Show life of a gilsonite miner by Mux Peat rots No night was ever as dark as the inside of a gilsonite i When a miner turns his light J he is in heavy absolute In a drift four or five hundred feet back i fram the shaft there Is no except that made by the miner himself as he swings his into the rotted surface of his j slope rotted that Is if it hard as flint and tough as rubber if it isn't even enough water to drip back here Here a man would be within one hundred feet of someone but yet it may as well be one hundred miles For seven or more hours a day he is alone in a world with only a half dimension- a narrow slit up and A five-foot block of ore is i left between the floor of one drift and the roof of another Holes are punched through every hundred feet or more for air circulation and to let water j run through in an effort to 1 keep it out of the A bulkhead is carried five or six feel j below the ceiling of the to keep air back on the much as The I Of Pete's drift needed but he hadn't done it in the month he had been at the McDonald and I had noticed Pete's shaky attitude toward ghost stories stories of strange j events in gilsonite I mines and tales of general and we never lost the chance to keep him One day I found with a job in the six-hundred pulling out old rails It was only a half hour quitting and I thought I would go see Pete in the I returned to the air lowered myself down onto the an- bulkhead and started walking back toward the slope Then I thought T would see just how spooky really I turned my light out and crept careful j not to make any Pretty soon I saw Pete's He was at the topi of his not daring to working because of the when he did I inched up a little closer and threw a handful of ore over the end of the bulk Pete stopped working He listened a moment and than started swinging his pick again at about half his former speed I threw another handful of Pete called For an answer he got la slight scraping sound of a boot on a piece of lagging That was The pick went and bumping down the over the bin and crashed into the tram And Pete was no one to be out raced by a The effect of darkness and silence had reminded Pete of society in the upper world who was the only one who was able to keep track of the all the asked me you know Pete came out early this afternoon wondered what happened to him He wasn't there when everybody came I remarked He as pretty well shook went on the spook you were in the six-hundred about that time j You didn't hear or see anything did you don't know about asked Pete if he had seen a slope He muttered mining being for fools or devils and headed for the He's over there in the car waiting to go I worked at the mine about three and during the i j three years I quit about three I would work at another I job two or three quit it j and go back to the mine On one of these return trips I found them getting ready to sink the shaft another couple hundred feet Before the shaft I could be sunk any the two slides had to be straightened so there'd be less strain on the cable and less work for the As it was the shaft jogged sharply to the west in the first slide causing terrific pressure to bo put on the rollers by the cable A ten-foot jog In thirty feet of makes quite a Then the vein bore to the cast all the way down to the second offset at the seven-hundred font and the cable had worn grooves in the rock two and three inches deep in some This provided quite a bit of We put a bulkhead across the shaft just below the top slide to catch all the rock and old and then we opened up a hole on the south side for it to fall down into an old long unused By the time we had pulled everything loose and had blast cd nearly all the rock off that was necessary for us to start timbering we had made quite a The whole area Where the slide once was had acquired a width of twenty to by fifty or Sixty feet When the bucket came down into the top side of this it was like riding on one of the thrill rides of a carnival and trying to work at the same The of the which was resting the bulkhead was a mountainous jumble of boulders and Be |