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Show 'r y- - it 1 Man Weddings Dear Abby Theater Comics TV Today What's Doing Music i Do-- lt Living DESERET NEWS, TUESDAY, MAY 3, 1977 .! fh c 1 V in balmier days, Bingham Canyon was a typical mining town, with a hodgepodge of homes climbing up the gulches. A :yv Jf. s rS i i S&' p j m, , i ,LX. '' WX, . is fW i iawS'i: v zi u& JJ IP " , vKl 'V ft, ' .vl $. 1 C33 ' .4f 32 SiTOrafcJ - ri.Li i j I ;;ir t; 4 ? 4 ' Cl A As iff C4T - it Ml y, another to form the annual cycle The winter of 1926 was different. The last days of January witnessed a rise in temperature, and a thaw melted the surface snow. This was followed by a crystalizing freeze. At night the mountains shimmered in the moonlight with a kind of afterflow etching them against the inky backdrop of the sky in a radiance to be remembered. The freeze held fast. By Sunday, Feb. 14. winter had regained its pace, relentlessly flushing a continuous white haze of snow out of a leaden sky. On Monday, the town was muffled in a snowy silence, and still the snow fell. Shortly after eight on Wednesday morning an avalanche began to form as the hillside became overburdened with the massive snowfall. It gained momentum and volume as it tumbled downward and with an explosive roar thundered into Doty Gulch, crushing trees and houses in its violent onrush. The last building to be ravished was the little wooden Methodist church. With a single protesting peal of the bell, the steeple toppled into the avalanche which then lay spent at the foot of the gulch. Witnesses to the devastation, on the Utah Copper Hill directly opposite the path of the slide, were men who had watched the monster form and glide down the mountainside and had been helpless to do more than blow the whistle of the train on which they were stationed, a warning blast which was drowned out by the roar of the avalanche. News of the slide flashed through the town on shock waves of alarm, passed from citizen to citizen, and soon d the ruin was swarming with people armed with sl.ovcis of arty digging implement on which they could lay hold. Some dug with bare hands in the hope of saving lives entrapped in the snow. All day they dug and into the night and the next day. Mercifully the snow had stopped falling. The Highland Boy Mine office was set up as a temporary morgue. Here a steady stream of people searched the faces within until all of the dead were identified and laid to rest. In time, the wounds of the injured were healed and they returned to a way of life that never again was quite the same. Doty Gulch was not rebuilt. The mine company reclaimed the land which had been leased to the residents and it remained a somber tombstone in memory of those who had lost their lives. Over the years that followed the insatiable mining industry devoured the town, gulch by gulch, as new sites for dumping the waste ore were needed. Giant steam-shoverun by electricity ate away at the mountainsides and long lines of cars removed the ore. The residential arteries of the town were severed as people sold their homes to the expanding mining enterprise and they moved to the farther valleys of Copperton, West Jordan, Murray and Midvale. Thus, a slow process of deterioration set in until death came again to the little town on Jan. 1, 1972, when the last occupants were evacuated and the town of Bingham Canyon ceased to exist except in the hearts and memories of its former residents. snow-covere- :'.,j ' ft" &' Photos courtesy Kennecott Coooer Corp. and Utah State Historical Society. Binghams tragic winter of 26 Editors note: Mrs. Keppls, a free lance writer, lived in Bingham at the time of the snowslide she describes. She now lives in Glendale, Calif. By Wilma Rimby Kepple The bitter Eastern winter of 1977 recalls the slow and paintul death of the town of Bingham Canyon, Utah. In 1929, it was mutilated by a snowslide which cost the lives of 39 people and the loss of 17 homes. Although the inhabitants were not then aware of it, this was the beginning of the dissolution of the town. Bingham came into existence in late 1840 when Thomas and Sanford Bingham rode into the canyon with a herd of cattle and gave the area a name that stayed with it- The town forked out from lower Bingham at the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains to form the gulches and alleys with names like Frogtown, Hegland, Heaston, Markham. Copperfield, Carr Fork, Highland Boy and Doty. These spread out from Main Street like branches of a living tree on which the life of each individual touched upon the life of another. Timber was plentiful and the mountains were rich with minerals. Soon large mining interests began to operate and Bingham prospered and grew into a closely knit community of several thousand people. They were a hodgepodge of nationalities from almost every European country. Bingham had assimilated them all, yet left them free to retain the customs, the crafts and folklore of their homelands, resulting in a town of many cultures where the inhabitants had learned to live in harmony. There were names like Rimpiouja, Kannianen, Predovich, Melich. Hervilla, Tregaskis. Zanardi, Dellag- - nola, Santavatiabegoa ; colorful names that needed a bit of practice