by Gregg Olsen
“Does he have a chance?” Betty Larsen asked when he told her.
“No way,” Findley coughed out. As far as he knew, he had been the last one out of the mine. “And I wouldn’t have made it if they hadn’t thrown me on an ore car.”
Larsen sat quietly while Findley was on the phone with his wife. She wanted to cry. The nineteen-year-old miner’s words pierced her heart.
I can’t imagine how she feels, she thought. How would a woman feel if that was her husband calling?
Twenty-three
2:00 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level, Jewell Station
SAFETY ENGINEER LAUNHARDT TRIED TO COLLECT HIS FRAYED wits. The station was wall-to-wall men; each looked down the drift, wondering what would come next. Who might be coming next? None were prepared to do anything. Many were without hardhats and lamps. None had any breathing devices. All they could do was talk about what they should do. Some came down from the warehouse and the carpenter’s shop, and some from the mill. Many probably hadn’t been underground in months. Some had never entered the mine before.
Launhardt checked the detector tube on the Draeger. It gave a positive reading for a slight amount of carbon monoxide. All at once, the usually reserved and laconic man found a boom in his voice.
“You guys get the hell out of here and back up the shaft, now! We all have to go up now. We’re going to have a repair crew start at the surface and go in on each level. Need to seal where air’s leaking.”
ON THE SURFACE BY THE JEWELL, CLEAR AIR BLEW OVER HIS SWEATY face, chilling Kenny Wilbur like the abrupt gush of a slammed freezer. A cluster of men swarmed around. All had the same questions. They wanted to know what he’d seen underground. Any sign of a partner? A best buddy? A brother? Wilbur could offer nothing to console them. It was so smoky down there, he couldn’t be sure who he’d really seen.
Over at the shifter’s shack, the bosses, hoping that it would lessen smoke in the drift, wanted someone to go down to open air doors just off the Jewell Shaft on 3700.
“I’ll go back down,” Wilbur said, without really thinking. As he saw it, he was obligated to go to 3700, since there was no cager there. It was his job. Another cager joined him for the quick trip. In a few minutes they’d wedged open the doors. The station was eerily quiet. On the way up, they stopped on 3100. Wilbur noticed the cars and the McCaas that Launhardt and his rescue team had left behind. They had probably done whatever they could and were out of the mine. A moment later, Wilbur was topside.
By the portal, Byron Schulz stirred from unconsciousness. The reprieve from his nightmare was over. Voices faded in and out. He could barely recall a moment after the frantic seconds of yelling when Don Beehner fell in the piss ditch. But he could not shut out what he’d experienced back at the 3100 station; each horrific image was etched in gruesome detail. Someone gave him a lungful of oxygen and loaded him into an ambulance.
EARLY AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Men’s Dry House
NO ONE KNEW WHO WAS STILL UNDERGROUND. THE MINE’S TIMEKEEPER attempted to track who had exited the Jewell, but the effort was wasted. Some who made it out returned underground to help with the rescue. The best record of who started shift that morning was in each of the shifters’ logbooks—slim, pocket-sized steno pads they carried in their hip pockets. All of those were still deep in the mine, because only a few shifters had made it out.
With the exodus from the mine, the scene in the men’s dry should have been chaotic. Instead, an unprecedented stillness held the cavernous room. Buz Bruhn was soaping up in the shower when partners Markve and Follette got there. Markve was still hacking and looked pale. Bruhn looked over and gave his head a shake.
“Say,” he said, “I’ll tell you right now, Sunshine’s gonna fool around today and kill somebody!”
Randy Peterson’s cage load of guys, his company of men, showered in silence. Steam edged the ceiling, and water pooled over the slow-moving drains. As he dressed in his street clothes, Peterson processed a checklist of those he’d seen on the cage. With one exception, all had made it topside. He hadn’t seen Dusty Rhoads, the fifty-seven-year-old mechanic who worked more for the fun of it than for the money.
Sometime around 2:00 p.m., Peterson returned to the portal, where he found men hovering over two supine miners strapped in rescue baskets. Someone administered oxygen, but it didn’t seem to be working.
“Open it up!” a mechanic called out to a miner by the oxygen tank. “Open it up!”
