The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  With lunch ten minutes away, Randy Peterson and Roger Findley listened politely as shaft foreman Fred “Gene” Johnson showed them how to do things his way with some timbers and fan lines before announcing that he had to head out to the Jewell. Working with Johnson always meant jumping to it. The sooner a guy came to terms with that, the better everyone got along. Peterson didn’t mind Sunshine’s most demanding boss. Despite Johnson’s hard-ass persona, Peterson respected the shaft foreman because he knew his business.

  10:45 A.M., MAY 2

  Underground

  SAFETY ENGINEER BOB LAUNHARDT FINISHED HIS MORNING ROUNDS at about the same time brusque Gene Johnson left his two cage tenders. Launhardt felt good. He liked going underground, the daily reminder that there was directness and simplicity to metal mining. If his old man, a farmer, could see the tangible world of mining, Launhardt believed he’d completely understand the appeal and the simplicity. If crops failed, there was no money.

  Growing up on a farm during the Dust Bowl years in Collinsville, Illinois, Bob Launhardt was one of five born to a taskmaster father and a sickly and sometimes emotionally chilly mother. Both parents were strict, remote, and deeply religious. Launhardt would later reason that they were only products of their own German Lutheran upbringing, one that drummed into their psyches a work ethic that made no allowance for the extras, like nurturing children. It was just as well. The Depression years were not for merrymaking, anyway. But in all fairness, his mother and father occasionally exhibited a kinder side. Bob’s dad taught him to drive a tractor at six, and a car at nine. His mother was a terrific cook; her angel food cakes nudged the clouds.

  For more than three years a field-cracking drought and coughing wind mowed over struggling crops, and the family’s cash reserves dwindled to next to nothing. Praying for rain was an exercise in futility, but it was practiced daily. Chickens died and window ledges were covered with a traceable film of dust and poultry feathers. Launhardt’s mother’s asthma worsened during those years, but there was no real treatment besides confinement to an oxygen tent. The pressure exacerbated his father’s remote nature, until it turned his anger outward. He repeatedly told Bob and his older brother that they were “not worth their salt,” words that would echo in Bob Launhardt’s mind for the rest of his life. Nothing he could do would make his father happy. Launhardt left home at seventeen and enrolled in a Lutheran prep school and seminary college in Missouri, with plans to be a minister. His future was his own plan, a personal road map that called for discipline with caring. His plan was on course until his uncle Bill, a gold prospector who had seen the country from Alaska to California, made an offer of a summer job in Idaho. That changed everything.

  THE TALACHE MINING COMPANY IN ATLANTA, IDAHO, WAS IN ITS declining years when Bob Launhardt, then nineteen, arrived to shatter rock in the summer of 1951. In its heyday, decades before, the Talache was the largest gold producer in the state—and one of the best gold mines in the country. It was located in a remote spot in the mountains along the middle fork of the Boise River. The little camp swelled and shrank over the years, following the availability of ore, the advances of metal recovery techniques, and the switch from donkeys to machines. Launhardt’s first three days on the job were spent shoveling fallen rock from an exploration drift into a muck car and depositing the worthless load in the waste dump. Not exciting, but decent work. After each night’s rest, Launhardt returned to find as much muck in his working area as had been there before his shift the previous day. It was mystifying. Finally, someone copped to the reason. They’d been working in a place of “rotten ground” where the rock above the timbers was so fractured that it rained pebble- and marble-sized pieces all night long. Sometimes bigger pieces, two hundred pounds or more, dropped, too. It certainly wasn’t the safest job, but Launhardt was young and not one to complain, anyway. His next assignment there was no better. The Talache foreman had the lanky young man drilling and loading old—and volatile—gelatin dynamite into a new raise. He didn’t offer any training, just a quick send-off.

  “Here’s your buzzy,” he said, indicating a 104 Gardner-Denver drill with a telescoping leg that gave it its other nickname, jackleg. “Here’s your drill steel. We’ll bring you some powder this afternoon.”