before they rolled easily off the tongue. This was the type of community where each one's problems were the problems of everyone, and when the tragedy of 1926 occurred, the grievious loss engulfed the town. Snow always came early to the little mining town situated some 28 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. A light snowfall would start to drift onto the mountaintops in late the town was wrapped in a October and by deep snow from which it did not emerge until the warming winds of April released it to reveal the muddy ruts and chuckholes beneath. Then would begin the maple, and the wild rose dirt roads, followed by crimson autumn. And so birdsong, the leafing of oak and spreading its bloom beside the a hot, dusty summer, and a the seasons had rolled one into ls Deep snow was not unusual for the mining town of Bingham Canyon, as this photo from the Denver Public Library Collection shows. Shortly after the snowslide, the avalanche was swarming with people shoveling with tools and bare hands, trying to save lives. American Gothic series Oldsters mass burial was only temporary Editors note: Luise Putcamp is editor of Sou'west Shore Magazine in Stanford, Conn., and has written a number of articles, short stories. including some award-winnin- g Her research into supposedly true and bizarre events led her to these stories of lost Americana which have been distributed by the Associated Press. FIRST OF A SERIES By Luis Putcamp Six drugged people lay on the log cabin's dirt floor two old women, three old men and a crippled youth. Kinfolk looked down at them said: with unconcern. Several "They're ready. The insensible six were stripped to one garment each. Then they were carried out into the chill light of a full moon and laid on logs rolled together in the drifts snow, Their noses, ears and fingers soon began to turn white in the bitter mountain air. By morning, the six were frozen stiff. While women in the cabin cleaned up after breakfast, the men purposefully piled out into the snowy morning to do strange chores . . . It happened at Eagle Ledge, Vermont. The time was January 8, early in the 1800s. old-time- rs Some of the men drove a team into the woods to collect spruce and hemlock boughs. Others set about building a wooden box, about ten feet long, five feet wide and five feet high. The villagers put straw on the bottom of the box. In the box they lay three bodies and covered them with doth and straw. They put in the other three, covered them, and nailed the top on the box. The box full of frozen people was shoved under a ledge, covered with branches, and left for the snow to cover. Now the infirm six would need no food from the villages skimpy winter larder. The following May 10 the air was mild and roads were muddy with beginning thaw. Near the ledge, the Vermonters set out rough-hew- n hemlock troughs, and put water to boii in iron pots hung frcm poles ever an open wood fire. The big wooden box was still buried, but snow had begun to melt from the brush on top. The villager tore off the branches, and shoveled the box free and dragged it clear of the ledge. They pried up the lid and stripped back straw and cloth. The top three bodies lay white, stiff and still in the pale sunlight. The six bodies were unpacked. They were lowered into troughs full of tepid water, heads d held clear. Then steaming water, with stepped hemlock needles, was poured into the troughs, over the rigid bodies. wine-colore- An hour went by. Color began to tinge the white bodies. The watching villagers set to work, rubbing and chafing. Another hour. Faces began to twitch. Arms and legs moved. The six in their watery troughs began to gasp. Spirits were trickled down the throats of the reviving people. They swallowed. Their eyes opened. They began to murmur. Soon they were sitting up. The villagers raised the six from the troughs, dried them off and helped them into the cabin. Soon they were eating a hearty meal, no worst for their four months under the snow. This story first appeared on the front page the Argus & Patriot of Montpelier, Vt. on Wednesday, Dec. 21, 1887. It was signed A M." The writer said it was from ''aa old diary kept by my Uncle William that came info my possession a few years ago of now-defun- at his decease." "A.M. said he'd seen that log cabin and the place where tl.e six people were interred and later revived. And he'd talked to an old man who said his father had been one of the six. Still, a tale this tall invites attempts at documentation. A writer in 1969 said that the "A.M. who signed the 1887 article "was almost certainiy Allen Morse, a dairy farmer from Calais, Vt. w ho died on January 21, 1919 at the age of 82. Morse would have been only 32 when his newspaper story appeared. Yet "A.M. had described himself as an old man. It was this same researcher who suggested that the burial site was "a settlement called Eagle Ledge between Calais and East Elmore " And he turned up one more fascinating rumor: A founder of Eagle Ledge had been the coachman of John Hunter, the British surgeon. Hunter, who died in 1793, was famous for his offbeat research. And some of Hunters known experiments were in hibernation and suspended animation. Next: Elm Street's House of Mystery. I I b |