• • •
Just before the explosion, the second cageload of men was dropping into the Crown Point. Nearing the seven-hundred-foot level, they caught a strong whiff of the most feared smell in mining—smoke. Just after, the explosion jolted the cage, jumping it two feet. Several men lost their hats. Smoke billowed into the shaft. A few seconds later, the cage reached the eight-hundred-foot station, which was crowded with coughing, choking, croaking, terrified men.
Thick smoke and carbon monoxide filled their lungs. The gas bonded with the hemoglobin in their blood, drastically reducing the quantity of oxygen delivered throughout their bodies and addling their brains into a muddled, vertiginous state that resembled drunkenness. Confused, choking, gagging, in fear and agony and desperate to escape, the men fought for space on the cage.
Tragically, there were two cageloads of men underground, and as the first load of miners staggered out of the drifts, far more men than the cage could carry packed the eight-hundred-foot station, every one of them trying to cram aboard. Such a plethora of arms, legs, and shoulders protruded beyond the sides of the cage that Murphy, the station man, didn’t dare ring for the hoist—those not wholly aboard would be torn to pieces on the way up. Several men clambered to the top of the cage. The quantity of smoke in the shaft increased. On the station and in the cage, all were suffocating. In the confusion, perhaps as many as five minutes passed, until, urged by the pleading of the fellows more securely aboard, those unlucky outermost souls abandoned their holds, one by one, knowing they’d be killed during the hoist. At the last second, one man crawled between the legs of the men already in the cage, begging to be left aboard. Finally, Murphy rang the bell. The cage whooshed up the shaft. No man aboard would ever forget the pitiful, desperate, choking, gagging sounds emanating from the men left behind slowly fading into the depths of the shaft as they rose toward deliverance.
• • •
Above, on the surface, in the Crown Point’s shaft house, it seemed as if someone below had hacked into a chamber of hell. Black smoke jetting from the maw of the shaft filled the building, making it difficult to breathe and threatening to drive the engineers from their stations. The cage reached the landing. Choking, retching men stumbled off the cage and reeled around the shaft house like drunken fools. The engineers couldn’t get a clear understanding of the situation. Critical seconds passed before they knew for certain that the miners had vacated the cage and that others might still be alive in the deep levels. Beginning to suffocate themselves, the engineers dropped the cage back into the hole, barely able to see the depth marks on the cable. They clung to their posts in the hopes of saving those still underground.
• • •
Eight hundred feet below, the fire raged. Blasted outward by the initial collapse and driven by the natural draft of the three mines, the fire ran south from its origin in the Yellow Jacket through timber sets and along wooden track floors to a winze connecting two mine levels at the Yellow Jacket/Kentuck boundary. There, the fire jumped a forty-foot section of tunnel through solid rock and burned through the Kentuck to the Kentuck/Crown Point line, then up a gangway to an old level. From there it took hold in the timbers of the Crown Point’s main drift, burning furiously, pouring out smoke and sucking oxygen from the mine’s limited atmosphere. Following the natural draft of the mines, smoke and poison gas roiled through the drifts and stations and rose up the Crown Point and Kentuck shafts. The miners who hadn’t escaped on the first cage were in dire condition. Some fled the station, groping through choking darkness, the terrifying anguish of asphyxiation contorting their features as they climbed up or down ladders or ran through drifts, knowing they’d die if they didn’t find breathable air. A group of miners held on at the Crown Point’s eight-hundred-foot station, hoping through suffocating desperation for the return of the cage. Among them were brothers Richard and George Bickell. One by one, men sank to the floor unconscious. When the cage arrived, only the two Bickells and four other men dragged themselves aboard. One of them rang for the hoist.
Up in the shaft house, someone smashed the windows, hoping to ventilate the smoke. It seemed impossible that anyone could survive such choking conditions as must exist below, but the cage bell tolled and the engineers sprang for the controls. Thirty seconds later, the cage arrived with half a dozen bodies sprawled on its floor. Men crawled through the smoke across the shaft house floor with wet cloths clamped over their mouths and discovered unimaginable horror—of the six men on the cage, only George Bickell still drew breath, and although George was unconscious, his hands clutched the shirt of his decapitated brother, Richard, whose jawline was a ragged line of gore. The rest of Richard’s head was missing, and at his left shoulder, only a scrap of flesh kept the arm attached.