  The foreman, with big, leathery catcher’s-glove hands, pointed to the back of a darkened stope and told Launhardt to get busy.

  “Just start drilling, son.”

  No mention of the importance of safety was offered. Just the command to get going.

  The Illinois teen worked alone, drilling, blasting, and running the raise like some goddamn movie miner. When timbering, he’d lower a rope to track level and an unseen helper would tie on a five-foot timber and Launhardt would haul it up. He’d set it above two posts and wedge it into place. The pressure of the rock—quite literally the weight of the world—held it in place. No spikes were used at the Talache. Wedges of wood were shimmed into cracks and along pressure points to ensure a snug fit. It was only the grace of God and the work of men that kept mines like the Talache from collapsing.

  Back then, Launhardt earned a passable $10.25 a day and rented a house for $10 a month. Electricity set him back $20—the cost of mining in a remote place and being at the mercy of those who made a living off miners. With his mother in a hospital oxygen tent with asthma, Launhardt sent most of his paychecks back home. He didn’t need money, anyway. For a mining town, the place was surprisingly straitlaced and quiet. He made a few good friends, including a father-and-son team, Delbert and Duwain Crow. That fall he returned to Illinois for his second year in seminary and was assigned to his home parish. He soon realized the politics of running a church was not to his liking. He was a solitary figure, a man who didn’t want to be enmeshed in consensus-building. He figured he’d serve in the Army and figure out his life. Launhardt notified the draft board only to find the Army wouldn’t take him—he was legally blind in one eye. His uncle’s words, which couldn’t have made sense without the experience at the Talache, took hold. Mining gets into your blood. No one knows why, but it does. Tall, skinny, and excited by the adventure, Launhardt drove his ’48 Chevy west, and when he hit Kellogg, he knew he’d made it home. He moved into the Crows’ little house, two blocks from the post office. His first day at Sunshine was March 13, 1954. He started at the bottom, earning $13.70 a day.

  Around that time, Sunshine was in the throes of a fight with the miner’s union. The tradition of union and management unrest and distrust, in fact, was deep and bloody in the Coeur D’Alenes. North Idaho had been the site of some of the most brutal and divisive labor uprisings in American history. For a decade prior to the turn of the last century, the Coeur d’Alene Mining Wars had drenched the district in miners’ blood. Miners wanted a bigger piece of the stake that was making mine owners rich. They traded their picks for rifles, hijacked trains, and bombed Bunker Hill’s mill. But of all district mines during recent history, Sunshine probably saw the most discord between labor and management.

  Since the 1950s the feds were convinced that communists ran the unions, and that Sunshine, in particular, was a hotbed of commies. Sunshine job applications required new hires to disclose whether they were affiliated with the Communist Party. When Launhardt was a new hire, there was talk among some of the men that he was an FBI plant who’d come to get the goods on the miners and their potentially subversive activities.

  Once he was better known and trusted, a fellow pulled him aside.

  “You just don’t fit in here,” he said. “In a way, you’re lucky to be alive. You’re lucky someone didn’t throw you down the shaft.”

  Launhardt shrugged it off. He felt luckier for another reason. He’d found the woman he’d marry.

  WHEN JANET NOYEN WAS SEVEN, HER PARENTS, BILL AND HAZEL Noyen, purchased the Wayside Grocery on Smelterville’s main drag. It was 1946, and the town was in its heyday, with a movie theater, another market, a drugstore and soda fountain, car dealerships, and a nice little public park where
kids could swing. Smelterville was packed with the kids of miners and loggers. It was a place where splashing in the milky water of Lead Creek—the runoff from tailings left by Bunker Hill and other district operators—came with a warning. Kids were admonished to rinse off after a swim and never to drink the water. But no one was afraid to play in it. In the beginning, Launhardt fretted over the green metallic finish of his car, a Chrysler convertible. Every now and then, acid rain would pelt Smelterville and Kellogg, mottling the paint on cars. Launhardt saw how others just accepted the air quality and the problems born of living in an industrial area trapped in a valley. Smelter smoke was an irritant to the upper respiratory system and bronchial tubes, but as far as anyone knew, it wouldn’t kill people. Livestock, maybe.