Two men carried Bob McCoy, the man who’d lit up a smoke and fallen, to the shifter’s shack. His face was crimson, but his skin was icy. They stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped him in a blanket. He also needed medical attention. Metallurgical accountant George Gieser expected more trouble to emerge from the mine, so he phoned the community ambulance service. He also told employees to stick around if they drove a station wagon or camper; they might be needed to transport men to the hospital. Central Mine Rescue, whom Launhardt had sent for, had set up four first-aid stations. Each had oxygen units to take care of the deluge of choking miners.
Peterson encountered Floyd Strand, the electrical foreman.
“Where’s Dusty?” he asked.
“He’s still on the 3400,” the foreman said. “And we’ve lost communication with 10-Shaft.”
A MAN MAKES HIS OWN CHOICES, AND THOSE DECISIONS SET THE stage for whatever happens in his life. Bob Follette had never wanted his son, Bill, to go underground at Sunshine or any other district mine. It was supposed to be temporary, a way to earn some money to finish his college education. Some of the men underground had been there out of necessity; they had families to feed. But Bill, twenty-three, didn’t fall into that category. He was married, a college kid who was bound to teach and coach basketball at some little high school in north Idaho. He had less than a year to finish his degree, but the lure of the money that came from mining sent him on a detour. Hunting, fishing, and playing around on one of the district’s dazzling blue lakes was too compelling for a young outdoorsman. His father understood. Some of the best moments of his own life had been spent with his sons, hunting in the Bitterroots. The Follettes came home once with one deer lashed to the front and another to the back of their VW bug. They ate venison for a year.
The image of his son, as he’d seen him that Tuesday morning, stayed with Follette. The thin six-footer had been fighting a cold. His skin was chalky and his eyes rheumy.
“You don’t look so good,” the father had said as they waited for the cage. “I wish you wouldn’t go down today.”
“Oh, I’ll make it all right,” the young man had answered. He knew that his partner, Louis Goos, couldn’t get a decent guy to fill in. A partner’s missed shift could knock a hole in their entire week.
Bob Follette was stoic when he called home. He doubted his boy would come out alive, but he didn’t say so to his wife.
2:45 P.M., MAY 2
3700 Level, Jewell Station
WITH 3100 A VERITABLE DEATH CHAMBER, BOB LAUNHARDT KNEW that the only other route to 10-Shaft was by 3700. Three new volunteers suited up. One, a squirrelly fellow who shaved about every two weeks, Stanley “Talky” Taylor, was a volunteer fireman in Wallace. Taylor, twenty-six, knew fires took on lives of their own, crawling through houses and sneaking into bedrooms, filling them with smoke while kids and family pets hid under beds. He knew smoke could hang in layers and filter through the thin spaces between doorjambs. But conditions on 3700 were totally foreign. The smoke was thicker and darker than a nest of burning tires, and its oily plume literally churned through the workings of the mine. Taylor was astonished. What could be burning that would make a smoke like that?
Launhardt’s team advanced on the seldom-used 5-Shaft. Launhardt checked for carbon monoxide. The shaft was lethal; no one could survive without respiratory protection. That wasn’t the worst of it. Launhardt studied the airflow and, even in the heat of the mine, felt a chill on the back of his neck. The drift’s intake airflow was carrying the bla
ck smoke eastward toward 10-Shaft. The poisoned air was pushing back to where the men were waiting for help.
When the mine’s safety engineer and the group came across the lifeless forms of fallen men, they knew there was nothing they could do for the men down deep, barricaded in drifts and waiting. They retreated from the mine.
Launhardt did his best to maintain focus, but the madness of the situation kept coming back to him. Rock doesn’t burn. Sure, every man, woman, and child old enough to spend a silver dollar knew that basic truth. That made hardrock mining eminently safer than, say, coal mining. Coal, after all, was mined because it was a fuel. Launhardt, Chase, Walkup, and the others all knew that. But they also knew something else. There was a silent forest underground, too. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of board feet of wood had been used to shore up the mined-out areas—the old country, as miners called it—for decades. Rock bolts and steel mats had reduced the amount of wood brought underground by far, but in decades past the mine had been filled with timbers.