Richard had made the cage alive, but he’d passed out on the way up. George grabbed at his brother, but he couldn’t prevent Richard’s head and shoulder lolling outside the cage and being torn off by the shaft timbers. The other four men on the cage were dead, and George himself barely clung to life, his breath rasping in and out of smoke-damaged lungs.
James, the third Bickell brother, wasn’t among those on the cage. Also missing were brothers Edward and William Jewell. Chaos threatened the shaft house. Confused head counts revealed more than twenty Crown Point and Kentuck men unaccounted for. Over at the Yellow Jacket, foremen couldn’t figure out how many they had missing. Anyone who whiffed the thick, stifling smoke gushing from the Crown Point and Kentuck shafts feared for their lives. The dark, ugly palls spewing from the windows and doors of the shaft houses broadcast news of disaster to every corner of Gold Hill and Virginia City. Comstockers flocked to the stricken mines.
• • •
The wives of the day-shift miners pressed through the throngs to the shaft houses and dashed back and forth trying to locate missing husbands. Nobody witnessed the dramas unaffected by the terrible contrast between the relieved reunions of wives with husbands who’d made it out alive and the rising anguish of the women who couldn’t locate their menfolk. The Territorial Enterprise reported scenes of “heart-rending grief.” The people of Gold Hill gathered on the slopes, porches, and sidewalks of the town and watched in stunned silence. No one spoke in anything but hushed tones.
The first two known widows were Mrs. Anthony Toy of the Crown Point and the Kentuck’s Mrs. Patrick Quinn—their husbands’ bodies had surfaced on the cage with Richard and George Bickell. The Quinns had two children. Somehow instantly on hand at the mine heads, Father Patrick Manogue—the spiritual leader of the lode’s Irish, and a genuine moral force in the community—did his best to comfort the widows.
No person on the lode had experienced a mine fire of similar magnitude, and lacking an understanding of the scientific dynamics playing out below their feet, the miners nurtured hope that men might have survived below the fire, in the deepest levels. Rumors to that effect swept the crowds, and frantic wives begged to be allowed to go down to look for their husbands.
Superintendent Jones and the foremen refused to let them enter the mines. The wives waited outside the hoisting works, in mounting anxiety, and the Territorial Enterprise reported that “the poor women, with their weeping children, stood about with their hands clasped, rocking themselves to and fro, but uttering scarcely an audible sob—they seemed astounded and overwhelmed at the suddenness and awfulness of the calamity. . . . Their grief was such as to cause tears to flow down the cheeks of the most stout-hearted.” Among them, Father Manogue and the other Catholic clergymen did what they could to ease the suffering.
To reassure anybody alive deep in the mine, Superintendent Jones wrote a message on a large piece of pasteboard and sent it down on the cage to the thousand-foot station with a lighted lantern, a bundle of miners’ candles, and a supply of water. “We are fast subduing the fire,” the note read. “It is death to attempt to come up from where you are. We will get to you soon. The gas in the shaft is terrible and produces sure and speedy death. Write a word to us and s
end it up on the cage and let us know how you are.”
Some minutes later, when they raised the cage, no word was written and the lantern was extinguished.
• • •
The fire drew all of Gold Hill’s fire companies to the mine heads and three from Virginia City. Nobody could survive the smoke and gas gushing up the Crown Point and Kentuck shafts, but the downcast in the Yellow Jacket’s South Shaft gave firefighters an avenue to attack the blaze. Firemen laid canvas hose from a hydrant on Main Street and began rigging it down the Jacket’s shaft, but even with the natural draft, some hours passed before anyone could get below the five-hundred-foot level due to stifling gas. When the worst of the gas cleared, firemen and an escort of miners extended the hose to the Jacket’s eight-hundred-foot level and advanced on the fire, extinguishing burning timbers. A man involved in the firefighting effort noticed the timbers showing “no blaze of fire.” Instead, “the timbers seemed to be one living and glowing coal,” sending out “slight sprays of spark.” Intense heat hindered their endeavors, as did the paucity of oxygen—barely enough to support a candle flame. When a cave or timber collapse seemed imminent, the firemen retreated, and miners took timbers forward to shore the drift. Soon, two or three inches of nearly boiling water steamed on the tunnel floor, further fouling the atmosphere. “It was such work as few firemen in the United States have ever undertaken and such as none but the firemen of a mining country could have done,” the Territorial Enterprise would boast in the aftermath.
