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Mostly cloudy skies. High 93F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..
Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. Low 69F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
A photo of the Argonaut gold mine, taken in the late 1930s.
A skip, like this one that can be viewed today at Argonaut Mine, transported miners in and out.
A photo of the Argonaut gold mine, taken in the late 1930s.
Jackson’s Argonaut and Kennedy mines were two of California’s largest gold producers, and by August of 1922, they were going full tilt. The deeds to each mine intersected the same vein of gold, but while lines drawn on a deed might be straight, the gold vein meandered along ancient paths of least resistance between two geologic plates. This caused no end of confusion and lawsuits for many years. It all began when, in the 1890s, W.F. Detert bought the Argonaut claim, and, once he held clear title, he offered to sell it to the Kennedy for $20,000 in a combination of cash and stock.
The Kennedy wasn’t interested, so Detert decided to develop the mine himself and started digging a shaft. As time went by, the Kennedy decided to go back and accept Detert’s offer; but now the Argonaut doubled the price. Negotiations went back and forth, until the Kennedy’s final offer of $100,000. But by then, the Argonaut’s shaft had gone so deep their engineers discovered that the Kennedy shaft was over their property line, and they sued and won. Thus began the feud between the two mines that would persist for years, and lawyers had found their own pots of gold as they became embroiled in one lawsuit after another.
The lawsuits didn’t get in the way of profits for the two mines, and time passed as more and more immigrants came to the United States. World War I came and went, and by 1922, 75% of the miners in the Gold Country were from other nations. Men from Italy, Herzegovina, Serbia and many other countries worked beside Americans, and many saved their meager earnings to bring their wives and children here.
Mining was tough and dangerous with brutal conditions, and the pay was low, starting at about $2.50 a day. Most men earned an average of only $4 a day, but they had families to feed, hence the long, unbroken days of labor. On this fateful night, several men were on their 22nd day with no break.
The dangers were many. A man could lose a hand or foot, or even his head, if he didn’t stay well within the fast-moving skips, or elevators, that could move up and down the shaft at 700 feet per minute with little room to spare. “Elevator” is a misleading term for a skip. Made of metal, a skip was basically a cage or an open box that hung from a two-inch-thick braided steel rope. Skips came in many shapes and sizes, depending on the job they had to do. Some had walls all around, except for the open top. These often carried water. Other skips had no fronts or backs, only floors and slatted sides. They carried many things, including human cargo. The mine shaft was divided into three 4-foot by 5-foot compartments, two for skips that moved up and down alternately as counterweights, and the third, called a manway, had a ladder from collar (top) to sump (bottom) and pipes and cables for water, electricity, signal wires and compressed air.
Wesley Greenslate, a miner from Martell who worked the gold in 1940, wrote in an article:
“I was scared all right when the skip came to the collar and it was my turn to get on. The skip tender puts ladders in the skip for the men to stand on, and each man stands on a rung, leaning back on the man above. This allows for about ten men in the skip. The tender usually stands on [top of] the skip, grasping the cable. This was not for me! The skip was hanging even with the collar of the shaft, and the tender put the ladder in as well as the lunch pails, water kegs, and a few sharp wedge axes . . . .
A skip, like this one that can be viewed today at Argonaut Mine, transported miners in and out.
“The skip tender . . . pushed the button to signal the hoisting engineer. In a few seconds we were on our way. It felt like someone had cut the cable. The skip fit the shaft so close, I had to turn my head sideways to keep the timbers from knocking the carbide lamp from my hat. The timbers were so close to the skip, you didn’t dare take hold of the rim . . . .
“My knee caps began to quiver, as we seemed to be going faster, the farther down we went. At last the skip began to slow down and we would be getting off. I began to notice the heat. The air seemed dead and there was a smell to it that was hard to explain. The skip was supposed to have stopped by now, but it was [bobbing] up and down the shaft. It would go down about four feet, then come Back up then down again . . . this bouncing motion was caused by the stretch in
the mile long length of cable . . . .”
The Argonaut night shift was about to start at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 27, 1922, and fresh arrivals were taking the place of the exhausted, mud-and-sweat-soaked men who were headed home. Two of the newcomers had expressed misgivings to their wives as they prepared to leave for work that night. Forty-eight-year-old George Steinman felt that “something is going to happen,” but shrugged his shoulders and left the house. Emmanuel Olobardi, 27, and his wife had enjoyed a banquet with friends at the Italian Benevolent Society, but now as he dressed for work he grew thoughtful. “We’ve had such good times,” he said to his wife, Amelia, “that I fear something awful is about to happen. I don’t like to go back to work, but I guess it’s all a foolish notion.”
Fourteen-year-old Spencer Fessel waved to his father who was boarding a horse cart on Main Street en route to the mine. His dad smiled and waved back. Fessel, Steinman and Olobardi were three of the 47 men who would never come home from work that fateful night.
The tragedy could have been much worse. On any other day, as many as 75 men would be on the night shift. But Sunday nights were often worked by skeleton crews, and quite a few had taken the night off. Luigi Oliva and his brother, Pio, had been scheduled to work together, but Luigi was visiting friends in San Francisco. Twelve others had taken time off to go hunting.
When Ernie Miller’s skip arrived at the 4800 level in the Argonaut Mine sometime after 11:30 p.m. on that fateful night, something didn’t seem right. He was there to collect lunchboxes left by the miners who had finished their dinner break, and he was expecting to see the boxes swarming with rats. Once the men finished their meals and went back to work, rats usually came out of the shadows and began to feast on bits of food left behind. They were brazen, these rats, not intimidated by close proximity to humans. Ernie would usually have to chase them in circles as he recovered the empty boxes and put them in the skip to take them topside. But tonight, the open boxes lay unmolested. What was going on?
The miners were accustomed to sharing their space with armies of the ubiquitous rodents, so persistent and successful at surviving in the miles of underground passageways. Nearly blind from living in darkness, the animals had developed an uncanny sense of smell to compensate, and the aroma of food always brought them from hiding.
The absence of rats gave Ernie a chill. Just as rats are known to leave a sinking ship, rats could sense danger in a mine before the men were aware of trouble. Moments later, Ernie realized what had sent the animals scurrying.
As he reached for the phone to call upstairs with this strange news, he noticed for the first time a frightening odor: Smoke! Support timbers were burning somewhere high above him, and the ventilation system was bringing the smoke right down to him.
Fire was a miner’s greatest fear, and Ernie had been trapped by one five years before, in a copper mine in Butte, Mont. At that time he had led his coworkers to a crosscut that the smoke had not reached and directed the building of a barrier that kept the smoke and fumes at bay for two days until rescuers came. He and his men had survived, but 163 others were not so lucky. It took two weeks to bring those bodies out. Now, he realized he was going to relive that horror.
Or, God forbid, become a part of it.
Stay tuned for Part 2, to be featured in an upcoming issue of the Enterprise.