by Gregg Olsen
Idaho mines shared more than just their luminous underground Dagwood sandwich of lead, silver, and zinc. Labor strikes, chronic absenteeism, and pumped-up wanderlust made the workforces somewhat fluid. Tough and experienced miners moved freely among Galena, Lucky Friday, Star, Silver Summit, Bunker Hill, and Sunshine. But even as itchy-footed as miners could be, every man had his home mine. It was the mine to which he knew he could always return.
AROUND THE TIME BOB LAUNHARDT, FORTY-ONE, BACKED HIS ’68 maroon Chrysler Newport out of his Pinehurst driveway, the sun had risen, leaving the sky awash in luminous Maxfield Parrish hues. The men of Sunshine’s graveyard shift were leaving the mine. As safety engineer, Launhardt made it a practice to get underground as early as possible—before the day shift rode down to their working levels. He liked to get a head start on the day. Tall and lanky, Launhardt had dark, wavy hair that he combed back with a slight swoop. Black-framed glasses made him look like a schoolteacher, or maybe a middle-aged Buddy Holly. After a five-year absence, Launhardt returned to the district in February 1972, bailing out of another job going nowhere, wanting to reconnect with a part of his life where he felt worthwhile. He was quiet and thoughtful, the kind of man who got lost in a crowd, yet Launhardt believed he stood out because of his fierce dedication to the safety of the men of Sunshine. No one questioned his passion for his work. It was apparent in every move he made. Many, however, found it difficult to connect with him on a personal level. Guys he’d known for years never even got his name right. They called him Bob Longhart. Part of the distance was the result of his personality, but it was also his status as a salaried man. Miners saw Launhardt, other managers, and office workers as outsiders. The fact that Sunshine’s owners were now New Yorkers who hadn’t blasted a round in their lives didn’t help. Yet managers and bean counters were necessary. Silver mining was, after all, a business—and a dangerous one, at that. As safety engineer, Launhardt was there to make certain that each day every man who went into the mine came out alive. That involved working with national and state labor agencies and the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) to ensure that safety regulations were in place. It meant seeing that equipment was up to date and miners were properly trained in evacuation and rescue techniques. Guarding miners’ lives was a crucial job because so much could go wrong. Government statisticians and mining district undertakers frequently acknowledged mining as the most perilous job on or under the earth. Some assumed the safety engineer’s position existed solely to meet government regulations, mitigate the risk of union complaints, and dodge civil lawsuits. Some mine managers considered it little more than a necessary nuisance. The workers themselves understood that there were ways to avoid injury, but they dismissed many of those measures. Many considered risk and danger essential to the job’s mystique. Launhardt, a bespectacled Goody-Two-shoes among his peers, believed that if he could get men to think before they blast, to wear safety glasses, to cool it on the horseplay, just maybe he could save a life. His biggest challenge in 1972 was the same as always: How do you convince men that accidents are unacceptable and unnecessary? For Launhardt, who had once studied to be a Lutheran minister, promoting safety became as important as preaching the word of God.
There were many reasons for his vigilance, and all were damned good ones. Sometimes men fell down shafts so deep that nothing remained but bloody clothes and serrated splinters of bone. Rockbursts or airblasts, however, were the most feared of district hazards. Those occurred when the stone ceiling exploded under pressure and sent slabs of rock the size of camping trailers down to pulverize men into biological splat. Other times, it was the floor that gave way. The lucky ones were buried alive until someone could move two tons of rock to free them. Although Sunshine had its share, the district’s Galena Mine was considered one of the worst, if not the worst, for rockbursts. Anyone who’d worked there longer than a month experienced the sudden and frightening reaction of rock giving way to pressure. Old hands knew that as long as the rock was talking—making characteristic popping and grinding noises—they’d be all right. When it got quiet, that was the time to think about moving to a different location or taking lunch early. Whenever it was quiet underground, look out.
In the battle being waged by men with jackleg drills against the fractured and folded metamorphic world of the underground, men frequently lost. Every man knew there was no guarantee he’d ever see daylight again.
Launhardt knew some accidents had more to do with human error—little mistakes that miners made doing things they did right every other day. Veteran miner Stanley Crawford’s accident was a case in point. Crawford had been setting charges on some blocking in a shaft, as he’d done countless times. He set four fuses, but only three blasts rumbled through the mine. Crawford was confident that two had ignited simultaneously, thus obscuring the distinct sound of a fourth explosion.
“I’m gonna go look,” he said.
His partner didn’t like the idea. “Stay here and have a cigarette. We can check it after dinner.”
But Crawford was impatient and insistent. As he bent closer to take a look in the smoky air, the charge ignited. It was the last thing he ever saw. His eyes were blasted from their sockets like a pair of soft-boiled eggs.
Sunshine’s safety engineer knew the inherent reasons for Crawford’s mistake. The greater the danger, the more reckless men became. It was a mix of laziness, tempting fate for the buzz of adrenaline, and just plain ignoring the obvious. More men were hurt and even more died because someone decided to push something to a new limit. Miners sometimes took the extra step toward trouble. Trouble could be a rush.
Some health hazards were slower in catching up with the miners. Airborne silica turned lungs into wheezing dust bags. Corneas were trashed by gritty dust belching through the working areas, forced along by the man-made cyclone of ventilation fans. The omnipresent dust that bloomed inside the working areas after blasting consisted of near-microscopic particles of lead, tetrahedrite, and razorlike pieces of silica from the quartz that frequently hosted the veins being mined. After each round was blasted, the air thickened with gray dust. Miners breathed it all in. Some tried to deplete the cloud through the judicious use of water over a muck pile as they were slushing out their stope, the working area whose name was a bastardization of the word “step” from the days when mining was done in a stairstep fashion. But water only goes so deep—no more than six inches—and men and machines stop for nothing. They didn’t wear any kind of respirator or paper filter, though common sense would indicate that such precautions might help. Some of that was the result of tradition and ignorance, but it was also that Sunshine’s underground was so hot that it was difficult enough to breathe even without a barrier across your mouth. Breathing a little easier underground at age twenty was paid for at age sixty, when scar tissue from abrasive dust caught up with a man’s lungs. More than one old miner ended his days with an oxygen canister, a metal mongrel trailing on a leash with every step.
The steam-table heat of the mine and the repetitious work of mining machinery also created inescapable peril. Hands, wrists, and legs cramped up to such a degree that men looked like aberrant sand crabs, with arms all bunched up and hands locked in claws. One miner cramped up while waiting at the station for the cage, the underground elevator system. When the cage arrived, he couldn’t stand up. His legs had turned into rusted C-clamps tightening around the bench. To beat cramping, some ate potassium-rich bananas. They thought a banana, not an apple, kept the doctor away. One miner opened a pickle jar, drained all the juice into a glass—and chugged the briny solution in two gulps. The light-green-tinged liquid tasted like shit, but the salt did the trick. In the mid-1960s, Sunshine installed enormous ventilation fans that improved conditions, but for those guys working underground, it still felt like being in Panama in the middle of August.
Most miners became astute at reading their bodies. Before the onset of a headache—when a dull throbbing alerted a man before the pain jumped into a sledgehammer on the crani
um—was the only time to stem the inevitable cramping. Salt tablets stored throughout the working levels were the preventive, of course, and miners ate handfuls all day long. Wait too long, and fingers, toes, and other body parts started to curl, and nothing short of a bath in a vat of Morton’s would cure a case of heat cramps. A man in his teens and twenties could handle it better than an older miner, but even youth didn’t guarantee immunity. In the underground, nothing did.
Chronic heat-related indigestion was also an underground scourge. Men had to drag themselves to the station to get out of that hot, stinking hole, sometimes feeling sicker than they ever had in their lives. One Sunshine miner got so ill from the heat that he vomited all the way from 4600 to the 3700 station. As strong as they were, men had been shaken like paint mixers all day long underground, and they arm-wrestled with 115-pound jackleg rock drills in their stopes and rained sweat from every gland. One miner chomped Rolaids like Beer Nuts; another carried a bottle of sickly pink goo that he swigged with the same gusto as a whiskey shot.