Nearly suffocating at the face of the fire, the miners brought forward ventilation pipes. Fresh air kept the men on their feet, but it also energized the fire. Every cave or tunnel collapse drove the firemen back to the shaft with a blast of hot embers, smoke, and superheated air. Only the Yellow Jacket’s downcast kept the men alive. If the dynamics of the fire should cause it to reverse, they’d die, but even with the draft behind them, they made scant progress through the afternoon and evening. On the other side of the fire, in the Kentuck and the Crown Point, the situation remained unknown.
The initial firefighting efforts stabilized. Miners reported manageable conditions in the deep levels of the Yellow Jacket. Someone proposed trying to reach the base of the Crown Point shaft below the fire, through a drift that connected from the Jacket’s lower levels. Volunteers rode the Yellow Jacket cage to the shaft sump. At great risk to their own lives, the men crept down the southward drift that connected to the base of the Crown Point shaft, paying close attention to the faint flames of their candles and lanterns. Almost immediately, they found the body of a Crown Point man who’d died in throttled agony just 150 feet shy of the Yellow Jacket shaft and its promise of breathable air. They wrapped his corpse in a canvas tarp, lugged it back to the shaft, and returned to the search. Before long, they’d found four more bodies, their features contorted in the death agony of asphyxiation. Gashes and cuts on faces and arms acquired in crazed blind dashes through the black drifts further distorted their appearance.
Meanwhile, recovery crews behind the point team sent the remains of three of the four missing Yellow Jacket miners up the shaft. By 10:00 p.m., a total of thirteen corpses had been raised to the surface. Fifteen minutes later, word reached the surface that the searchers had found a clutch of bodies in a drift near the Crown Point’s nine-hundred-foot station. A concentration of stifling gas aborted the recovery effort. Highlighting the hazard, one of the underground searchers collapsed unconscious in a poorly ventilated drift. His companions dragged his body back to the Yellow Jacket shaft and sent him up on the cage insensible, but alive.
• • •
Rescue efforts continued Thursday morning. With the fire still burning, John James, one of the Crown Point’s foremen, and two other brave men went down the Yellow Jacket shaft to spearhead another attempt to reach the Crown Point below the level of the fire. Carefully, one by one, they inched down the connecting drift, checking each other and the mine’s atmosphere, and succeeded in reaching the Crown Point shaft. They found nine grotesquely disfigured corpses tangled together in a drift and another man clinging to a ladder, his hands refusing to abandon their grip on a rung, his head lolled back in death. Other bodies floated in the shaft sump, mangled by falls.
Before descending, James and his companions had coordinated a plan with the Crown Point engineers to try to reach the eight-hundred-foot level using the cage. From the deepest station in the Crown Point shaft, they rang the bell. A thousand feet above, the engineers at the controls in the smoky shaft house dropped the empty cage to the three men below. Aboard the cage and ready to raise, the men rang the bell continuously, the prearranged signal. The engineers raised the cage slowly, poised to lower the instant the clanging stopped—indication that the rescuers had either encountered unbreathable air or lost consciousness. It didn’t take long. The clamor stopped and the engineers lowered the cage to the original station. After several attempts, the men succeeded in reaching eight hundred feet. Thirty feet from the shaft, they found a dead man sitting on a log, his head resting in his hands. Shortly thereafter, foul air extinguished their lights. They groped back to the cage and descended to the trickle of fresh air coming down the drift from the Yellow Jacket. They abandoned their efforts, but by 9:45 a.m., they and other recovery crews had raised eighteen additional bodies to the surface, retching over the almost intolerable stench. The flesh of the dead seemed as much decayed as if they’d been moldering a month, perhaps due to the great heat, noxious air, and poison gas. The fingers of those handling the deceased squished completely into the dead flesh. Those who did the job swore they’d never forget the “peculiar and sickening smell.”