Launhardt thought back on the Draeger and how it went black in an instant. How could that be so? And if timbers and gob had somehow ignited in the dank recesses of the mine, how was it possible that the enormity that was Sunshine underground be filled so quickly with so much carbon monoxide? It couldn’t be a wood fire, Launhardt thought. A wood fire underground in a wet mine couldn’t rage like the one that was sucking the life out of this mine. What was burning?
MINER ACE RILEY SHOWERED AND DRESSED AS QUICKLY AS HE could and went looking for Joe Armijo. Riley called out his partner’s name, but no response came. At the shifter’s shack, he saw men huddled in conference. Among the group were safety engineer Bob Launhardt, a shaken Jim Bush, and graveyard shift foreman Ray Rudd.
Riley asked if rescue crews were making progress.
“There’s nothing more we can do,” Bush said.
Riley’s blood heated up. “Get your goddamn ass down there and get that man,” he said, referring to Armijo. Launhardt was white. Bush, who’d just lost his forty-five-year-old brother, was in worse shape.
Riley didn’t care about any of that. Not just then. “It’s your fucking job!” he said to Bush.
The foreman didn’t blink, but it was Launhardt who spoke up.
“We need to start building a seal,” he said, “level by level.” He told Rudd that they should start on the 500 level and work down to seal off drifts connecting with the Jewell. He was concerned about old crosscuts and corroded bulkheads—anyplace where seepage probably occurred.
The two-hour life of the self-contained breathing apparatus only allowed for about forty minutes into a rescue before a man needed to return to fresh air. With 10-Shaft more than a mile from the Jewell, it meant the fresh-air base starting at the Jewell would need to be moved forward, closer to the shaft. Launhardt insisted they start moving methodically down the drift, sealing leaks as they went. It would be slow going, but it was the only safe way to get to the men trapped in the mine.
Rudd didn’t buy any of it. Until a few moments ago, all he’d known was that he’d been called out of bed and told to get his ass over to the mine. A veteran shifter with helmet training, his neck veins plumped like night-crawlers on a rain-soaked pavement.
“We’re not going to do that,” he said, his voice rising. “Were going back to look for people!”
He didn’t say so, but Rudd blamed Launhardt for nearly killing Larry Hawkins, who, married to his niece, was family. Launhardt, Rudd thought, had made a huge error in judgment. Hawkins and Beehner didn’t have training. And that’s Launhardt’s fault. Launhardt took those guys down there. It was a mistake. And a goddamn big one.
The ill-fated rescue effort on 3100 had cost one and almost two lives.
AN HOUR AWAY IN SPOKANE, WORD SHOT THROUGH THE SMALL bureau of the United Press International that a fire was burning in a Kellogg silver mine. Reporter Jerry McGinn immediately claimed the story. Though only twenty-six, the flame-haired and mustached McGinn had a better grasp on the culture of north Idaho’s mining district than most reporters. He’d been covering the valley since he was a student stringer. He’d learned that the best places to call for sports scores were the district’s hook houses. The madam would hold the phone to her breast and call out for the scores.
In fact, if there was anything other than silver, zinc, and lead that put the Coeur d’Alene Mining District on the map, it was the whorehouses that had catered to the men of mining and lumber camps for decades. Kellogg had shuttered the houses in 1966, but some entrepreneurial women still worked above a couple of the downtown bars. Wallace prostitutes, however, serviced a steady clientele in 1972 in the Oasis, the Lux, the U&I, or the other houses that served all-American helpings of sex. The Horseshoe Bar, below the Oasis in downtown Wallace, was a favorite waiting spot for dads who’d brought their teenage sons. They’d check in their boys with the madam and wait with a whiskey shot or two. “Brought my son up to initiate him. His birthday’s this week.” The son would call for his dad from the doorway, a boy not old enough to come inside for a drink, but ready to go home with a good story to tell.
If the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché had any genuine basis, it was in Delores Arnold, a Wallace madam with a powder-puff-coiffed white poodle and a practice of giving back to the community in tangible ways. Gutsy and enterprising kids always made a beeline to Arnold for school fund-raisers. But beyond band uniforms, a police cruiser, and scads of other things she gave openly, she also provided a service that local cops felt benefited the district in much bigger ways. The transient workforce of miners and loggers needed a sexual release. Arnold’s girls were the tonic. Every sheriff’s deputy thought so. Wallace-born movie star Lana Turner was the district’s prodigal daughter, but Madam Delores Arnold was its beloved and eccentric aunt.
Besides Nevada, no other part of the country had whorehouses as visible and accepted as Wallace’s. Their existence wasn’t the last vestige of the Old West, because in the district, the Old West still thrived.
Reporter McGinn happily reported the quirky tales of Idaho eccentricity, yet in all his pieces he wove in a thread of empathy. Mining district people were living and dying by the price of silver much the same way farmers lived and died by the weather. McGinn knew that they had good times and bad times, and that the worst and best could happen in the same week. And no matter how rough some had it, they’d left something worse to migrate to the district.
McGinn drove east from Spokane. Miners’ lives were wrapped up in uncertainty because that was the nature of the business. You go down there and risk your life, and if you live long enough, you get paid. If there isn’t a strike, if there isn’t a rockburst or a drop in the metals market or if your wife doesn’t leave you, you just might be able to pay your bills that week, McGinn thought.
The fire was just another obstacle for people always hoping for the best.
Twenty-four
EARLY AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Bunker Hill Mine, Kellogg
THE NIGHT BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY AT BUNKER HILL, IN THE spring of 1964, college student Harry Cougher opted to camp overnight in his car rather than give up the bucks for one of Kellogg’s famous rent-by-the-week rat-hole motel rooms. The smelter’s seething black stacks dwarfed the town and smudged the mountains that dropped straight, and all at once, to the valley floor. If it was no longer the richest mine, Bunker Hill was certainly the district’s biggest operation. Cougher stayed up half the night as heavy equipment lumbered along and workers dropped heavy kettles of processed ore, one after another. Working at Bunker Hill was more than just a summer job. His professor at the University of Idaho had set it up, saying Cougher had better get his butt over to Kellogg to see what he was going to do with a mining engineer’s degree.
The first day at Uncle Bunk’s, Cougher donned a white hardhat, letting every old hand know he was a trainee—the lowest rung. While Cougher could curse with the best of them in a bar or underground, his better-than-a-gyppo’s vocabulary and
professional aspirations gave him away. He sat next to an old-timer for that intimidating first ride down the mine’s incline shaft. The old miner’s dinner bucket sat squarely in his lap, and his eyes were fixed straight ahead. Cougher did the same. They were the only two people in the world as the cage went into darkness and low-hanging timbers whizzed overhead.
If he can do it, I can do it, Cougher thought.
Eight years later, Cougher was Uncle Bunk’s chief planning engineer—one of the youngest ever. He was in a meeting when the mine manager brought news of big trouble at Sunshine.
“A helluva fire,” the manager said. “There’s black smoke rolling out of Sunshine Tunnel.”
Cougher was among a handful of Bunker managers who had completed extensive “hotshot” training on breathing apparatuses superior to Sunshine’s equipment. There was a reason Uncle Bunk invested in advanced instruction. Other mines had bad country, with falling rock and rockbursts; still more regularly sent miners to the hospital for heatstroke. Bunker Hill had fires—about one a year. Old timbers and an antiquated electrical system that occasionally shorted out were the main culprits. Slushers were notorious for sparking, too. And at least once the shaft caught fire.
The Bunker Hill manager put the brakes on sending anyone to the rival mine.
“Let’s wait until they call us.”
The wait was brief, and Cougher and several others—an engineer, a geologist, and a maintenance foreman among them—packed up their gear for Big Creek.
2:10 P.M., MAY 2
Sunshine Mine Yard
ON HIS WAY TO GRAB A BEER BEFORE HEADING HOME, DENNIS CLAPP, the skinny longhair who had escaped the mine after alerting Flory and Wilkinson, stood in the yard, mystified.
“Goddamn,” he said, looking at the hoist’s massive cables. “How come they ain’t moving? Shouldn’t they be getting those guys out of there?”
