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Wallace, Idaho – “Hearses were in short supply in
Kellogg, Idaho, in May 1972. A pickup hauled a dead miner
to a hillside cemetery slashed with freshly turned earth.
Another arrived in a station wagon.”
Thus begins “The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption
in America’s Richest Silver Mine,” a riveting, page-turning
and gut-wrenching account of the May 2, 1972 Sunshine Mine
Disaster by New York Times best-seller Gregg Olsen (Abandoned
Prayers, Starvation Heights, Cruel Deception, Bitter Almonds).
The Deep Dark is due for release by Crown Publishers on March
1st.
From the very first of his 319 pages Olsen wraps you around
his finger at the Jewell Shaft portal that fateful morning
and doesn’t let go until the last of the 91 men who lost
their lives in the sudden and impossible hell that enveloped
them at the lunch hour a mile deep inside is laid to rest.
You can read Clancy or Higgins for great fiction, John McPhee
or Jack Olsen (no relation, but a friend and mentor to Gregg’s
nevertheless) for non-fiction, and you will find none better.
I read the rave reviews of The Deep Dark from Publisher’s
Weekly and the like and wonder if they read the same book
I did. They talk of the bravado and macho of mining men like
this was something different out here in the Old West. Oh,
one supposes there is some truth to the notion that western
hard-rock miners are a breed apart. Indeed, hard-rock mining
is part balls, but it is also part intellect, part luck, part
skill, part determination, part creativity – and it is
surely no part dumb labor, at least not in the sense that
the practice of law or banking or accounting are dumb labor.
There’s nothing rote about hard-rock mining.
Nor is hard-rock mining, by the standards of this day, exceedingly
dangerous. Truckers, power company linemen, loggers, pay a
far higher workers’ compensation premium than do miners.
This will come as a shock to most miners. (Review the stats
further and you will discover that for municipal employees,
it is far more dangerous to be a sewer worker than it is to
be a cop.) Bring up either of these well-documented comparisons
in the wrong bar, however, and your jaw will be merged with
your lower stern bearings.
It is the suddenness, the strangeness, the swiftness and
the violence that injures or kills a hard-rock miner that
gives us our death-fix with these people. And the fact that
mining camps are small places. If your partner gets “slabbed,”
(crushed to death in a sudden fall of rock from the back of
a stope) there is a good chance he was on the school board,
or an uncle to your neighbor’s kids, or coached little
league, or taught debate.
No, what strikes this western reader is Olsen’s brilliance
in bringing out the ordinariness of the men of the Sunshine
Mine, then and now, the ordinariness of hard-rock miners and
their human dignity. The kiss from a young wife. The plans
to wash and wax the vintage Ford at shift’s end. The
car-pool to work and its conversation about dumping shift
that day to celebrate a friend’s birthday. And underground,
even as death enveloped them, the passion of a man to save
his friend’s life, to not get on the life-saving mile-long
cage-ride to the surface until he was sure his partner was
all right and already aboard.
It’s about guys who wouldn’t leave their jobs underground,
at the controls of the hoists and aboard the cages, miners
who having escaped death went back into the gas-choked mine
to join a rescue team because there were men alive still underground,
and gave up their own lives in so doing. Because they were
miners.
On another level, The Deep Dark is an indictment of Nixon’s
mid-1970s corporate America, the age of the leveraged buyout,
where accountant- and law-degreed middle-managers dithered
while a mile beneath them, men’s lives hung on every
second of indecision. And the fury of real mining men against
this corporate Pablum, the fury of young men who would become
decades later captains of this industry. Harry Cougher. Art
Brown. Among the first of the “helmet team” rescue
guys who understood the gravity of the situation a mile beneath
them while men without chests awaited orders from higher up
and sussed-out their financial projections.
The horrors of the Sunshine Mine Disaster I will leave to
the reader of The Deep Dark to unearth. They are plentiful
and graphic to a fault. But they are not told in a “he
said-she said” vein. You see first-hand the Sunshine
Mine Disaster from the eyes of the men who were there. It
is their tale. It’s a narrative style you will find refreshing
– told by a journalist who has the dignity and the decency
to be invisible. Gregg Olsen makes you the lens of the camera.
He is not in the scene.
The Deep Dark will open old wounds in my mining camp. Huge
wounds, ripped apart by a UPI reporter who posed as a Red
Cross candy-striper in order to infiltrate the rain-besotted
camps of soon-to-be widows and orphans until he was called
out by a miner for the fraud that he was. (Trust me: 30 years
later they still hate journalists here.)
Huge wounds, ripped apart by network television crews who
hijacked Big Creek homes and power lines to file the latest
sensationalistic lede. Huge wounds, ripped apart by Nixon’s
Secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, who parachuted in
to the mining camp to assure all of us that the mining company
was doing all that it could even as Cougher and Brown chafed.
Huge wounds, ripped apart by “Jerusalem Slim” –
Sunshine CEO Irwin P. Underweiser – who flew out from
New York to set jittery shareholders to right by announcing,
before the first corpse came out, that Sunshine Mining Company
had production interruption insurance, and that a cessation
of operations would improve the silver price – even as
men still breathing that cruel air screamed from below in
vain to be hoisted out, that from the company’s perspective,
the Sunshine Mine Disaster was a good thing.
Huge wounds, ripped apart by a tragedy that killed ever seventh
father and uncle in this mining camp.
Yes, Gregg, you stepped into my mining camp and you reopened
huge wounds. But I think in a way I would have wished I’d
done, you also healed them.
One of the protagonists of your book, Ken “Ace”
Riley, was my next-door neighbour on Wallace’s South
Hill. He woke us up on occasion in the 1980s, screaming the
black-and-white replays of his nightmare underground, of losing
his partner Joe Armijo, in the deep and the dark. Ken’s
kids, Greg and Randy, taught me how to chop wood. And next-door
neighbour Ken, when my pipes froze up, was first in the attic
of my log cabin to show me how to cheat a copper fitting and
make it work. He gave me a stolen Hecla axe, and took up where
his kids left off, and within a week I could make toothpicks
out of logs.
Ken Riley was just one of 200 men living an uncommon life,
with a common story. When we met I was a journalist and he
was a miner, working, after the fire, in Sunshine’s lamp
room. But we shared an affinity for Heidelberg beer and good
conversation. We almost never talked about the fire. But it
hung upon our shoulders like St. Elmo. He talked obliquely
about how the union and the company had screwed the men, but
I never knew his real story until I read Olsen’s book.
Ken’s kids tell me now that, yeah, I never really knew
the Old Man. He didn’t want to unload, back then.
But Gregg, he talked to you.
I was shooting stick at the Long Shot Saloon (formerly the
Tip-Top) in Kellogg one Saturday morning four years ago when
Gregg Olsen wandered in, looking for me, wanted to know what
I knew about the Sunshine Mine Disaster, said he was writing
a book. Well, I’d heard that happy horseshit before,
besides I was always going to be the guy who wrote that book
and who was he? Then he started shooting out names like Dionne
and Beehner and Kitchen and Bush, the real guys. Told me more
about those guys than I knew myself – and they were my
neighbours. I told him about Ace’s nightmares; he’d
already heard, they’d already talked.
Then Gregg went away, to work over every Sunshine Mine Disaster
survivor and widow still living for their recollection. This
part of research preparatory to writing is – trust me
– the most difficult. And my friends reported back to
me: “I think this guy gets it.”
The pre-publication copies of The Deep Dark are in circulation
this month up here, prior to its release to the New York snobs.
(CBS News, by the way, does not want to touch this story because
it is such ancient history. Apparently, so is the Hard Rock
West. Hurricane Dan as dinosaur slayer.)
Here is one widow’s reaction:
“You have written such a powerful book. It took me back
to those horrible days when the entire valley waited for words
of hope. My father-in-law was Bob Bush, he was one of three
men in his family who died in the mines. My ex-husband got
out of the Shine in the early 80's, and we moved to Alaska.
We are so much a product of that environment. So many memories,
so many names. Buz and Jenny remain dear friends. Thank-you
for writing it, for giving them dignity. Thank-you also for
clearing up the mystery of why it was so lethal. My husband
may have known, but he never told me. My thanks are so pathetic
an expression of what I feel for the miracle of this book
you have written. I had wondered for years why no one had
taken on the task. You have struck the right note.
“I must tell you also, I consumed this book. Obviously
so painful a subject would not be savored, but I couldn't
stop. I missed my yoga class and read for 6 seemingly short
hours.”
It was signed by a Sunshine widow, just a few days ago.
Hey, you with the cute charts: Men die for you. Hey you with
the pump-and-dump scam. Men die for you. Ninety at a time,
in the exploration camps, in the hard-rock mines. Does that
make you, Mr. Normal with your accounting degree, feel superior?
Men die. It’s a fact of life for all of us. What Gregg
does is dignify, for the first time in American literature,
the hard-rock miner that walks amongst you. He is not macho.
He is simply an American man. This is the stick-man miner
of Hart, Twain and Solomon, suddenly flesh and bone.
The men who make lousy charts and stock scams are different
from the men who actually bring you silver. Miners are living,
breathing sentient human beings who occasionally die for you.
Gregg has breathed life back into the inert bodies of the
91 dead of May 2, 1972. That the Sunshine Mine is now in the
hands of a man who lost uncles, grandfathers and friends in
the Newcastle coal fields is of no small consolation to me.
To understand mining at that visceral level – that mines
are holes in the ground that occasionally do nasty things,
especially if management is not looking – is not something
your average MBA can suss.
Mines kill while you play with your chart toys in your air-conditioned
condo in Florida. The beauty of the miners’ dignity is
that they know this and go to work anyway. The least of the
day’s pay hands has a triple-nine silver round on his
mantle. He believes in what he’s doing.
Thank-you, Gregg. You’ve reminded the miner of the dignity
he always had, a dignity that the poofters in their Park Avenue
lofts will never know.
Gregg has healed us, vindicated our labours. Before you buy
an ounce of silver stock, read this book. And give Gregg Olsen
a Pulitzer. The American West has always had a friend in the
hard-rock miner. Now the miner has a friend.
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