  Tall, blond, and very pretty, Janet Noyen certainly wasn’t the first high school girl to have a crush on an older man. Launhardt was seven years her senior, a man with a steady job at Sunshine and a convertible with Scotch plaid upholstery. They met at the American Lutheran Church in Kellogg, where he was Luther League adviser. Handsome and brainy, Launhardt was the kind of man who listened and processed his words before offering an opinion. They married on September 2, 1956, and moved into one of the rental houses that barnacled the route to the mine. Not long afterwards, the Launhardts bought a house at the apex of an invisible triangle that ran between the two most important buildings in the community—the Sunshine Mine manager’s house and the Big Creek Store. The community also included Sunshine housing, a neighborhood of forty-two company-owned residences, most of which were three bedrooms (“built for families”) with appliances that included an electric range, a hot water heater, and a floor furnace. Sunshine leased the houses by the year, with rents averaging around $45 a month. By far the most extravagant of Big Creek’s residences was the mine manager’s mansion, a big white colonial built by the company in 1935. It had a maid’s quarters, a kitchen with a paneled dining room, and a drawing room that always smelled of cigars and whiskey. Miners dubbed it “the guest house” because no one stayed there long.

  The Launhardts settled into a nice, comfortable life. Janet ran the household while her husband worked underground as a pipe fitter up the road at Sunshine. She learned to deal with the dull ache of worry when she felt the rumble of a rockburst. Sometimes it felt as if a mini-earthquake shook the house, tinkling the dishes in the sink drainer and jostling the floorboards. Living in Big Creek gave Launhardt an even stronger dose of the daily rhythm of the mining life. Riding the bright orange Sunshine Mining Company buses with men from Wallace, Osburn, and Kellogg also provided the young pipe fitter with a better look into the lives of others caught up in the rhythm. Younger miners tended to drive to work, so the miners on the bus were often older down-and-outers, or those who just plain didn’t own a car because they spent their money elsewhere. A few got in at one of the whorehouses in Wallace and Kellogg, indicating how they’d spent their nights. Boozy breath and talk of screwing some barmaid or waitress filled the stagnant air and shocked the former theology student. It didn’t fit with his memories of Talache gold miners. The Sunshine crowd was nothing like those homebody miners. The men on the bus were seasoned tramp miners, and their lives were like their military or jail tattoos, ragged and colorful as hell. After shift, the men would leave Sunshine’s parking lot, trails of cigarette smoke and cranked-up country music trumpeting the end of the day. And one after another they would slow down and rejoin the horde in front of the Big Creek Store. Launhardt pumped his brakes to squeeze past traffic, but he never stopped inside.

  Bob Launhardt was a family man. In December 1957, his son, Rob, was born. Almost a year and a half later his daughter Julie followed. In 1962, baby Jeannie arrived. By then Launhardt had moved up the union ranks to chief grievance committeeman and finally president of the local. He was a good organizer and leader, and he did the paperwork that others couldn’t be bothered with. When offered the safety job at the mine, he said yes.

  On the morning of May 2, 1972, his inspection complete, Launhardt caught the cage to the surface and made his way to the showers in the shifters’ dry. The cleanup was needed. Grime rolled around his collar, and his black hair clung to the nape of his sweaty neck. The trip underground had been extraordinarily swift. It was the only time he’d made it back topside before lunch.

  Eight

  10:50 A.M., MAY 2

  5000 Level

  THE LATE-MORNING ROUTINE ON 5000 WAS INTERRUPTED WITH an altercation between Butte transplant Ace Riley; his partner, Joe Armijo; and their shift boss, Bob Anderson. Riley and Armijo were angry that the stope they had been working was a loser, and they wanted another—one that would give up sufficient muck to pay out decent gyppo money. Riley, thirty-two, wasn’t shy about making his point known, and his boss didn’t care much for his attitude. Anderson refused to commit to getting them out of that stope without having to lose any pay. Riley and Armijo wanted action right then and there, but Anderson was more concerned about the day’s production. He wanted them to get back to work and shoot their round. They’d talk about another stope later.

