Review by Ed Quillen
Mining history – December 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado Mining Stories – Hazards, Heroics & Humor
by Caroline Arlen
Published in 2002 by Western Reflections
ISBN 1-890437-74-3
THIS BOOK’S TITLE would be more accurate if it were Silverton Mining Stories, or even San Juan Mining Stories, rather than Colorado Mining Stories. It’s got plenty of stories — recollections from 30 miners — but almost all of them concern the mines around Silverton, some of which stayed in production until the 1980s. Other than a few passing mentions, you won’t hear much about Leadville or Cripple Creek, but this collection should be of interest to people interested in Leadville or Cripple Creek, nonetheless.
The author, Caroline Arlen, admits she knows little of underground work. But after hearing some old timers talk at a Silverton Hardrockers Holiday festival in 1997, she decided that their tales should be preserved. And Arlen has done a fine job of it. She has a good ear for the speaker’s voice, and a good editor’s eye for what needs to be in the tale.
Essentially, Colorado Mining Stories is a collection of short oral histories — miners talking about their work over the years. Much of the talk is about danger. Almost all mines have bad air and some loose rock, as well as machinery that can crush men as easily as it crushes rocks, but the San Juans had an outdoor danger — avalanches that made working topside as adventuresome as toiling underground.
Thus while reading these recollections of broken bones and dead co-workers, you start to wonder “Why didn’t these guys take up another line of work?”
The answers appear through the accounts. Many were in it for the money; mining paid better than any other job open to an able-bodied guy (and the occasional gal) with only a high-school diploma. Some liked the sense of discovery, since you never know what’s ahead when you’re driving a drift.
Others enjoyed the lack of direct supervision, since in many of these mines, a miner and his partner saw the shift boss only at the start and end of the shift. And there were more than a few who found fun and profit in high-grading — smuggling out the most valuable chunks of gold that they encountered while underground.
Each miner’s reminiscence runs for five or six pages, often accompanied by photos, and there’s a gem or two in every one of them, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. Here are a couple of selections.
From Albert Fedel of Ouray, talking about the Idarado Mine, then known as the Treasury Tunnel, in the late 1930s:
“When we had the bunkhouses going up there, you went up and stayed until they said you could go to town. It’s not very far from the Idarado to town, but the road wasn’t much more than five feet wide, and it wasn’t paved. I went up in September, one time, and I didn’t get back until July. We were contract mining, which is where you get paid according to how much rock you break. We made good money, but we didn’t have the chance to go to town and spend it.
“They had these outhouses, until the bunkhouses got plumbing. And you always got a guy that would swipe the shower soap. We couldn’t catch this one guy, so we finally decided we’d fix him up. I went over to the blacksmith and got a couple of Gillette razor blades. We powdered them up and put them in a bar of soap and left it in the fountain.
“He looked like hell when he got done with that bar of soap. Oh man was he cut up. Mainly from the arm where he started. He come on out yelling and headed for the medical box. The boss said, ‘Well I guess you won’t never bother another bar of soap.’ He handed him his check and said, ‘Now you can go find another place to work.'”
Or this recollection from Terry Rhoades of Silverton:
“Most of the people I know who have been killed underground were hit by slabs. The pockets in the scrams would get hung up — all the big boulders hanging up in there. You had to crawl up on ladders, put dynamite around to blast them down, so they didn’t fall on you by accident. That can be a little scary. One time I was running out of there with boulders coming behind me. I hit my head on the rail bolted at the brow of a pocket, and flipped. I quickly crawled out of the way of the rocks coming down, but I wound up getting a bunch of stitches on my head.
“With Johnny Castle, I guess he just got hit by a really big slab. They were going to bolt up that slab. That’s where you drill a hole through it and put these pins in it that hold it up there. He went to bolt it up, but it broke behind him, fell and killed him.
“My good friend, Steve Davidovich, was barring down in a chute with a drill steel. You’re not supposed to use steel, because steel doesn’t bend. You’re supposed to use an aluminum bar. Anyway, he hit that rock with the steel, and that rock was probably about 600 pounds. It caught the steel, and the other end of the steel caught him underneath the neck. Broke his neck.”
AND THERE’S Pat Donnelly of Silverton, the first woman to work at Standard Metals, who recalled setting off dynamite: “Oh man, talk about a rush! I love to blow things up. You push that plunger down, and that dynamite blows. You can feel the vibration under your feet, and then you see that smoke start curling up out of those holes. It was great.”
Plus Frank Gallegos of Bondad, talking about his boyhood in Silverton after the tourist train started running: “I also sold chipmunks to the tourists. They would pay five dollars for a chipmunk. Then they’d go and stick their finger in the cage. The chipmunk would bite the hell out of their finger, they’d drop the cage, and the chipmunk would run off. I’d catch it again and sell it again.”
These selections from the recollections could go on and on — there are scores of great stories and anecdotes here, coming from the industry that built Colorado but is now vanishing. These are the hard-rock voices you used to hear in the J-Mar and the Manhattan in Leadville, and they’re voices that are receding.
I couldn’t put it down once I started, and if you’ve got any interest in Colorado’s mining lore, you’ll feel the same way.
