by Gregg Olsen
“Don’t stop and talk to any of them,” he said. His voice was a near whisper. “Go directly to the office in the maintenance shop. We’ll talk there.”
They gathered around a table, and Al Walkup set out a pad for notes.
“Well,” Chase said, “what did you see? Did you recognize anyone?”
“No,” Rudd said emphatically.
The response nearly knocked Harry Cougher out of his chair.
“Jesus Christ, Rudd, you did. You called out the names of those guys.”
Rudd looked completely bewildered. He said he didn’t know anybody who was down there.
Cougher mentioned Duwain Crow and Wayne Allen as two men Rudd had identified—names that meant nothing to Cougher because he’d never met them. Cougher was bewildered. He wondered if Ray Rudd was in shock.
4:00 P.M., MAY 2
Coeur D’Alene Mining District
THE CALL FOR HELP FROM KELLOGG, IDAHO, WAS HEARD ALL OVER the Northwest. Miners with helmet or rescue training and gear were en route from Kimberly, British Columbia, and Butte, Montana. The Butte bunch, a dozen strong, came from the Anaconda Mining Company. Though rivals, they were also brothers. So quickly did they get to Big Creek that some wives didn’t even know their husbands had left Montana until after they called home. One Butte miner spoke with a Spokane reporter.
“You can quote me,” he said, “as saying I think they’re working damn well together. These guys from all over—who’ve never seen each other before—down there working right together, trying to get at those poor men.”
But for all that was going on, the office at the end of the maintenance shop was noticeably quiet, as if no one knew what to say. Johnny Austin, the fiftyish bulldog manager from Bunker Hill, cleared his throat and turned to Walkup and Chase.
“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.
Hecla’s Gordon Miner saw a crack in the door and pushed right through it.
“By God, it’s about time!” he said. “I’m interested in anybody who’s got a suggestion!” The forty-three-year-old with the steely blue eyes and no-bullshit attitude wedged himself between would-be power brokers at the head of the table. At six foot two, Miner’s appearance was as imposing as his manner. Whenever Hecla’s top man spoke, it was with complete self-confidence; he was clearly a man who put action first and apologized later. For that very reason, some learned to follow Miner’s lead because they knew that there was no stopping him—with reason or force. Al Walkup knew Miner’s reputation, but he’d never felt the brunt of his indomitable personality until May 2. He backed off.
Miner saw Sunshine’s Walkup and Chase as indecisive. It didn’t seem they could stick to any plan and, not surprisingly, they were easily pushed around. Miner, in particular, was quite aggressive. That figures, Art Brown thought. Gordon Miner will run roughshod over anyone who’s weak enough to let him. Around the Hecla office, his autocratic ways had earned him the nickname “the Alone Arranger.” Certainly he wasn’t perfect, but Hecla’s executive vice president was never short of ideas, and once he started moving forward, he never looked back.
Miner, in fact, had been through a potash mine fire in Utah. When they first realized fire was choking the life out of the mine there, some of the underground crew ran and some barricaded themselves in. The men who stayed put were the ones who survived. The Hecla chief hoped the trapped Sunshine miners were doing the same thing and were waiting for someone to get them out.
One thing troubled Gordon Miner above everything else, and he just couldn’t shake it: the apparent delay in evacuating Sunshine. You don’t wait for a green light from the corporate types when they don’t know anything anyway about that particular situation, he thought.
Back in the command center, men unfurled schematics of the ventilation system and drift maps, circling the possible locations where they might find survivors. The room wasn’t particularly large, about the size of an average dining room, with floor-to-ceiling drapes that made it seem more residential than professional. But it was packed. Advancing the fresh-air base through either 3100 or 3700 was proving slow going, with workers discovering that Sunshine’s drifts were anything but airtight. Launhardt focused on Sunshine’s connecting mine, the Silver Summit. From Sunshine’s 3100, an eighty-five-foot ladderway joined the Silver Summit at its 3,000-foot level. The obscure route was Sunshine’s designated emergency escapeway in the event the Jewell could not be used.
