A large mine in which are employed from five hundred to one thousand men is of itself a considerable village, though it be a village far below the light of day. In it are more timbers, lumber, and other combustible matter than is found in all the houses of a town of two thousand inhabitants—it contains millions on millions of square feet of timber—in it whole forests have found a tomb.
Besides being built up to a height of from one thousand to one thousand five hundred or two thousand feet, with cribs composed of massive timbers, each crib filling a space five by six feet in size, there are floors of heavy planks, six feet apart, one above another, all the distance from bottom to top. In many places, too, the main timbers are doubled again and so filled with blocks and wedges and braces that all is a solid mass of wood. In numberless places there are stairs leading from floor to floor, and then there are scores of chutes, built of timber and lined with planks, with vertical[vertical] winzes, constructed in the same way, all of which, with the chutes, lead up through the floors from level to level; also numerous drifts and cross-cuts supported by timbers and walled in with lagging (split pine-stuff like staves, but longer), all of which serve as flues to conduct and spread the heat and flames throughout the mine.
The mines of the Comstock have not escaped fires. They have not been[been] many, but they have been fearful as experiences, and have cost many lives.
The first and most terrible of these fires was that which broke out in the Yellow-Jacket mine, Gold Hill, about 7 o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, April 7, 1869, in which forty-five men lost their lives.
The fire started at the 800-foot level (that is 800 feet below the surface) at a point two hundred feet south of the main shaft, near the line of the Kentuck mine. It was first discovered at 7 o’clock in the morning, though it had no doubt been burning longer, as some of the miners asserted that they detected the smell of smoke as early as 3 o’clock A. M. The night shift (relay) left at 4 A. M. and the morning shift began work at 7 A. M., and it was supposed that the fire originated from a candle left sticking against a timber by men on the night shift. From 4 o’clock till 7 o’clock the only men in the mine were the car-men, but before the danger had been discovered many of the day shift had been lowered into the mines—Yellow-Jacket, Crown Point, and Kentuck.
The first thing done on discovering the fire was to try to get the men up out of the mines. The alarm of fire was sounded, and the fire companies of Gold Hill and Virginia City at once turned out.
Pending the arrival of the firemen with their apparatus, those about the several mines were doing all in their power to rescue the men who were left underground. At first the smoke was so dense that no one dared venture into either of the shafts, but about 9 o’clock in the morning it seemed to draw away from the Kentuck shaft, and men descended on the cage and recovered two dead bodies.
At the Crown Point mine, when the cage was being hoisted for the last time, some of the men on it were so far suffocated as to fall back and were crushed to death between the sides of the cage and the timbers of the shaft.
Toward noon some of the firemen working at the Yellow-Jacket mine ventured down the shaft to the 800-foot level and recovered three or four bodies of asphyxiated miners.
About the same time, at the Crown Point mine, a cage was sent down with a lighted lantern upon it. It was lowered to the 1000-foot level, and with the lantern was sent the following dispatch, written on a large piece of pasteboard: