“Nor were the only hazards underground. Mining made the whole district dangerous. Sampling just a tiny smattering of the accidents that had occurred on the lode in the ten years since its discovery: A boulder falling from a drift face in a Gold Hill mine broke a man’s leg and collarbone; a thirsty mill worker took a swig of a clear liquid he supposed to be water and cored out his gullet with nitric acid used by prospectors and assayers to prove the presence of silver. A freight wagon ran over a child. A miner tamping a black powder charge with an iron rod struck a spark that touched off the blast—a rock put out his eye. A collapsing pile of shoring timbers crushed a teamster’s skull. A popular stagecoach driver trying to control a runaway team died when the stagecoach capsized and smashed him beneath. A man trying to drive a buggy through a drove of hogs lost control of his horses, fell from his seat, and broke his thigh. A sill timber being lowered into a mine slipped from its harness and killed a man below. Two men on the surface stepped into an ore bucket attached to a horse whim without noticing that the horse had been detached from the whim. They shot 230 feet to the bottom of the shaft “at the run” and would have died except for the ten feet of water in the shaft sump and the drag of the rope spooling off the whim, which slightly slowed their descent. Coworkers fished them out unharmed. An eight-year-old boy was found dead at the bottom of an abandoned forty-foot shaft. Nine-year-old Freddie Cowles toppled into a privy and drowned. The brake of a loaded ore freighter going down Gold Cañon failed. The runaway wagon crushed and killed four of the team’s six horses. A man working in a Gould & Curry ore chamber fell one hundred feet through the timber sets and died impaled on a collection of picks at the bottom. A mill worker trying to dislodge stuck amalgam poked his finger through a pan’s drain hole and had it chopped off by a passing “muller,” one of the rotating iron bars that stirred the pulp. A surprise jet of steam severely scalded the back of a man adjusting amalgamating pans in a mill. A miner brought home a quantity of amalgam, put it in the oven, then left to run an errand. Mercury vapors killed his child and rendered his wife and their German lodger “insensible.” In the Chollar-Potosi hoisting works in the spring of 1868, a bolt connecting the brake lever to the brake shoe broke. The cage—which didn’t have safety catches—plummeted down the nine-hundred-foot-deep shaft, and the braided iron wire cable spun off the twelve-and-a-half-foot-diameter hoisting reel with “fearful rapidity.” Men tending the equipment scattered for their lives as the immense centrifugal force disintegrated the woodwork frame of the hoisting reel, sending heavy pieces of wood, bolts, and iron banding flying about the hoisting works. The end of the cable whipped off the reel, smashed a ten-foot trail through the ceiling, darted through the shaft house like an angry steel snake, wrapped around the crossbeam of the gallows frame and nearly wrenched it from its foundation, then slithered down the shaft after the fallen cage—which was empty, thank God. A cage in the Kentuck crushed a fourteen-year-old pick carrier named Kennedy against the shaft timbers. He survived severe injuries. A boy named Miles working as an engineer’s assistant in the hoisting works of the Yellow Jacket’s South Shaft got his left thumb caught in an engine valve. The valve tore it off. John Russell and a gang of other nightshift miners working in the Hale & Norcross shaft in the spring of 1868 dodged a mass of rock and dirt falling from above. Several of them sought safety in different compartments of the shaft. Those sheltering in the pump compartment heard Russell call out, “I’m all right! I’m all right!” But just at that moment a cage came whizzing up. A few seconds later, a man at the station one hundred feet above saw a headless figure atop the passing cage. The man recovered from his fright and rang for a stop. Miners wrestled John Russell’s body to the station. The only evidence of his head was a flap of skin with an ear and some hair stuck to it. Russell’s head had been torn off by the passing shaft timbers somewhere beneath. Adding to the gloomy, candlelit nightmare, searching miners couldn’t find the severed head. Twenty-eight-year-old Chauncy Griswold got tangled in the machinery of the Pacific Mill below Gold Hill. A rapidly spinning drive shaft brokehis leg and wound his torn and lacerated muscles around the shaft. A setscrew ripped a hole in his abdomen. His body spun around with the rapidly revolving shaft. His head pounding against the floor thwack-thwack-thwack stove in the side of his skull. Griswold was dead by the time his coworkers managed to stop the machinery. An eight-year-old boy drowned in a flume conveying water to a mill. A Crown Point miner coming up on a cage narrowly escaped death when a negligent engineer sent the cage “up the sheaves” and crushed it against the gallows frame overhead. A carman named Michael McGuire pushed a loaded car onto the cage at the Kentuck’s four-hundred-foot station. He leaned forward to secure it in place. The cage suddenly started up the shaft and jammed him between the cage floor and the station’s cap timber. The engineer on the surface sensed something amiss and slacked the cable, freeing McGuire. Unconscious, McGuire slipped from the cage, bounced off the front lip of the station floor, and fell three hundred feet to his death at the bottom of the shaft. A twenty-eight-year-old Irish miner named Patrick Price was working in an inclined winze in the Chollar-Potosi when the cave of an insufficiently timbered level beneath collapsed the ground around him. A mass of dirt, rocks, and splintered timbers carried him to the bottom of the incline. The press of earth trapped his hands and feet and the whole of his body, but a group of shattered timbers somehow protected his head. His voice echoed out from inside the collapse. Price begged his companions to dig him out, but no one dared come within twenty feet. Price spoke to his friends nearby as the ground above his head creaked, cracked, and groaned. The other miners did their best to keep Price from learning the awful hopelessness of his predicament. Loose earth slowly piled up around Price’s face. He bore the ordeal “manfully” for more than an hour, hoping for rescue, until a long moan escaped his lips. A moment later, “one grand crash” collapsed tons of clay, rock, and mangled timbers onto Patrick Price and stifled his voice forever. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 252). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 252). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (pp. 251-252). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 251). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 251). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 251). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (pp. 250-251). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 250). Scribner. Kindle Edition. Crouch, Gregory. The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West (p. 250). Scribner. Kindle Edition. ”
