mitchell and Peterson—knew the way out to the Jewell. Dennis Clapp had worked at Sunshine for a couple of years and had never before set foot on 3100. Speedy Gonzalez passed a wet T-shirt to Peterson to plaster over his mouth and nose until he could get his self-rescuer working. Peterson stared blankly at the cylinder with the nose pinchers, mouthpiece, and flimsy head straps. This is a piece of crap. They are all pieces of crap. He scuttled it to the floor. Peterson was jacked up and anxious to get out of the mine.
“Forget these fucking things! Let’s go!”
The men below 3100 continued their frantic calls for a cage. Each was answered, but one thing wasn’t disclosed. The trapped men thought they were talking to the 10-Shaft hoistman on 3100—the man who could get them out of there. Instead, the suggestion to crack open an air pipe and build barricades came from a foreman on the surface.
“Hang on, help is on the way,” he said.
Castaneda stayed on the overloaded party line. As frenetic overlapping voices taxed his comprehension, it hit him hard that miners in the deepest levels where smoke was not as severe were almost apologetic when asking for help.
“Yeah, I know you have a job to do,” one coughed into the phone. “But I want you to know we’re down here.”
By then the hoist room on 3100 had been silent for what seemed like hours but was more a matter of seconds or minutes. Castaneda refused to think the worst—that the hoistman was dead. Maybe he’d passed out and another was on his way.
A moment later, Castaneda heard Dusty Rhoads’s voice break the silence. From 3400, on the mission to turn off the fans, he said that Arnold Anderson had passed out. Gene Johnson answered, and the instructions he gave should have clued in everyone to how serious things had become.
“Don’t wait,” he told Rhoads. “You just better get out of there.”
12:23 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level
FEAR CAN PARALYZE. IT CAN MAKE A MAN COWER LIKE A KICKED dog as he gives in to terror. Occasionally it leads men to actions they would never, ever disclose. Cowardice in battle is written about only by someone other than the man who ran. Terror can also jolt a man and transform him into something greater.
Cage tender Peterson was as anxious as he’d been in Vietnam, when mortars hurtled right at him in streaks of white, only to hit another soldier, sending fireworks and chunky blood raining down. As he led men through the drift, his eyes burned and his lungs convulsed as though they were skirmishing inside his tightening chest—as if there was no room to hold all his vital organs. Peterson had suffered from asthma since childhood, a mild form that precluded running as a sport or pastime. At that terrible moment, his asthma made sifting oxygen from the black air nearly impossible. The only thing that kept the twenty-three-year-old from giving in to the smoke that was waging war against his respiratory system was that he believed if he didn’t lead them out, they’d all die. He didn’t think of his family, of any regrets he had or what he wished he’d done in the event that his own life would end right there. His only concern was the other lives on the line three thousand feet underground.
Just a little longer, he thought. If I can only hold on a little longer. These are my guys.
Things were deteriorating with a suddenness that scared the hell out of the men on 5000. Smoke turned opaque. Men were gagging, and nobody knew how to work the self-rescuers, which had been locked in a bright orange cabinet on the station wall. Darol Anderson, the timberman working with Delmar Kitchen, raced to the box, busted it open, and, despite the smoke, somehow read the instructions. The plunger that activated the unit by breaking a protective seal, however, proved formidable. Anderson used his wrench to smash open the seal.
Anderson scooped up self-rescuers and passed them out. Markve was so unfamiliar with the units that when the canister cover fell onto the track, he took his lamp off to look for it. He thought that the protective cover was the self-rescue unit itself.
Kitchen kept his teeth clamped on his mouthpiece and helped others smack their self-rescuers into working.
The men on 5000 were blind. It was so dark, one man pressed his palm into the shaft to feel the steel gate of the cage—in case it was there and no one could see it. The smoke moved in a circle, following the airflow of the drift. It skirted over the grizzly, leaving the air there, approximately forty feet from the station, halfway clear.
Men huddled in the grizzly, sunken below track level, and let a whiz-bang discharge fresh air over them.
“Come over here! At least we have a little air,” one called over to the station, where the smoke continued to build. None went over. They were paralyzed.
Fifteen
12:25 P.M., MAY 2
5000 Level
WHEN THE CAGE CAME, IT WAS SO SUDDEN AND FULL THAT Delmar Kitchen didn’t make it in time to get a spot on board, though he was right behind his partner, Darol Anderson, who had. It was impossible to see exactly how many were on board, but it appeared to be about ten men. Another couple could be shoehorned inside, if not for the muck pile that consumed a back corner. Kitchen stood on the station and worried about his father, Elmer, and his brother, Dewellyn. He hoped they were already out of the mine.
Cager Greg Dionne held a rag over his mouth and nose, and was making a move to bell the men up.
“You’re going with me,” Anderson yelled at Kitchen.
Kitchen took a couple of steps back. “I’ll wait here. I’ll catch the next one.”
“I’m not leaving you. Jump. Jump aboard. Now!”
Anderson held out his arms and scooped up his partner. Another miner frantically pushed some muck to the side to try to improve Kitchen’s footing, but the effort proved futile. Somehow, as Dionne belled the cage up, Anderson kept his arms around Kitchen. Kitchen flailed and grabbed for a railing. With no room for his heels, most of his w
eight remained on his toes. He caught a rail and hung on. The cage screamed up the shaft so fast that some thought it was going at muck speed. Even in the dimness of the cage, Kitchen could see that another miner was having trouble.
“Can I have a bite of that thing you got in your mouth?” he said.
Though it was risky, considering his precarious balancing act, Kitchen removed his mouthpiece and the other miner took a long drag. Seeing this, Anderson offered his self-rescuer to another young miner while he held his breath. At about the 3550 level, there was a sudden burst of fresh air. Good, cool, fresh air. It was as if they’d all been underwater and suddenly, when they’d thought they might drown, they broke through the surface.
“Thank God, we have some air!” a man called out. Relief was more powerful than fear. For a moment the men thought the worst was over. But in another flash, the smoke returned.
ACE RILEY WAS CONFUSED BY THE SOURCE OF SOME SMOKE. AT FIRST he thought the pig, or jackleg’s oil reservoir, was throwing too much oil, but his partner, Joe Armijo, disagreed and the two even argued for a moment what it could be. Armijo, thirty-eight, was more than a partner; he and Riley were drinking and hunting buddies. The son of Mexican immigrants, Armijo was both tough and stubborn. He had reason to be. Beyond the rigors of a tramp miner’s life, moving from the Coeur d’Alenes down to a gold mine in Nicaragua and back, he had an additional burden. His wife, Delores, was emotionally unstable. His home life was a living hell. One time he told Riley about an incident that had occurred en route to a doctor.
“She jumped out of the car and ran to the police station. Said I was kidnapping her. They damn near arrested me.”
Riley counted his own lucky stars. No man should put up with that, he thought.
When warned about the fire Tuesday afternoon, Riley was somewhat indifferent. There’d been other fires, and using past experience as a gauge, he figured they’d sit around the station and yak until all the hubbub and smoke cleared. Gyppos didn’t have a minute to waste. Every moment was spent working to make money. Coffee breaks and jawing over lunch at the station was for the day’s-pay guys. Even when an Idaho mine inspector came through and wanted to talk, a typical gyppo would turn a deaf ear and get back to work. Short of cutting off his air supply, no real gyppo would stop to talk to anyone. Keep blasting, breaking rock, and planning the next round—all the way to the bank. If they had saved, which most didn’t, their bank accounts would be flush. In the best of times, up into the early 1970s, the best gyppo miner made upwards of $50,000 a year.
