by Gregg Olsen
Marvin Chase was quietly ambitious, a little different from most of the mine managers in the district. He didn’t define himself solely by his position. He was a homebody who went to church and didn’t cheat on his wife. Some of the men who ran district mines were flashy—players who picked up women while their wives stayed home in houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and wrought-iron patio furniture. After a day at Sunshine, Chase was content staying home with his family, playing with their Airedale, or working on his stamp collection.
Marvin and Viola Chase had six children—four girls followed by two sons. The age gap between siblings was such that the oldest were out on their own and it was a family of five and a dog that made the move to the district. Mary, an eccentric teenager who played the zither, was certainly like none of the other girls at Kellogg High. Rob and Pete rounded out the still-at-home brood. The children found themselves high on the pecking order. On their first day in church at St. Rita’s, the priest introduced the family to the congregation. The boys were embarrassed by the misconception that came with their father’s new job. Some kids thought that because Marvin Chase managed the mine, that meant he owned it. One boy asked if they had gold bricks or diamonds stashed somewhere in their big white house on Big Creek Road.
The district didn’t have a trace of what Chase considered “fringies” such as there had been back in Seattle. No hippies, no college students waving cardboard signs. The Vietnam War was raging, and though the young men of the district were on the battle lines, the political turmoil that surrounded the war was nearly absent. It was like stepping back to the 1950s. It was hard for a newcomer to wrap his mind around it. Part of it was that there were indisputable connections among the district’s people; many even shared family histories as marriages occurred and dissolved over time. But there was something at work that kept the fabric from being woven too tight. People came, went, and returned. That was certainly true among tramp miners, who zigzagged from one district to another. There was also quite a bit of migration among the upper echelon. All of the moving around made it simple to renew old bonds. Men connected at the Wallace or Kellogg Elks, executive wives at bridge clubs, kids at school.
More reserved than his older brother, Rob, seventh-grader Pete Chase had a difficult time adapting to Big Creek. Though a pack of teenagers lived on the creek, only one or two boys were his age. He was too young to tag along with the older boys—though they sometimes took him fishing up at the mine bridge. But the afternoon of May 2 had been the best day of his life. His class had its annual picnic along the frothy banks of the south fork of the Coeur D’Alene River, and for the first time in a long while, the Chase’s youngest felt that he belonged to the group. When he heard there was a fire, he figured everything would be all right and never gave it a second thought. When Pete got home, he shot some baskets until his mother came outside. Her face was the picture of anxiety.
“Come inside,” she said quietly. It was disrespectful to play a game with a tragedy taking place right up the road. “Some people have been killed up at the mine.”
It was sunny and clear when Rob Chase got off the bus in front of the big white house. He had never seen so many vehicles headed up to the mine and parked along the road. Many were hastily double-parked. As the teenager made his way into the swell of onlookers, an afternoon shift worker yanked him aside.
“Bob Bush and some other miners are dead,” he said.
Rob knew serious injury and death came with the extraction of ore. The phone rang late at night enough times in the big white house to make it understood that things occasionally went wrong underground. He went up the hill.
A young Sunshine worker still in his teens said 3100 was an inferno. Rob, completely stunned, stayed mute. He had no idea what to say.
If that’s true, he thought, how are we going to get those guys out?
About that time, a man who had trained to be a priest, but had ended up at Sunshine, asked the mine manager’s oldest son to help keep reporters out of the yard. He was stationed at the bridge over the creek.
“Just tell them no one’s allowed in,” the man said.
BUNKER HILL HOTSHOT HARRY COUGHER’S CREW WAS TAPPED FOR another attempt at 3100, following Launhardt’s failed effort. Of the five on Cougher’s team, only graveyard shifter Ray Rudd was a Sunshine employee. Rudd was a good choice. He made it his business to keep tabs on who was coming and going at his mine. Miners called him “Mother,” which was as much shorthand for “motherfucker” as for his tendency to keep them in line. He’d trained half the crew, including Wayne Allen and Charlie Casteel. Rudd and former partner Duwain Crow also shared a bond—they’d survived a serious cave-in in 1961. Rudd had sustained broken ribs, shoulders, and vertebrae, requiring him to wear a body cast from armpits to waist for five months. Crow had been so shaken he had needed tranquilizers to get by.
