Review by Ed Quillen
Mining – April 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Making of a Hard Rock Miner
by Stephen M. Voynick
Originally published in 1978 by Howell-North Books
Republished by the author
ISBN 0-8310-7116-8
WHEN THIS BOOK was published nearly 30 years ago, thousands of hard-rock miners labored in the Rocky Mountains. Today, the miner is nearly extinct in Colorado, and the original publisher went out of business years ago, but this book remains in print – and for good reason.
For most of us, the good reason is that even though we know that mining is important to our region’s history, we don’t know much about what happens underground. The headframes and portals often sit in relatively isolated spots, but even if they perch next to an interstate highway, we still see only the topside. If we take one of those ghost-town mine tours, or visit the exhibits in the excellent museums at Creede or Leadville, we’re not inside a working mine.
There’s a big difference. I’d been inside lots of old mines (not a form of historic exploration that I’d recommend even to thrill-seeking Gen Xers, but as our President observed, many of us pass through a “young and foolish” phase) as well as tourist mines. They often gave rise to claustrophobic feelings, there’s nothing darker when the light goes out, and even barely perceptible sounds could be frightening because they might mean that the ground overhead was shifting.
In early 1980, when the rocks were moving around the clock, Climax hosted a media tour of what was then the largest underground mine in the world. We rode the mantrip in, we climbed up into slusher drifts and peered up into the finger drifts and learned why the hang-up men on the Storke were king-hell studs with world-class bragging rights. When a big chunk of rock clogged a chute – a hang-up – they crawled up there with drill and dynamite and broke the jam. Sometimes the jam broke them.
Water dripped constantly and we sloshed around with unshielded 440-volt trolley wires right overhead. Even with earplugs, the noise was excruciating whenever a jumbo drill ran. I still have nightmares about the prospect of falling into the gyratory crusher, which chewed up trainloads of car-sized rocks in seconds. The ground beneath our feet shook with passing trains and distant blasts. The air reeked of dust and nitro fumes. And we had no idea how anyone could avoid getting lost and spending weeks wandering around without food or daylight.
AMONG US TOURING WRITERS and reporters, our cynical theory was that the company’s strategy had backfired. The union contract was coming up that summer, and we figured the tour was designed to give us the company side so we’d tilt that way if a strike came. But if that was the plan, it didn’t work. Most of us, accustomed to working in comfortable offices, thought we’d want about $200 an hour to work underground. Except for the temperature, it seemed very much as I had imagined Hell when I was a youthful Baptist.
Steve Voynick needed some quick money, and hired on at Climax in 1970 as a miner’s helper. Within a week, most of the guys he started with had quit. He endured some hazing, and worked his way up to a full miner. Then he tramped for other work.
In need of cash again in 1973, he saw that Hecla was hiring for a copper mine in Arizona. “I didn’t really want to go underground again, but the two years away from the hole had mellowed the deafening roar of the drills and softened the deadly fall of the slabs. The next morning I phoned Casa Grande for an application.”
It was quite different from Climax, where everything moved on rails. At Casa Grande, the mine was entered through a long incline, diesel rigs did the hauling, and the topside was not the arctic climate of Climax, but often over 100º. The underground was over 100º, too.
“In less than two months at Hecla, I could see that Climax was in all respects a country club compared to the Lakeshore Mine. This included safety and general working conditions. The only thing Hecla improved on was winter driving to get to work.”
Voynick was working there in 1973 when the requirement came for miners to carry self-rescuers – masks with chemical filters that removed deadly carbon monoxide, often a product of underground fires. The miners didn’t much care for them – just more weight on an already heavy and uncomfortable tool belt.
“If there had been a lot of joking on August 13 about the clumsy cannisters we were given, there was none on August 17, for those much-cursed and verbally abused self-rescuers saved many lives that day. Only through their use did 110 of the 112 men who went underground that day reach the surface safely. Only two men, Deeder and Udall, remained underground, trapped by 225 feet of muck with a fire in the middle.” The book’s account of the rescue efforts is gripping.
Voynick tramped again, and ended up mining uranium near Douglas, Wyo. The mine was wet, the rock was rotten, there was carcinogenic radon gas – and at the next mine down the road, there was “contract mining,” where miners are paid by production instead of by the hour.
“The cold and dampness would go right through you for eight long hours. Dress heavily and you’d drench yourself with sweat when you were working; take the clothes off and you’d freeze. It didn’t seem nearly that bad when we got our first checks, though. Some good footage had gotten the hourly rate up to nearly $15 per hour, and with a little overtime, the two-week gross would be around $1,400. Grin and bear it, I told myself, that’s exactly what you’re here for.” (And Voynick earned that amount before the book was published in 1978 — more than twenty-five years ago.)
Voynick takes us underground, where even the vocabulary is different – what we’d call the roof of a tunnel is the back, the sides are ribs, usually lined with stulls, and a shovel is a muckstick. Co-workers might be powder monkeys or whistle punks.
He explains the camaraderie that develops in mines, but it’s something that has to be earned by the new hire. Mining is dirty, dangerous work, where mistakes or ignorance can maim or kill. The miners are loyal to each other, but never to the company, which is just a source for a paycheck.
He also examines the towns around the mines – and even if Leadville’s long winters inspired him to tramp from Climax, he ended up liking the area enough to settle nearby and write the occasional piece for this magazine.
So you can look at this as a piece of sociology, or recent history. In either case, it’s good reading, and probably as close as you want to get to actually brassing in at the dryroom at the start of an underground shift.
But I was surprised by the answer when I asked Steve — who acquired the publishing rights after Howell-North went out of business and then reprinted the book on his own — just who seemed to be buying the book. It’s required reading, he explained, in several colleges that teach mineral engineering. The engineers will end up in mine management, of course, but the colleges want their students to know what sort of workers they’ll be dealing with.
And Voynick makes that clear. Underground there’s a constant calculation: “I visualized the weekly paycheck on one side of an imaginary scale, and a slab with my name on it on the other. It took very little imagination to picture what a human body would look like if it caught one of those babies.”
