Show life of a gilsonite miner I by Max Peatross EDITOR'S NOTE This is another installment of by Max Art standing on the far side of the I stepped Art gave the line on his side of the shaft a and we started not supposed to ride a loaded he told you'll be doing a lot of things you're not supposed Better get your hands here comes the This slide was caused by an offset in the ore When the shaft had been sunk to the three hundred foot the vein narrowed down and The owners decided to go down another fifty hoping to find it Then someone noticed a slight seam of ore only a couple of inches wide on the west wall up where the vein had petered They followed the and ten feet it opened up into the black opaque gilsonite in the real The fifty feet of shaft that had already been sunk below this offset was used to hold That was the reason for the two bars at the head of the They were hinged at the top and locked in at the bottom with a When the water in the sump of this shaft got the rope-rider would pull the pins and let the bars swing back thus the shaft would be open straight and the bucket couldn't go into the Getting these bars back in place was a rather precarious job foe the He would have to ride the bucket down into the mouth of this which hung like an appendix to the main and step back into the man-way while the raised the bucket back up a Then he would straddle the appendix shaft right where it joined the main one in the One slip into the main shaft would mean a fifty-foot I was always partial to the short but 1 took care not to make I had worked on top three months when the quit and the foreman asked me if I wanted the None of other miners wanted because they could make more money by digging the stuff than could by seeing that it got out on The made five cents an hour more than the miner's which was a dollar an hour but the miner could contract when his drill was free from and the track was laid up to the Then he could about double his The miners all wanted me to be the because 1 was only a and they thought they could talk me into leaving the buckets a little short ot which I Neither did they care if I got into trouble with the boss over which 1 I don't remember my first day as I don't even remember who showed me what to But I do remember that a day in the life of a in a gilsonite mine could and always very sometimes to the point of giving him a substantial thrill Water from all the drifts drained into the and by the time it readier the nine hundred-foot it made quite a Efforts were made to keep it out as much as but metal drains were soon eaten away by the water or plugged or knocked loose by falling Since the s work kept him right in the shaft most of the he always wore a raincoat and hip boots It was the custom to start shipping ore at one In order to get the bucket the would have to put a pole across the shaft to let the bucket set on so the bail would tip to one- side and a chut could be lowered into the Because of this pole across the shaft and because shipping started at one the would have to start shipping at the bottom The miners all came filtering down after bringing or anything else they Three men could ride the bail at one time fairly comfortably four men could ride it and often did going out at noon or at the end of the but nobody ever was fourth going oh It was much too One day Bird and I were going Mitch worked the six-hundred and Bird worked the nine-hundred south Just below the four-fifty on the east wall a or stuck out about eight or ten and instead of being blasted off like it should have a short slide about three feet long had been laid over The top of this slide was one inch or so away from the I had always been careful of this except this The raincoat slipped between the slide and the wall and folded Bird and the bucket kept but I remained trying to get my arm around a stull and reach the bell line before the coat tore but from the position I was in I couldn't quite get By the time I thought of yelling Bird had recovered and stopped he you don't like our just say You don't have act like that blasted bell and get him back up I wishing that I had a pick to throw at like us don't yon smarty chided that we're around to help you hear you you'd think you saved my life I could have done all right by I jokingly knowing full well what a close brush with death I had be |