Tethered together by a nylon link line, Cougher, Rudd, and crew worked their way down 3100; CO readings were deadly. Charlie Casteel was standing upright, stiff and lifeless, just where Hawkins had seen him. By Cougher’s estimation, Casteel was only a hundred feet short of fresh air. Cougher puzzled over a self-rescuer, which he presumed was Casteel’s. It was in the muck fifteen feet from his body, toward fresh air. Why is it in front of him? Maybe it slipped from his hand as he was running toward fresh air. Or maybe he turned back for some reason.
Moments later, deeper down the smoky drift, the crew discovered a clutch of bodies where men had collapsed where they stood. Rudd called out each man’s name as he pointed wildly around the drift.
“That’s Crow!” Rudd said through his mask. “That’s Allen over there . . .”
The sight distressed the crew, though not one would have admitted as much. None wanted to say what weighed heaviest on their minds, that the others deeper in the mine could be doomed.
“Oh, to hell with it, pard,” Rudd said, giving into growing doubts. “Let’s get the hell out of here. There’s nobody alive.”
Cougher wouldn’t hear of it. His light swept over the faces of the crew. “They told us to go back to the station,” he said, pushing forward. “We need to get back to the hoist room.”
The link line went taut as they moved down the drift. They could hear the hoist’s rectifier sounding the alarm that the hoist was having mechanical problems, or had gone down altogether. The noise droned, growing louder and louder, mocking hopes and reminding them with each step that there didn’t appear to be a soul to answer the alarm.
Twenty-eight
AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Osburn
IN OSBURN, WHERE HOWARD AND SUSAN MARKVE LIVED NOT FAR from KWAL’S blinking tower, the Osburn Club, with its worn-out jukeboxes and card tables, was a regular hangout for miners coming off shift at the Silver Summit or Sunshine. Markve stopped in on occasion, but not on Tuesday afternoon, though now, more than ever, he could have used a drink. His lungs hurt like hell and his limbs felt shaky. Susan, twenty-two, a beautiful woman with red hair and pale, flawless skin, had seldom seen her husband home so early. She’d never seen him in such a state. His face was blank. He was an automaton. When he said there was a fire at work, she assumed that it had been a brushfire on the mountain.
“No,” he said, “underground.”
She studied his face, but there was nothing, just the flat affect of a man in shock.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
He indicated so with a slight nod.
“Did Dad come up?”
This was Louis Goos, the fifty-one-year-old miner working with Markve’s partner’s son, Bill Follette, twenty-three.
Markve said he didn’t know and asked her to brew a thermos of coffee. He was going back up to Sunshine.
A flicker of worry came over her face, and Susan Markve phoned a sister in Montana. In minutes all six Goos girls and their mother, Delores, were en route to the district. While she waited with her two babies, Susan answered call after call as women phoned to ask if she knew anything. She told them she on
ly knew what her husband had told her, and what she had heard on KWAL.
Later, when Markve returned from the mine, Susan met him at the door.
“Well, did you see my dad?”
When he told her that he hadn’t, Susan insisted she wanted to see for herself.
“There’s nothing for you to do up there,” he said. “You have to take care of the kids.”
“I need to go up there,” she said. “He’s my dad.”
Susan loved her dad, though he hadn’t been the best father—not by a long shot. Louis Goos had been one of the better gyppos at Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, and he’d made a lot of money. He was an outgoing, take-no-shit, hard-drinking cuss who unfailingly put his own needs ahead of his family’s. In mining towns, legends were built as much around drinking tales as around mining prowess. Goos benefited from all kinds of stories. One had him getting hammered in a Wallace bar. When a cop told him that he was too sloppy to drive home and needed to take a cab, Goos agreed. So he stole a taxi.