Firefighting efforts continued simultaneously, but firefighters in the Yellow Jacket made little progress in the face of caves and tunnel collapses. The state of the fire in the Crown Point and the Kentuck remained a mystery. George Bickell, the miner who’d emerged alive on the Crown Point’s second cage clutching his decapitated brother, died at noon. The lode held the first of many funerals later in the day. Hundreds of people followed the processions to the various churches and cemeteries. Every flag in Gold Hill and Virginia City flew at half-mast.
• • •
Friday, April 9, dawned hopeful, with less smoke rising from the Crown Point and Kentuck shafts than at any time since Wednesday morning, but by 8:30 a.m., soon after work had resumed, dense, black smoke, “hot and charged with cinders,” spewed from the mouth of the Crown Point shaft and poured from every aperture of the hoisting works.IV Until that morning, no one thought the mines themselves were in serious danger, but by 9:00 a.m., the fire appeared worse than ever. If the shafts caught fire, the entire mines would be lost. Firefighters went down the Yellow Jacket, but they couldn’t stand the foul air and soon returned to the surface. Belowground, the fire had free rein.
Despite eight or ten men unaccounted for, John Percival Jones of the Crown Point and Kentuck and “Colonel” John Winters, superintendent of the Yellow Jacket, agreed that hope had vanished that any of the missing remained alive. The Gold Hill fire chief advised the superintendents to seal the shafts and inject steam down the ventilating tubes of the Crown Point and the Yellow Jacket. There seemed no reasonable alternative. Carpenters floored over the shafts, and men piled on dirt, cloth, and more dirt wherever a puff of smoke appeared. Seven large boilers forced steam into the mines at as high a pressure as the tubes would bear.
• • •
The shafts stayed closed through the weekend. After they’d been sealed for seventy hours, the superintendents ordered the Crown Point and Kentuck shafts opened. No smoke or gas rose from the Kentuck, and only a trace of smoke leaked from the Crown Point. Most miners thought the fire extinguished. Fearing for their employment, all wanted to get back to work and probe the extent of the damage.
Crews sprayed water down the Crown Point shaft, hoping to absorb any remaining gas. Engineers decoupled the steam injectors and began forcing pure air down the ventilating tubes, likely an egregious mistak
e. Lanterns lowered to 800 feet returned extinguished. Someone proposed sending a dog to the bottom of the shaft. Miners rejected the idea as too cruel. An exploratory party descended to the Crown Point’s 230-foot level, where they expected to find the bodies of John O’Brien and K. Ryan.
They found O’Brien first. He’d almost made the station. After six days in the burning mine, his body was in awful condition, the death stench overpowering. Gagging and vomiting, the recovery crew wrapped his body in canvas and raised it to the surface. The foul odor of putrefaction filled the hoisting works. The miners tipped O’Brien’s corpse into a disinfectant-filled coffin.
News of the recovery of O’Brien’s body had reached his wife. She met the procession carrying her husband’s remains from the building with “loud and uncontrollable” manifestations of grief and an escort of other women. Mrs. O’Brien begged—then demanded—that Superintendent Jones allow her to see her husband’s body. It took Jones long, painful minutes to convince Mrs. O’Brien and her supporters that it would be “folly, inhumanity, and indecency” for Mrs. O’Brien to interact with her husband’s remains.
Half an hour later, foreman Hank Smith recovered K. Ryan’s body from the 230-foot level. Ryan was a bachelor, so there wasn’t the same scene. Much to everyone’s relief.
The fire flared up, forcing the superintendents to reseal the mines.
• • •
Afraid of prematurely reopening the mines for a second time, the superintendents kept the shafts sealed all week, but they felt intense pressure to reopen—the idled mines threw five hundred men out of work, depressed trade all along the lode, and cost shareholders thousands of dollars. On the cold, blustery morning of Sunday, April 18, the superintendents relented and ordered the shafts opened.
The Bonanza King Page 33