Coming from opposite directions, with the Sunshine effort west of 10-Shaft and the Silver Summit helmet crews to the east of the shaft, the rescue effort was a race in every way, with stakes no less than life and death. And above the constant discussion by men from all over—Sunshine, other district mines, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, the miners’ union—was the ceaseless ringing of a bank of telephones. A big oak table was covered with so many underground maps that no wood showed. Some maps showed the suspected location of the fire; red markings indicated the belief that the fire had started in the abandoned stopes between 3400 and 3550, near the mined-out 09 crosscut or vein. The speed and fury of the smoke through the ventilation system pointed toward the failure of the bulkhead on 3400. The sixty-foot-long timber and polyurethane-foam-sealed bulkhead shuttered the 910 raise, which connected gob-filled workings to the 09 vein, a vein that hadn’t seen a miner’s jackleg since the mid-1940s. Harvey Dionne had seen the smoke boiling behind the eight-year-old bulkhead, just after all hell broke loose. Others reported that they had heard an explosion, which had been followed by billowing smoke darker than night.
Walls throughout the command center were papered with notes reporting air samples, contact information, and status of the crew. Cigarette smoke masked the ceiling. An enormous map of the mine with Mylar overlays, measuring ten by twenty feet, was spread over another table. Coffee was tepid, and sandwiches sent up by the Red Cross grew stale because no one thought to eat.
Lucky Friday’s Art Brown volunteered to lead a ten-man team from the Silver Summit side of 3100, also known as the Sunshine Drift. Only a handful had any experience with McCaas; the rest were hastily trained on the spot. They were as ready as they could be.
DOWN FROM THE MINE OVER IN KELLOGG, BYRON SCHULZ SAT UP in his bed at West Shoshone Hospital and told reporters his harrowing story in a halting, raspy voice. There were some things the twenty-one-year-old just couldn’t speak of just then, maybe never. At one point, tears interrupted the interview when Schulz blamed the company’s safety program for the tragedy.
“There was no organization. Nobody knew what to do or how to do it,” he said.
According to Schulz, the company had thwarted any attempts to improve safety, and any grievances related to safety were met with retaliation from the bosses. He himself had been given “bad time” for filing a safety complaint.
Schulz was the first to talk to the press and point the finger of blame at Sunshine’s managers. He didn’t know it then, but he had lit a fuse.
Twenty-nine
4:20 P.M., MAY 2
Sunshine Portal
JUST AT THE CURVE THAT SWEPT UP TO THE MINE WAS THE LAST house in the Big Creek neighborhood. Duwain and Lauralee Crow paid $3,000 for the sturdy little place in 1956. It was a sweet deal for both owner and seller. Their house payment was only $50, and Sunshine liked having its miners in debt and close at hand. Early on the morning of the fire, Mrs. Crow set out a big plastic jug and filled it halfway with water. From the freezer, she brought out six Campbell’s Soup cans that she used as ice molds. She slipped the frozen cylinders from their tin skins and dropped them one by one into the oversized thermos. Duwain gets thirsty down there, she thought. This ought to hold him until tonight.
At the mine that afternoon, Launhardt instantly recognized her voice. Lauralee Crow got his attention by the machine shop. She stood behind the rope line. Lee, as her friends called her, was an attractive woman with long dark hair and fine features, though she could be tough as a miner. She was also a prankster. Her husband learned the hard way that he
’d better think twice when he opened his dinner bucket. He liked to crack the shell of his hard-boiled egg on his head while sitting on the station. One time she’d tricked him with a raw egg, and all the gyppos around the station had a good laugh.
“Bob! Have you seen Duwain?” she called over.
Launhardt didn’t ignore her, but he kept moving. Stopping and looking into her eyes would surely make him stammer out the truth. Duwain Crow was one of the confirmed dead. Launhardt thought he saw a couple of Duwain’s children standing beside their mother. Lauralee Crow’s dark hair hung lifelessly, and her winter-pale skin looked like frost.
“No, I haven’t,” Launhardt said stiffly. “Don’t know anything yet.”
“Oh,” she said. “Let me know as soon as you can.”