  But Riley, a man with a deep bullfrog voice and an admitted hot temper, wouldn’t let up. “There’s no sense in taking that round today, or in doing anything more here.”

  Anderson turned away. Riley, his dark, wavy hair and long sideburns dripping with sweat, got angry and switched on his drill and turned his back. It was a kind of “fuck you, boss” stance that miners frequently employed. No man can argue when he can’t hear a word.

  Anderson paid it no attention and left just before 11:00 a.m.

  11:00 A.M., MAY 2

  4600 Level

  THE DAY’S TEMPO TOPSIDE WAS A LOT SLOWER ON THE MORNING OF May 2 because it was the day of the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Most of the big bosses were gone. The men at the geology and engineering department took a little longer with their coffee and newspapers in the break room of the dull-yellow and blue building across from the administrative offices. They lingered, waiting for the paperwork to arrive from the shifter’s shack with instructions about which stopes needed sampling.

  Larry Hawkins, twenty-eight, was one of several Sunshine rock technicians, or “rock rabbits.” A big man at six feet and 220 pounds, he considered his job every bit as vital to the fortunes of the company as mining ore. The company, which frequently scrimped on development work, needed to know where the highest-grade ore was coming from and how much it could expect. Hawkins’s job was to map the specific location of ore bodies and to retrieve samples from corresponding headings. That required charting the length and depth of the stope and the width of the vein on graph paper. The angle of the ore body was also recorded. A little hammer chipped off samples that he put in a little white canvas bag and ticketed for the assay office.

  Rock rabbits weren’t always welcome. Some miners figured they’d become experienced enough that they could see or even taste the quality of ore in their stopes. They didn’t need a damned scientist to tell them they were working a second-rate stope—or one that was going to make them a buttload of money. Most gyppo miners were annoyed that they had to stop to let the technician do his work. Stopping cost them money. A few were always ready to catch a smoke break. Just one cigarette, though. Any longer and they’d get aggravated, too.

  When the paperwork came, Hawkins, dressed in diggers, went down to 4600 to climb down the raise to 11 stope on 4800. The morning was a little quiet, oddly so. It seemed that the miners on the station at 4600 had kicked back a little early. A couple of the guys had removed work belts laden with tools and cap-lamp battery packs. Another was sleeping. There wasn’t much bullshitting going on. Hawkins tied up the cords of a sample bag and looked around. Seems like some of those guys must have had a rough night, he thought. It was a little early for napping, as some men did every day during lunchtime, from eleven to eleven-thirty.

  Hawkins finished and rode the cage up to the so-called blue room on 3700. Nobody who worked at Sunshine was really sure a
bout how the foremen’s hangout came to be painted a hue somewhere between baby blue and the bottom of a swimming pool. Some thought the color scheme went back to the 1950s, maybe earlier. Whenever it was, it was clear that someone had had some extra paint and decided that nearly every surface of the blasted-out room should be coated in pale blue. A substation, cordoned off with chain link, took up one end of the fifty-foot space. At the opposite end was a fourteen-foot-long desk with several benches—painted blue, of course. Shifters met there, ate, and did paperwork. Fluorescent and incandescent lighting kept the whole thing illuminated with a cool glow in one of the hottest sections of the mine. Gene Johnson, Harvey Dionne, and the Bush brothers, Bob and Jim, were among the men talking and drinking coffee when Hawkins arrived. It was a ten-minute ride on a Mancha Midget, a small, passenger-only, battery-powered train used to travel through much of the mine. Running a motor brought a little rush. It wasn’t the life-and-death excitement of mining a stope or running a shaft, but it wasn’t completely devoid of danger. Reeling down a track at fifteen miles an hour was fun—like a Disneyland ride on eighteen-inch gauge rails. At the Jewell, Hawkins took the cage to the surface, the brilliant light of day pouring in from the portal.