The Deep Dark (5 page)

Miners referred to their horseplay as grab-assing, and occasionally things went too far. In addition to stunned pride, miners turned up with broken bones and gaping wounds. Bob Launhardt was put in the position of having to write up some of those antics as safety violations. That pushed him further away from the brotherhood of miners. In truth, Launhardt's reserved personality made it difficult enough for a close relationship with others anyway. He hunted elk and deer with a couple of pals, but those relationships didn't last. One of his buddies left for another mine, and another died when the battery hood of his motor caught a muck chute and swung back, slicing his head from his neck.

O
N THE MORNING OF
M
AY
2
, AS HE HAD FOR THREE MONTHS
SINCE
his return to Idaho, Launhardt drove from Pinehurst through Smelterville and five more miles southeast of Kellogg, to the spur at Big Creek. Filtered sunlight reflected off his windshield as he went up the mountain and past the row of miners' houses that marched up toward the company gate. He was troubled that morning by something he'd read in the
Kellogg Evening News
the night before. It was a scathing letter from the local of the miners' union, the United Steelworkers of America:

Launhardt took the comments personally because he took his responsibility to heart. He parked behind the mine offices. It was forty-five minutes before the day shift would start filing underground. After changing into coveralls, heavy woolen socks, yellow hard-toed rubber boots, and a hardhat, lamp, and battery, he met up with Jim Salyer. A no-nonsense fellow with angular features and a head of sandy hair, Salyer, fifty-one, was the foreman in charge of development efforts on the 5400 and 5600 levels, where Sunshine was searching for new ore bodies. By the early 1970s there were additional pressures on mining companies throughout northern Idaho to ramp up production. Mineral extraction was no longer merely the interest of the small towns where shafts were sunk. Mining was going corporate, and pressure to perform was increasing with every quarterly report. Sunshine's owners wanted the silver mine to pay out, and a stiff-armed push was on.

6:15
A.M.,
M
AY
2

Sunshine Mine Offices

E
VEN IN EARLY
M
AY, FRAGMENTS OF THE SNOW PACK WERE SCATTERED
like broken dishes over the mountainsides adjacent to the mine. Icy water drained from the dirty white deposits into Big Creek and gushed under the mine bridge before joining Elk Creek and the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. The weather was a yo-yo in May. Days sometimes hit the mid-seventies, with nights plummeting to freezing as the elements battled over whether it was winter or summer—the seasons that rule the district most of the year. On the eastern edge of the thirty-five-mile-long valley, water dammed up by beavers was smoothed flat, and stalks of cattails with the last tufted remnants of coppery fur stood battered but upright.

But more than any place on earth, mining districts were about what lay beneath the surface, what couldn't be seen by the day-tripper passing through.

Mine engineers recorded the world below, but such schematics were a blend of reality and wishful thinking. They depicted an orderly place. In a mine map, drifts often run in straight lines, and raises poke from one level to the next in a perfect, logical trajectory. But no mine is so tidy. Men develop mines with muscle, jackleg diamond drills, and explosives. And as much as they would like things to go exactly as planned, the subterranean has a will of its own. Rocks break, fractures form, and routes are adjusted. To the layperson, the concept of a tunnel speaks of a streamlined and uniform tube. In a hardrock mine, the height and width of a tunnel or drift vary considerably. A drift might start out spacious enough for a Peterbilt, but a hundred yards later it may be just big enough to accommodate an MG. It only has to accommodate a muck car and a man train. Bulkheads along drifts are patched with wood and plastic or polyurethane foam to control airflow and to keep the face from splintering off any dangerous rock. Steel mats are bolted to places that appear especially perilous. Massive timbers shore up intersections or cross-drifts.