“You told me to take a taxi home” was his sheepish reply to the officer who caught up with him.
Whenever Goos drank, however, his mean streak worsened and his blue-green eyes, magnified by thick eyeglass, filled with rage. Susan, the fourth of his six girls, knew that whenever their daddy came home late at night, her mother, Delores, was in for trouble. In the years since her childhood, Susan would scour her memories for pleasant ones, but few stood out. Those that did were twisted. One time her mother had caught her looking for a high-heeled shoe in her parents’ bedroom closet. Delores smacked her so hard with the other heel it drew blood. Seeing that, Louis blew up and lit into Delores, berating her for hitting their daughter. And though her head was hemorrhaging, Susan held on to that moment as a happy time. My father really loves me, she’d thought.
Years later, Susan set aside some of her anger; she even forgave her dad, but she couldn’t sweep his drinking-related abuse under the rug. She confronted him once, and Goos denied that he’d ever laid a hand on anyone. There was no telling him how she’d prayed every night that God would intervene and save her mother from his balled-up fist. There was nothing to be gained in pushing the point, because the blameless look on his rugged face was so utterly convincing.
AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Hayden Lake, North of Coeur D’Alene
IT WAS AN INCOMPLETE JUMBLE OF BAD INFORMATION WHEN THE news reached Delmar and Donna Kitchen’s dream house, with its two bathrooms and two-car garage, in Hayden Lake. Someone said that it was Delmar who was ensnared in the drifts of the burning mine, and his brother and dad had escaped. Donna’s mother came right over, and the two agreed that they’d focus on getting over to Sunshine, and not so much on what they’d find when they arrived. Donna, however, turned her worries to her sister-in-law, Margie, and how she would be able to cope if the situation at the mine was deadly.
“It would be better,” Donna Kitchen said, “if Delmar died than Dewellyn.”
Her mother was incredulous, and Donna tried to explain her remark. It wasn’t that she wanted to trade her husband’s life for her brother-in-law’s; it was that she felt that if the worst happened, she’d be able to get by. Dewellyn’s wife was more dependent on her man than Donna was. He’d made all the decisions. He had been her life. Donna felt she could draw on her own strengths and survive whatever God handed her.
Delmar was standing on the bridge when they found him in the crowded mine yard. His pale skin was whiter than paper. Donna ran for her husband, joyous at the sight of him, but also confused.
“Delmar,” she said, “what are you doing out? They said you were trapped! They said your dad and brother went in after you.”
Another man came running. It was an old classmate from Pine Creek. In a flash, he grabbed Kitchen and hugged him.
“I thought you was dead!” The man’s eyes were floating in tears. “They told me you was dead.”
“I’m okay,” Kitchen said, before amending his words: “I’m alive.”
But his dad and his brother and dozens of others hadn’t been seen for hours.
TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 2
4800 Level
BREATHE AND REMAIN CALM. FLORY AND WILKINSON HUDDLED IN THE crosscut on the western end of 4800. The image of the dead men back down the drift was at once vivid and hazy. The swirling, rolling smoke made the drift otherworldly. Broad swipes of black against the dull sheen of blasted walls and the crisp, blue-gray ribbons of tetrahedrite would in themselves have been an awesome sight if that had been all they’d seen. But it was the unexpected and horrific spectacle of bodies splayed out over the tracks that they tried to comprehend. Men had simply slumped over—quietly, and, it appeared, suddenly. Maybe they hadn’t even had time to fight whatever was killing them. Maybe they didn’t know what had happened to the guy behind each of them and they fell like dominoes, one after another.
Flory had been the last to see the others alive. He’d had no idea if he’d make it, but he knew that the last moments of a man’s life, his final words, were sometimes precious to survivors. What can I say to their wives and children? He didn’t even know who half of them were. Neither did Wilkinson. They knew three of them as Gordy, Pat, and Dick. They might have shared a smoke with one or another of the men topside, but they didn’t hang out at the Happy Landing, nor did they actually work together. They were familiar faces and nothing more. The newest of the bunch was a tall kid, Darrell Stephens, nineteen, just a year out of Wallace High. Flory wondered if it had been the boy’s first day in the mine.