Launhardt nodded. But he couldn’t tell her the Bunker Hill crew had found her husband’s body in the muck on 3100. The body wasn’t coming out until rescue crews made it to the lower levels. And that, Launhardt feared, might take some time.
WHEN SPOKANE-BASED UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL REPORTER Jerry McGinn arrived in Big Creek, he instantly saw trouble. Print and television reporters were already griping that Sunshine was trying to control the story. Sunshine bosses hated constant questions for which they had no answers. While all of the reporters understood the need for order in the midst of the unraveling disaster, only McGinn would take the access issue into his own hands. They think this is under their control? It is beyond their control.
Exiled with the other reporters across the bridge, McGinn scrutinized the scene. The miners’ wives were stuck. Many didn’t own telephones and lived in remote gulches around the district—where there were no neighbors to consult for the latest news. The only way to know what was happening was to stay huddled on folding chairs and wait. Certainly the women looked older than their years. The men might have enough money for a new truck every year, but they didn’t see the value of regular visits to a dentist. McGinn liked the people because they were never given to pretense. To characterize them as salt of the earth was too easy. All sat there with cups of perked Hills Bros. coffee and waited. McGinn thought they deserved better. When a plane crashed, airlines were ready to release passenger names and casualty numbers from the first hours. Sunshine was holding the names for some cruel reason, he believed, and it angered him.
McGinn studied the grim faces of Sunshine’s staff for a clue to their heartlessness. Instead, he saw fear. These guys are petrified. They’re in deep shit. The guys still underground are screwed, he thought.
The reporter watched the goings-on around a table set out for Red Cross recruits. Two women were seated behind a folding table upon which had been neatly arranged name tags, brochures, and assorted flyers. McGinn picked up the sign-up sheet and wrote down his name. A few seconds later he put on Red Cross identification and was on the way to forbidden territory.
THE FOOTHILLS RISING FROM THE VALLEY FLOOR THAT RUN EAST TO west through the district were dressed in a light shake of snow. While trees didn’t have a sugar topping that late in the season, on May 2, 1972, a patchy carpet of white still tucked itself into the gaps between the conifers and the feathery spires of aspen that grew in fan-shaped groves. Susan Markve walked in the direction of the portal, staring at the scene as though she were looking at a painting, or maybe experiencing a dream. She had an odd feeling of complete detachment, as though whatever was going on at Sunshine was excluding her. She was watching it, but not participating. A Red Cross worker asked if she wanted coffee. Susan looked lost, her pale skin now paper white.
“No,” she said, not breaking her gaze from the portal. “I want my dad to come out of there.”
Howard was in bed when she returned home after an hour of nothingness. She prodded him for more information, but he offered nothing more.
“I saw smoke,” he said. “No fire, just smoke.”
He didn’t tell her just how black that smoke had been or how he had had to lower his cap lamp to within a foot of the track line to see it. Before restless sleep finally came late that night, Howard tried to reassure his wife. He said her dad would find an air pocket and bulkhead himself in. Louis Goos was taking it all in stride, deep in the mine in an air pocket that kept him safe.
He’ll be okay, she thought. He’ll be getting out . . . tomorrow.
Thirty
5:40 P.M., MAY 2
Big Creek Neighborhood
WHEN THE KELLOGG EVENING NEWS PUBLISHED ITS TUESDAY EDITION, it carried an article indicating that “some eighty” miners were trapped in Sunshine. Things were not dire, the paper reported, because the men could exit the mine through alternate routes. “It is believed that day shift workers will be able to get out by this means, although it may be some time before they can get out.” About the time newspapers were landing on front steps across the district, a kid who ran around with Gene and Betty Johnson’s son, Dennis, arrived at their Big Creek home. He caught his breath at the front door while Betty answered. He was barely a man, but he’d been working at Sunshine, following in the footsteps of most district men.
“Gene here?”
Betty shook her head, and the kid’s face went ashen. “Oh God,” he said, “there are only two people I care about in that mine, and Gene is one of them.”
She looked scared and, realizing that his words were the cause, he backpedaled.
“We hear Gene got out,” he said, “and he was checking guys out. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I just wanted to make sure he was home.”
