ringer in.â District men figured Montana miners took off Fridays to get an early start on the weekend and missed Mondays because they were too hungover to make it to work. Montana miners made similar jibes at Idaho miners.
In the late 1950s some Butte mines faltered, while most of Idahoâs held steady. Kenny âAceâ Riley, eighteen at the time, couldnât rustle a job where his father mined. When a referral came from his brother-in-law, already at Sunshine, Riley, a reed of a young man at only 135 pounds, fibbed about his weight on his job application and was hired as a minerâs helper.
Before he left town, his dad offered a warning.
âOnce youâve mined,â he said, âyouâll never get out of it. Itâll grab ahold of you.â
The senior Rileyâs words were prophetic. Every day was an adrenaline fix, like a motorcycle on Lookout Pass at speeds above ninety miles an hour.
Take the turn a little tighter, go a little faster. Feel the air and watch the world blur right by.
Working underground provided a rush, with blasts shaking the mine, rock tumbling down, and the certainty that anything could happen. After a shift, in the back of a minerâs mind thereâd always be the thought:
Cheated death again today, and got paid pretty good for it.
Riley loved it, and life was good.
Competition was another draw of working underground. Men pushed it even harder, maybe even took a few chances that they shouldnât, because they had something to prove. And being the biggest, strongest, and toughest was the brass ring. A minerâs identity, his reputation, was based not only on how much muck he pulled and therefore how much money he made, but also on the size of his balls.
When he was thirty, married and the father of five sons, Riley learned that the price of the rush could exceed its value. Sometimes devastatingly so. In March 1970 he was partnered with Bernelle Brown, a forty-two-year-old dreamer with a college education and a love for the big fat stack of cash that came with the mining life. It was a hellish 100-plus degrees in their stope on 4600, a wet atmosphere that sapped energy like a virus. At around 9:30 they opened a water line and let it run over their heads, shaking off the excess like dogs out of the river. They made small talk, smoked, and returned to drop more ore, but found that the chute was clogged. Lagging, or boards, had been carelessly placed across the chute by the night crew, but neither man knew it. Brownie started poking at the rock with a steel, and in a second, a thunderclap of rock and muck sounded as the world gave way to gravity and pressure. Riley lunged for Brownie, but no man could have been fast enough. Brownie, the muck, and the lagging under his feet swirled down the chute like a backed-up sink drain that had finally found relief, instantly killing the father of five. Neither man had worn a safety harness because both had believed the area was stable, and belts were too much of a bother anyway.
No one who lost a partner was ever the same afterward. The event kidnapped the survivorâs psyche for the rest of his life. It was a footnote that never vanished. Whenever Riley heard the song âSwing Low, Sweet Chariot,â heâd think of his fallen partner. For some reason, Brownie had been singing that song that day.
I F DANGER WAS A MINER â S HEROIN, MANY WHO WORKED UNDERGROUND were junkies. For Howard Markve, a week shy of turning twenty-nine, the suggestion that his life was on the line every minute underground became a compulsion. Standing on the raise climberâs steel deck, two hundred feet above the track, a light from a cap lamp casts a beam into a darkness of rock, talking and popping. The raise climberâs deck is the size of a dining table, and the miner standing on it doesnât really know, with complete certainty, which way that quarter-ton rock will fall, or if the rock that rains down will be
In the late 1950s some Butte mines faltered, while most of Idahoâs held steady. Kenny âAceâ Riley, eighteen at the time, couldnât rustle a job where his father mined. When a referral came from his brother-in-law, already at Sunshine, Riley, a reed of a young man at only 135 pounds, fibbed about his weight on his job application and was hired as a minerâs helper.
Before he left town, his dad offered a warning.
âOnce youâve mined,â he said, âyouâll never get out of it. Itâll grab ahold of you.â
The senior Rileyâs words were prophetic. Every day was an adrenaline fix, like a motorcycle on Lookout Pass at speeds above ninety miles an hour.
Take the turn a little tighter, go a little faster. Feel the air and watch the world blur right by.
Working underground provided a rush, with blasts shaking the mine, rock tumbling down, and the certainty that anything could happen. After a shift, in the back of a minerâs mind thereâd always be the thought:
Cheated death again today, and got paid pretty good for it.
Riley loved it, and life was good.
Competition was another draw of working underground. Men pushed it even harder, maybe even took a few chances that they shouldnât, because they had something to prove. And being the biggest, strongest, and toughest was the brass ring. A minerâs identity, his reputation, was based not only on how much muck he pulled and therefore how much money he made, but also on the size of his balls.
When he was thirty, married and the father of five sons, Riley learned that the price of the rush could exceed its value. Sometimes devastatingly so. In March 1970 he was partnered with Bernelle Brown, a forty-two-year-old dreamer with a college education and a love for the big fat stack of cash that came with the mining life. It was a hellish 100-plus degrees in their stope on 4600, a wet atmosphere that sapped energy like a virus. At around 9:30 they opened a water line and let it run over their heads, shaking off the excess like dogs out of the river. They made small talk, smoked, and returned to drop more ore, but found that the chute was clogged. Lagging, or boards, had been carelessly placed across the chute by the night crew, but neither man knew it. Brownie started poking at the rock with a steel, and in a second, a thunderclap of rock and muck sounded as the world gave way to gravity and pressure. Riley lunged for Brownie, but no man could have been fast enough. Brownie, the muck, and the lagging under his feet swirled down the chute like a backed-up sink drain that had finally found relief, instantly killing the father of five. Neither man had worn a safety harness because both had believed the area was stable, and belts were too much of a bother anyway.
No one who lost a partner was ever the same afterward. The event kidnapped the survivorâs psyche for the rest of his life. It was a footnote that never vanished. Whenever Riley heard the song âSwing Low, Sweet Chariot,â heâd think of his fallen partner. For some reason, Brownie had been singing that song that day.
I F DANGER WAS A MINER â S HEROIN, MANY WHO WORKED UNDERGROUND were junkies. For Howard Markve, a week shy of turning twenty-nine, the suggestion that his life was on the line every minute underground became a compulsion. Standing on the raise climberâs steel deck, two hundred feet above the track, a light from a cap lamp casts a beam into a darkness of rock, talking and popping. The raise climberâs deck is the size of a dining table, and the miner standing on it doesnât really know, with complete certainty, which way that quarter-ton rock will fall, or if the rock that rains down will be
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