“I don’t remember seeing him before,” he said.
The men were unnerved, yet their fear remained unspoken. Wilkinson pinched a fat bunch of Copenhagen, and Flory pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Half the world was above them, ton upon ton of rock, water, and earth held up by God’s will or the force of nature. They sat and speculated about what had happened above. Both were sure 4800 had suffered the greatest calamity.
“They’ll be coming down here for us,” Wilkinson said.
The toxic cloud tiptoed past seven dead men—Richard Allison, Richard Bewley, Davy Mullin, Hubert “Pat” Patrick, Darrell Stephens, and Gordy Whatcott. Each had a story. A child with a heart problem. A wife who had once been beaten by her husband’s hand. A parolee looking for a second chance. Each had a future before that day, and some had a past for which they could no longer make amends.
Then the smoke stalled and rolled backward. It was both quiet and monstrous. Neither Ron Flory nor Tom Wilkinson could imagine what was causing it. And there was no way to find out. They were so far away from the outside world, the sky, the fresh air, and the men trying to reach them and the others. On 4800, Wilkinson and Flory were at a depth greater than the height of four of the country’s tallest buildings—New York’s Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, and the soon-to-be-completed Sears Tower in Chicago—combined.
HARRY COUGHER’S CREW ADVANCED FARTHER TOWARD 10-SHAFT, all holding hope that Sunshine miners were safely ensconced on the levels below, just waiting to get out. As they moved down 3100, it occurred to Cougher that the men might have barricaded themselves in the hoist room.
God, he thought, what if there’s a whole bunch of men back there and they try to steal my apparatus?
On the station, the smoke parted a little, revealing an underground killing field. Their lights sweeping the muck, Cougher and his men just stood still for a moment. A couple of guys felt sick. Everywhere around them were bodies, faces staring upward. One man had hit the concrete floor and the steel of the train track with such force that blood leaked from his ears. Cougher wondered if he’d fallen hard enough to fracture his skull. But most men had just slumped and keeled over. They looked as though they had just gone to sleep, peacefully and without fear. One guy sat off alone in the corner of the station, pressed up tight against the timbers. He reminded Cougher of how they’d found Charlie Casteel.
Some men had died while drinking coffee;
others had kicked back to drag on a cigarette in the middle of the smoke storm. These guys weren’t in a hurry to get out, Ray Rudd thought. They might have made it if they’d taken the threat seriously. Rudd knew why the scene had been so serene, why there hadn’t been panic. The men were mostly gyppos. Since they hadn’t finished blasting for the day, they’d planted themselves on the station to wait it out. They had thought they’d go back to blow up some rock.
Cougher’s eyes caught Rudd’s. Next was the hoist room.
In the world of hardrock mining, a smart man would argue that there is no job more important to operations than running the hoist. Without a hoistman, nothing moved from level to level—not men, not supplies, and of course, not ore. Hot mines like Sunshine built air-conditioned compartments around the control area, making it the most comfortable place underground. Cougher’s crew entered the hoist room. The last minutes played in each man’s mind. It was almost as if they could hear what had happened. The coughing. The yelling. The promises that they’d be able to get out alive. The deadly smoke had entered through the ventilation system, and the men had fought with their lives to save the others below. Over by the console were fallen dominoes, the bodies of several men who had tried to take over the controls. As each had succumbed, another had shoved him out of the operator’s chair. The last one to die was a heavyset fellow, stripped to the waist, wearing only his diggers and boots. His beefy chest was bright cherry red.
God, Cougher thought, that poor kid had a heat rash before he died.
Their air supply half-exhausted, the helmet crew returned toward daylight, heavy, life-giving oxygen packs loading their backs. Marvin Chase met them at the collar and warned them that reporters with TV cameras were facing the portal.