History of the big bonanza

by Dan De Quille

His head was torn off, his arms and legs were torn off, and all that was left was his trunk, in which not a whole bone remained. The trunk was rolled up in a piece of canvas and brought to the surface, while pieces of his arms, legs, and head were scraped up and sent up in candle-boxes.

In falling, the body bounded from side to side against the walls of the shaft, and, in passing the 1400-foot station, a piece of one of the bones of a leg, with some flesh adhering, flew out of the compartments and fell on the station floor. He was a French Canadian, and had just purchased a lot of trinkets to send home to his wife and family by a friend who was going to leave for Canada the next day.

Just as they were bringing up the remains in the canvas and candle-boxes, this friend arrived to get the trinkets which he was to carry to Canada.

When cages are passing stations, men sometimes put their heads out into the shaft and have them crushed to atoms or pulled entirely off. In June, 1874, a miner was instantly killed by having his head caught by a descending cage at the Crown Point mine. He was at the time in the act of pulling the bell-wire at the station at the 1000-foot level. As the man went to pull the wire to stop the cage, a friend who was with him turned to a box to get a candle. When he turned again he saw his companion going down with the cage. The cage passed down just below the level of the station, and stopped, having struck the head of the man who had fallen being wedged between it and the side of the shaft. The man left at the station, thinking his friend had gone to the bottom of the shaft, rang up the cage (a double-decker), when the body came up with it, the legs still fast.

In August, 1873, at the Chollar-Potosi mine, a miner ran an empty car into the shaft, and was pulled in after it, falling a distance of 890 feet. In the sump were found floating portions of the shattered car but the body of the man had sunk to the bottom of the water. By the use of grappling-irons the body, mangled almost out of all semblance to a man, was finally recovered. The whole of the head was gone, down to the underjaw, both legs and both arms were broken in dozens of places, and, indeed, not a whole bone was left in any part of the body. So torn and mangled was it—so nearly reduced to pulp—that it was found necessary to roll it in a blanket, and lash it to a piece of plank, in order to get it up to the surface. In pulling, the man was dashed from side to side of the shaft, striking against the timbers, now on this side and now on that, tearing all the clothing from his person. Shreds of clothing were found sticking to the shaft timbers in several places. In one place one of his gloves was found lying on a timber, and in another place hung a piece of one of his socks, containing a toe that had been torn from the foot. The pump brought up bloody water for a considerable time after the accident, showing that the whole contents of the sump had been crimsoned.

Although the ingenuity of the many mechanics about the mines is constantly exercised in devising means for the prevention of accidents, and although there are now in operation a great number of useful inventions of this kind, yet men continue to find ways of being wounded and killed never before dreamed of. In all of the leading mines safety-cages are in use; also, safety incline-cars, or “giraffes,” and these have saved scores of lives. With the safety-cage or giraffe in use the miners do not fall to the bottom when a cable breaks. The safety apparatus instantly comes in play, and the cage or giraffe is at once stopped, at the point of ascent or descent at which the cable parted.

In all the hoisting works there is a strong cover of latticework over the mouth of each compartment of the main shaft, to prevent men from stumbling or thoughtlessly walking into it. When the cage comes up the shaft, the iron shield or “bonnet” on its top picks up this cover, and holds it up out of the way, the floor of the cage meantime filling the mouth of the compartment, and guarding it in place of the cover; when the cage descends it leaves the cover behind on the opening through which it passed down, somewhat like the cunning little animal that pulls the door of its hole in after it when it retreats into the ground.

With all these provisions for protecting life and limb, accidents continue, and must ever continue to happen, as there are so many things against which neither the owners of mines nor the miners themselves can guard. In case of a cable parting, for instance, the men who are on the cage are protected by the safety apparatus, but the upper part of the cable is liable to spring backwards and kill the engineer standing at his engine fifty or sixty feet in the rear of the shaft, quite at the opposite end of the building.

A heavy cable of steel wire whipping back in this way, will cut a broad road through the whole length of the ceiling of a building, taking off large joists and beams as though they were so many bars of soap. Huge fly-wheels of many tons’ weight occasionally burst asunder, tearing the sides and roof of the works to pieces, killing or wounding all who may be in the way of the flying fragments; boilers sometimes explode, and leave hardly a vestige of the works in which they stood; men are caught in the cog-wheels of the machinery; and, in short, there is no safety either above or below ground.

Below the surface, however, the accidents are most numerous and terrible. In the examples given by means of which to illustrate the fearful velocity attained by the human body in falling through a space of from 1000 to 1500 feet, it may be thought that I have selected the most shocking I could find; but such is not the case. It is the usual experience that in falling such a distance, the hand, foot, or head of a man coming in contact with a timber toward the bottom of a shaft, is cut or torn off. It is by no means unusual for the remains of men to be collected at the bottom of a shaft and sent to the surface in candle-boxes; to such an extent are the bodies and limbs of many who fall into shafts rent and scattered. On one occasion of this kind, when the jury of inquest had finished hearing the testimony and were sitting silent round the fragmentary remains, considering their verdict, a man came hurriedly in, with a candle-box under his arm, approached the foreman, and said to him in a reverent tone, “Wait a moment, please—I’ve got some more of him.”