The Jewell, a timbered, four-compartment shaft, was not only the gateway for men and machines, but it was also the mine's single most important source of fresh air, the life-giver of any mining operation. Jewell was the surname of the supervisor who sank the shaft back in 1934, though most assumed—obvious misspelling aside—it commemorated the wealth deep in the mine's gullet. The Jewell dropped from the surface to the 3700 level. Sunshine was a web of passageways that, if accurately depicted, would look more like a near-blind grandmother's worst crocheted potholder than a grid made with a ruler. Drifts or tunnels followed ore bodies set off by bands of snowy white quartz that, in the bright light of a motor, appeared as swirls of silver tetrahedrite folded into a metamorphic meringue. Spaced every two hundred feet, horizontal drifts were intersected by vertical cuts called “raises” that led miners from one working level to the next. Around every turn of the underground maze were old stopes that had been emptied of ore and gobbed—packed with waste rock and trash—to protect against collapse. By the early sixties, most Idaho mines had switched to backfilling mined-out voids with sandfill, a slurry of water and tailings, the by-product of the milling process that chemically and mechanically separated precious metal from waste rock.

Safety engineer Bob Launhardt considered Sunshine no more convoluted than any other district mine, although it did operate with multiple shafts. The Jewell Shaft was the main way into the depths of the mine, and it carried miners and other underground workers in a single-drum chippy hoist; muck and equipment traveled the Jewell in the larger double-drum. The Jewell bottomed out just below the 4000 level, but its role was to get men and machines to the most important levels, 3100 and 3700. If the Jewell was the way into the mine, 10-Shaft was the route down to the current production levels. The deepest level being developed was 6000. The 200-foot-spaced drifts that followed the veins were fed by 10-Shaft. They no longer were identified by descriptive names like Yankee Girl or Chester Vein but with numbers and letters to mark their location. Men took 10-Shaft from 3100 to the deepest working level of the mine, 5600. By 1972, the route to 10-Shaft from 3100 was seldom used. The 3700 level was preferred. In fact, most Sunshine miners had no familiarity with 3100 whatsoever.

A mile's train ride east of the Jewell, 10-Shaft was powered by a 900-horsepower double-drum hoist that carried ore and waste muck from lower levels to cars that ran on a track to the Jewell. The double-drum configuration also allowed for two single-deck cages. Each deck held nine men—one deck coming and one going on a counterbalance system. On the 3700 level, a single-drum chippy hoist had a four-deck configuration that transported forty-eight men at full capacity. Cages had next to no clearance from the jagged shaft, maybe four inches at best. Both the shaft and the cage were gated, a necessity given that one slip was a rocket ride downward. The conveyance's trajectory was steadied by four-by-six-inch mahogany guides bolted to timbers that defied gravity with rock bolts and timber spikes. To ride the cage was to experience a seemingly endless free fall, a long, dark descent through a great empty space. Men traveled at about 900 feet a minute; muck and supplies hurtled at about 1,800 feet a minute. Speed depended on three things: the state of the equipment, the government's regulations, and what kind of night the operator had the night before. Sunshine cages had an excellent safety record; not all mines in the district did. In October 1936 at the Morning Mine in Mullan, a hoist cable snapped, the backup safety dog catches failed, and a cage with ten men plummeted downward. The cage was forty-three feet tall before the accident. When the crew recovered it, it was a six-foot steel sandwich spread with a paste of dead miners.

Clustered around the station at 10-Shaft on 3700 was a cavernous space that served as a warehouse, a shaft repair shop called “the chippy doctor's room,” and, a little farther down the drift, a pipe shop known as the “08” because of its proximity to the defunct 8-Shaft. All were lit by dangling banks of fluorescent tubes.

6:15
A.M.,
M
AY
2
Fourth of July Pass, West of Kellogg

T
HE
K
ITCHEN ME
N
—D
ELMAR, THIRTY, HIS EIGHTEEN-MONTHS-
older brother, Dewellyn
,
and their fifty-four-year-old father, Elmer—drove in from the western town of Coeur d'Alene and the surrounding area where most of the Kitchen clan lived. Delmar, who lived the farthest out, near Hayden Lake, was always the last and first link in the family carpool. As the only nonsmoker of the three, Delmar kept the window cracked no matter the weather or the season. The men in the '65 Ford on the morning of May 2 were mining elite. For some in the mine, the name Kitchen was revered for the fear it evoked among lesser miners. Challenging a Kitchen was a fool's death wish. Led by Dewellyn, the pecking order of any mine started with a Kitchen and went down from there. Men underground would pass their lunch hour by betting on who could bend a timber spike, a long, pencil-thick nail. The best at the challenge was nearly always Dewellyn. He'd take out his handkerchief, wrap it around the spike, and turn it into a horseshoe. Others practiced with spikes for hours, trying to make them give. Few could.

Guys in the Shoshone County Mountaineer Motorcycle Club admired thirty-one-year-old Dewellyn, although not so much for his riding ability, because he was only so-so at that. Fellow riders were spellbound by Kitchen's casual display of his Samson-like physical strength. One time Kitchen and a buddy were out riding a steep hill, their motorcycles sputtering up the incline. Kitchen had enough, got off, and put his motorcycle up on his shoulders and
carried
it to the crest. He was going to win that race, and if it meant packing his motorcycle up the hardest part of the course, so what? That's what muscles and stamina were all about. The Kitchens were solid blocks of grit and don't-fuck-with-me attitude. If there was a tougher man, a harder sonofabitch than the Animal, as Dewellyn was respectfully known, he'd yet to make his presence felt anywhere in the district. Kitchen was Mullan miner Buz Bruhn's partner. Bruhn had seen with his own eyes what the Animal could do. One time they were working on a raise prep that involved putting in upright fourteen-by-fourteen timbers. The timbers were so massive that a motor was used to lift them into place. Kitchen sized them up one morning and told his partner that he thought he'd be able to lift one and put it into place.
By himself.

Sure, pard,
thought Bruhn, a man who'd paid a printer twenty dollars for a fake birth certificate when he was sixteen so he could join the Marines. Bruhn, thirty-nine, was no slouch himself when it came to physical strength. He'd known Kitchen for years, but wasn't sure
any
man could move those massive timbers. Bruhn offered a hand to get one lifted, but without so much as a grunt, the Animal dismissed the help and took it the rest of the way. His forearms were a pair of fire hydrants, stout and bulging under the taut sheath of a grungy T-shirt. He picked up that timber as if it was a campfire log.

This guy's a walking winch,
Bruhn thought.

The morning of May 2, in a routine followed by all the men of the mine, the Kitchens checked in with the bosses at the shifter's shack, a corrugated sheet-metal building with a peaked roof facing the portal. Overhead, the cables of the hoist ran from the hoist room to the Jewell's headframe, where huge steel wheels and massive pulleys with cables supported the cage—the vertical transportation system that miners always told outsiders was like a high-rise building elevator.

The Kitchen boys made another play for working on 5400 on Tuesday. They had been bugging their foreman for the past week or so about the heat on 5000 and how they'd prefer to go work on the cooler 5400. Their father, Elmer, was down there, and the three Kitchen men thought it might be good to work on the same level.

“I'm not going to argue with you guys no more,” the foreman said. “Just go down to the 5000 and finish what you're doing. All you have to do is slush it out and you're done with it.”

The Kitchens knew how to pick their battles, at least when the boss was calling the shots. They backed off.

From the Jewell station they took the cage down to 3700 and scrunched up to fit into the tight and low confines of the flame-orange, battery-powered train for the mile-long ride to 10-Shaft. Guys sat on benches two abreast facing each other. So tight was the fit, men interlaced their legs for the duration of the ride. Some smoked, some talked, a few even slept as the train lurched through the drift, its wheels scraping against the rails and screeching as it ran along a drift, parallel with the ore body. At the station, another cage was waiting to ferry the miners to their working levels. Delmar and Dewellyn got off on 5000 and passed through two air doors on the east side of the shaft, where they were working a raise prep with their respective partners. Elmer continued on down to 5400.

6:25
A.M.,
M
AY
2

Jewell Shaft

B
ENNIE
S
HEPPARD AND
G
LEN
S
HOOP HAD BEEN REPAIRING SHAFT
guides on the 3400 level off 10-Shaft. They were coming off an uneventful graveyard shift, typical of their routine of track and shaft repair. A little after 6:00 a.m., the pair made their way to 3700 station for the man train out of the mine. Foreman Ray Rudd ran the motor, and Sheppard and Shoop joined the others and got on. As the train passed an electrical substation, Shoop, twenty-one, turned to his partner and sniffed.