“Not yet,” she said, saying good-bye and closing the door. It sounded as if Gene had plenty going on up Big Creek Road. Mines had calamities of one kind or another very nearly every other day. Betty sat down and waited.
RAISED IN THE SHADOW OF THE BUNKER HILL SMELTER, BETTY Jean Barker was the daughter of the night watchman and sometime worker in Uncle Bunk’s blower house. She and her four siblings grew up in the district during the best of times. Boys always knew that when the time came, they had a job at one of the area’s numerous mines or at Bunker’s smelter. Most had new cars because summer jobs turned into full-time employment. Dances at Kellogg High and parties along the river went on without so much as a pause, even as boys were plucked out of the district for military service. Soldiers returned to certain employment and the girlfriends they’d left behind. In time, most of the men in Betty’s life worked at Sunshine—her brothers and husband, and their son.
Frederick Gene Johnson and Betty Jean Barker were proof that opposites do indeed attract. He was a man who loved a good time, fast cars, and partying with his pals. She was a homebody, a shy, petite girl with enormous eyes that soaked up all the excitement around her. He was brash and she was reticent. He had tattoos and scars, and she wore sensible shoes. Johnson had altered his birth certificate to get into the Army so he could see the world; she took a job selling tickets at the Kellogg bus station so others could do the same. But in 1946, on that steep stretch of frost-heaved roadway that passes through Fourth of July Canyon, the two met. Betty Barker was returning home from Coeur d’Alene with her brother Robert when they came across Johnson and ended up racing him halfway home. At twenty-one, Johnson was only a few months older than Betty, but he was much more grown up. Not long after they met, he showed up at the bus station and started courting her. He wore long-sleeved shirts in the blistering heat of the summer to conceal the tattoos that were a roadmap of his tour in the military. He wanted Betty Barker to see who he was, rather than where he had been.
Gene Johnson, as the only son of Sunshine’s boardinghouse cook, was a boy who never knew his father. Since his mother’s job had her up at 3:00 a.m. to prepare for the changing shifts, she sent her son to a Catholic boarding school. Johnson loved his mother, but his lonely childhood had created a big hole that he only knew one way to fix—a family of his own.
Friends had warned the young woman that Johnson was too wild, but she ignored them. In her own quiet way, Betty Jean Barker set out to tame him. Some would later say she s
ucceeded. They married, and in 1957 they moved into a little house on Sunshine Star Route, about a mile from the mine. Over the years they had five children: a son, Dennis, and four daughters, Linda, Peggy, Karen, and Brenda. The kids attended Elk Creek School, a three-story brick building near the base of the canyon. Because it was good business to keep miners and their wives settled in a community, the school benefited from the generosity of the owners of the mine. Mine officials knew that kids were the glue that kept some men from leaving for another mine.
But Johnson wasn’t the type to plant his butt in a lawn chair with a beer and have five more cold ones lined up in the fridge. He almost always worked two jobs, even during some of his years as a contract miner. For a while, early in their marriage, Johnson worked opposite shifts at Bunker Hill and Sunshine, so that he could create the kind of life he had envisioned while growing up without siblings or a father, and with a mother who worked her fingers to the bone. The Johnsons always had new cars, boats, horses, and motorcycles. All of it, from the train sets circling the tallest imaginable Christmas tree to the toy racetrack in the basement, was fun stuff. Johnson was the biggest kid of all.
In turn, Betty wasn’t shy about getting what she wanted. Her children could see how their mother manipulated their dad, but they also knew he didn’t mind. It was almost a game. If Betty didn’t get her way on some trivial matter, she’d give Gene the silent treatment. If he wanted to do something and she didn’t, he’d pick a fight just to have the excuse to leave. Outsiders, who thought Johnson was a tough SOB and his wife was needy and weak, missed what those closest to the couple could see. He loved her. When Betty was facing surgery, Johnson called their daughter Peggy to the kitchen. The mountain of a man slumped at the table, bawling over the prospect of something going wrong. When the talk turned to his own mortality, he made her promise that if anything ever happened to him, she’d always take care of her mother.