The foreman then showed the man the cotton string that had been burned off, and he left, giving the San Francisco man a sour look as he departed. Even a dead rat in any close or heated part of the mine annoys the men, and is speedily scented out and sent above. So with everything else from which there can arise the slightest effluvium.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.
Accidents are of constant occurrence in mines in every part of the world, and the mines on the Comstock lode enjoy no immunity from what appears to be the common lot or prevalent fatality, in this respect. Accidents of every imaginable kind have occurred since the opening of the first mine on the Comstock, still occur, and will continue to occur so long as a mine on the lode is worked.
In the early days, when the miners worked in a primitive way with a hand-windlass, and sunk a small round shaft resembling an ordinary well, they quite as frequently broke legs, arms, and ribs, or were instantly killed, as at the present day. Though men were working in that which was but a straight round hole, only fifty or a hundred feet in depth, they were still able to injure themselves in many ways. They fell out of buckets, or the crank of a windlass was broken, and they went back to the bottom of the shaft “by the run;” a blast exploded while they were yet standing over it; rocks fell out of the walls of their untimbered shafts; or dropped from a bucket as it was being landed at the top of the shaft—in short, they were maimed and killed in ways innumerable and past finding out until the thing had happened.
At the present day, with all manner of safety apparatus, and every avenue to accident seemingly thoroughly guarded, men are wounded and killed the same as before. They are constantly being hurt and killed in new and unheard-of ways—in fact, in every way imaginable. It is a saying in the mines, that these accidents run in streaks; that they occur in groups. When two or three accidents have happened within as many days, you will hear the miners say: “Now, look out, we are going to have a regular run of accidents!” and so it generally turns out. There will often be a dozen accidents within a fortnight, half of them, perhaps, of a fatal character.
More accidents happen to old miners than to men who are new to the business. The old miner sometimes forgets where he is, while ‘where he is’ is just what the greenhorn is all the time thinking about. He is always on the lookout for trouble, and he is always holding on to something that has the appearance of being pretty substantial—particularly when he is in the neighborhood of shafts and winzes; but a man who has worked in the mines for years will walk into a winze or chute in a musing mood, or run a car into the main shaft and be pulled in after it, which is a thing a green hand has never been known to do. Shafts, chutes, winzes, and things of that nature are what he is always looking for, and you couldn’t pull him into one of them with any yoke of oxen ever seen in a mine.
Hundreds upon hundreds of accidents have happened in the Comstock mines, some hundreds of them fatal. A large volume would not contain their history. I may furnish a few examples at random—by no means the worst that have happened—in order to give the reader some insight into the nature of the accidents that occur in mines:
In January, 1874, four miners met with quite a thrilling and perilous adventure in the bottom of the main shaft of the Ophir mine. No situation in a sensational play could possibly have been more blood-curdling than that in which the four men found themselves.