Two variables ensured that underground accidents could and would come to pass—the earth was unstable and men took chances. Launhardt knew how men thought underground because he’d worked there. I’ve done this before. I can do it again. Injuries were an accepted cost of the business. Broken ribs and cracked skulls were the hidden costs of grandma’s silver tea set, the film in a young family’s camera, or the precious metals used in electronic components. Timber framing and five- or six-foot-long rock bolts were rarely enough to permanently shore up the guts of the earth. That realization was a thorn in his side. Launhardt knew that there were very few things that he could personally do to eliminate injuries from a fall of ground or rockburst—the greatest source of serious injury or fatality. Changing behavior when tradition, history, and male bravado had entrenched it was beyond his influence. Instead, Launhardt would preach safety to those who took an interest, and he’d see that lifesaving equipment was in working order. And when inevitable calamity occurred, he would suit up with the rescue team to extricate a miner from a two-ton tomb. If the accident involved a fatality, federal USBM and Idaho State Mine inspectors would arrive to conduct what was seen by many as nothing more than a cursory examination. Safety violations were cataloged and a narrative of the accident was captured on inspectors’ clipboards and they’d move on. Up through the 1960s, there were few teeth to whatever laws were on the books, anyway. If an operator could make an easy change to improve underground safety without too much expense, it usually got done. If it could be put off, it was.
Mine-shift bosses and foremen saw safety as the safety engineer’s responsibility with their own focus solely on production. Launhardt wanted the foremen to lead by example and—though some were exceptions—the foremen just didn’t buy it.
“Now wait a minute here,” one shift boss told him, “I’m not going to go around with all this babble you’re giving these men. It’s not my job. It won’t do any good. The men are going to get hurt regardless of whatever you tell them.”
Launhardt was profoundly disappointed by the dismissal. He’d preached safety with so much true belief that he expected that the concept had made at least some gains the years he was away from the district. He hoped there was the same prevailing momentum in mine safety as there had been in other dangerous industries. Just maybe, he thought, these Sunshine miners have let the importance of job safety sink in. Maybe there’s been a change in attitude. It took him less than a week back at Sunshine to see the futility of such hopes. Nothing had changed.
A FAMILIAR MAXIM AROUND THE DISTRICT THAT HAD THE DISTINCT ring OF truth was that miners work hard, play hard, and fuck hard. Everything miners did was hard. Physically demanding jobs, dangerous jobs, brought a greater need for blowing off steam. Nothing was kept inside, and no rules needed to be maintained, period. Like soldiers, miners were a lifelong fraternity. Most had grown up together and had dads or uncles who worked underground. Sure, they fought, as brothers do, and certainly there were the kinds of rivalries that pitted one man against another. But in reality, when push came to literal shove, miners were Johnny-on-the-spot. Pity the newcomer, the logger with a tough-guy attitude, the out-of-towner who came to cause trouble. Miners who were at odds with each other a minute before would chuck all their disagreements and draw battle lines around the outsider.
Launhardt was just a man who wanted to do his job and do it well. But as far as the men busting rock were concerned, Launhardt was not one of them. He was a guy who kept track of what they did wrong, wrote it down, and passed it along to the boss. The boss would come and make sure some irritating violation was corrected. All it did was slow down the process.
Every time the garage doors opened across the yard from Launhardt’s window, it was a reminder that his cautionary words, his best intentions, were frequently ignored. Launhardt could feel his adrenaline percolate as one of a pair of ambulances came into view. Shoved right in his face would be the sight of a “basket case,” a miner strapped into a Stokes stretcher, being put into the back of an ambulance for the ride down the mountainside.
As the calendar peeled toward May 2, the scene was played out with alarming regularity.
Two
5:50 A.M., MAY 2
Mullan, Kellogg, Pinehurst
MEN WENT MINING FOR MOSTLY THE SAME REASONS. THEY needed a job, had no other options, or fell into it because their dads and granddads had been miners. And while the supply was usually there, district mines as big as Sunshine had to duke it out for the manpower needed to keep things running. Bill Steele, Sunshine’s hiring agent, knew every man, every reason, every goddamn story ever used to get work—and get out of it. On the morning of May 2, Steele, a square-shouldered military type, looked at his bedside clock and knew he wasn’t going to lift his head from the pillow. A cold had knocked him down like a gust of wind. As men across the district prepared to head to Sunshine for another workday, Steele was probably the only one in the company who could name each one of them. Steele had taken the recruiting job in the early 1960s when Sunshine management dumped his predecessor because that man was more interested in the bottle than in working. More than two hundred men had applied for the position and, tellingly, all but three were disqualified for poor attendance. Steele never missed a shift, shaved every day, and talked more than a magpie. Keeping men coming into the mine sometimes required persuasion, even wiles. At the time, the hiring office was in a little building that had been the barbershop in the days when rootless tramp miners roomed in the boardinghouse, drank at the Big Creek Store, and left the mountainside only when they fell off it. It was nothing for Sunshine to hire ten or twenty men a day, because that many would quit at any one time. Steele started each morning in the shifter’s shack where bosses—shifters—rattled off manpower requirements.
“Bill, I need four miners.”
“Bill, I need two.”
“Bill, get me a couple laborers.”
Almost every day, Steele would return to his office, slide open the hiring window, and view the motley lineup. Many faces belonged to seasoned miners and were quickly hired, though Steele knew they’d be leaving soon. That’s just the way it was. Men rolled into town without a penny in their pockets. If they were any good at all, they’d have a job, a hot meal, and a room—all inside of a couple of hours. Some faces belonged to working miners’ sons. By the early 1970s, many in the district had seen a lot of good times, times where dumping a shift was seen as no biggie. After all, miners working on a contract were making as much out of their stope as they wanted. Steele learned that the best prospects to fill the employee labor pool frequently came from outside of the district, especially the Midwestern states. There he found young men who’d been stuck on a farm in Bumfuck, Nebraska, earning $200 a month, plus room and board. When Sunshine’s hiring man explained the pay scale of a laborer, it left young men slack-jawed.
“You can make about $250,” he said.
“Sounds good. For the month?”
&nb
sp; “No. That’s for a week.”
The farm boys were astounded by their good fortune. That the work would be harder than anything they had ever done, and would likely rewrite the trajectory of their lives, didn’t matter. It was more money than their fathers ever made.
New hires were sent to Sunshine’s warehouse for boots, a hardhat, a belt, and a pipe wrench—the essentials for the underground. After that, they were directed to Wallace or Kellogg for a physical examination. Doctors documented blood pressure, height, weight, and the disclosure of any possible past injuries, but they also paid close attention to the condition of a man’s lungs, back, and hearing. If a man’s eyesight warranted glasses, it was so noted and stipulated that he should wear them underground. Exams were quick. A man could get in and out in twenty minutes. Hired in the morning, medical once-over by lunchtime, the new hire was at the mine for the afternoon shift. Some, however, never made it that far. Every now and then, Steele saw new Sunshine-issued boots and belts in district hock shops.
No matter how much they made—$700 clear for gyppo or contract miners and even bigger weekly paychecks for men sinking shaft—plenty couldn’t make the money last until the next payday. There was a stinging irony to that, of course. On Fridays, Steele handed out paychecks that were more than what he made in an entire month. Yet by the following Wednesday the same guys would be leaning on the pay-window shelf, begging for a draw to get them through the week. Steele heard it all. Sometimes they’d say a kid was sick and had to see the doctor; other times they’d just put it on the line that they were flat busted. “I just gotta have it. My old lady’s really on my back. You gotta help me out here.” When he was feeling tenderhearted, Steele would fork over the dough a day early, keenly aware of the danger in doing so. Next time, the hard-pressed miner might beg for his check on Tuesday.