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11:20p ET Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
David Bond, author of the Wallace Street Journal
column, may be the best writer in this business,
as indicated by his new essay, "Redemption,"
which is appended here as a sobering reminder of
the real work done behind all the philosophizing,
argument, and investment calculations.
Bond's essay echoes William Jennings Bryan's
great speech to the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in 1896, when the great
political controversy was bimetallism, which
Bryan advocated against the gold standard of
the time. Bryan told the bankers:
"When you come before us and tell us that we
shall disturb your business interests, we reply
that YOU have disturbed OUR business interests
by your action. We say to you that you have made
too limited in its application the definition of
a businessman.
"The man who is employed for wages is as much a
businessman as his employer. The attorney in a
country town is as much a businessman as the
corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The
merchant at the crossroads store is as much a
businessman as the merchant of New York.
"The farmer who goes forth in the morning and
toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all
summer, and by the application of brain and muscle
to the natural resources of this country creates
wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who
goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the
price of grain.
"The miners who go a thousand feet into the earth
or climb 2,000 feet upon the cliffs and bring forth
from their hiding places the precious metals to be
poured in the channels of trade are as much
businessmen as the few financial magnates who in
a back room corner the money of the world."
So thanks to Bryan and thanks to David Bond, and
here's to the victory of the working class in a
world where money can't be cornered anymore.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Redemption
By David Bond
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
http://www.silverminers.com/publications/showpub.aspx?id=663
WALLACE, Idaho -- "Hearses were in short supply in Kellogg, Idaho, in
May 1972. A pickup hauled a dead miner to a hillside cemetery slashed
with freshly turned earth. Another arrived in a station wagon."
Thus begins "The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America's
Richest Silver Mine," a riveting, page-turning and gut-wrenching
account of the May 2, 1972 Sunshine Mine Disaster by New York Times
best-seller Gregg Olsen (Abandoned Prayers, Starvation Heights, Cruel
Deception, Bitter Almonds). "The Deep Dark" is due for release by
Crown Publishers on March 1.
From the very first of his 319 pages Olsen wraps you around his
finger at the Jewell Shaft portal that fateful morning and
doesn't
let go until the last of the 91 men who lost their lives in the
sudden and impossible hell that enveloped them at the lunch hour a
mile deep inside is laid to rest. You can read Clancy or Higgins for
great fiction, John McPhee or Jack Olsen (no relation, but a friend
and mentor to Gregg's nevertheless) for non-fiction, and you will
find none better.
I read the rave reviews of "The Deep Dark" from Publisher's Weekly
and the like and wonder if they read the same book I did. They talk
of the bravado and macho of mining men like this was something
different out here in the Old West. Oh, one supposes there is some
truth to the notion that western hard-rock miners are a breed apart.
Indeed, hard-rock mining is part balls, but it is also part
intellect, part luck, part skill, part determination, part
creativity -- and it is surely no part dumb labor, at least not in
the sense that the practice of law or banking or accounting are dumb
labor. There's nothing rote about hard-rock mining.
Nor is hard-rock mining, by the standards of this day, exceedingly
dangerous. Truckers, power company linemen, loggers, pay a far higher
workers' compensation premium than do miners. This will come as a
shock to most miners. (Review the stats further and you will discover
that for municipal employees, it is far more dangerous to be a sewer
worker than it is to be a cop.) Bring up either of these well-
documented comparisons in the wrong bar, however, and your jaw will
be merged with your lower stern bearings.
It is the suddenness, the strangeness, the swiftness, and the
violence that injures or kills a hard-rock miner that gives us our
death-fix with these people. And the fact that mining camps are small
places. If your partner gets "slabbed" (crushed to death in a sudden
fall of rock from the back of a stope), there is a good chance he was
on the school board, or an uncle to your neighbor's kids, or coached
little league, or taught debate.
No, what strikes this western reader is Olsen's brilliance in
bringing out the ordinariness of the men of the Sunshine Mine, then
and now, the ordinariness of hard-rock miners and their human
dignity. The kiss from a young wife. The plans to wash and wax the
vintage Ford at shift's end. The car-pool to work and its
conversation about dumping shift that day to celebrate a friend's
birthday. And underground, even as death enveloped them, the passion
of a man to save his friend's life, to not get on the life-saving
mile-long cage-ride to the surface until he was sure his partner was
all right and already aboard.
It's about guys who wouldn't leave their jobs underground, at the
controls of the hoists and aboard the cages, miners who having
escaped death went back into the gas-choked mine to join a rescue
team because there were men alive still underground, and gave up
their own lives in so doing. Because they were miners.
On another level, "The Deep Dark" is an indictment of Nixon's mid-
1970s corporate America, the age of the leveraged buyout, where
accountant- and law-degreed middle-managers dithered while a mile
beneath them, men's lives hung on every second of indecision. And the
fury of real mining men against this corporate pablum, the fury of
young men who would become decades later captains of this industry.
Harry Cougher. Art Brown. Among the first of the "helmet team" rescue
guys who understood the gravity of the situation a mile beneath them
while men without chests awaited orders from higher up and sussed-out
their financial projections.
The horrors of the Sunshine Mine Disaster I will leave to the reader
of "The Deep Dark" to unearth. They are plentiful and graphic to a
fault. But they are not told in a "he said-she said" vein. You see
first-hand the Sunshine Mine Disaster from the eyes of the men who
were there. It is their tale. It's a narrative style you will find
refreshing -- told by a journalist who has the dignity and the
decency to be invisible. Gregg Olsen makes you the lens of the
camera. He is not in the scene.
"The Deep Dark" will open old wounds in my mining camp. Huge wounds,
ripped apart by a UPI reporter who posed as a Red Cross candy-striper
to infiltrate the rain-besotted camps of soon-to-be widows and
orphans until he was called out by a miner for the fraud that he was.
(Trust me: 30 years later they still hate journalists here.)
Huge wounds, ripped apart by network television crews who hijacked
Big Creek homes and power lines to file the latest sensationalistic
lede. Huge wounds, ripped apart by Nixon's secretary of the interior,
Rogers Morton, who parachuted in to the mining camp to assure all of
us that the mining company was doing all that it could even as
Cougher and Brown chafed.
Huge wounds, ripped apart by "Jerusalem Slim" -- Sunshine CEO Irwin
P. Underweiser -- who flew out from New York to set jittery
shareholders to right by announcing, before the first corpse came
out, that Sunshine Mining Co. had production interruption insurance,
and that a cessation of operations would improve the silver price --
even as men still breathing that cruel air screamed from below in
vain to be hoisted out, that from the company's perspective, the
Sunshine Mine Disaster was a good thing.
Huge wounds, ripped apart by a tragedy that killed ever seventh
father and uncle in this mining camp.
Yes, Gregg, you stepped into my mining camp and you reopened huge
wounds. But I think in a way I would have wished I'd done, you also
healed them.
One of the protagonists of your book, Ken "Ace" Riley, was my next-
door neighbour on Wallace's South Hill. He woke us up on occasion in
the 1980s, screaming the black-and-white replays of his nightmare
underground, of losing his partner Joe Armijo, in the deep and the
dark. Ken's kids, Greg and Randy, taught me how to chop wood. And
next-door neighbour Ken, when my pipes froze up, was first in the
attic of my log cabin to show me how to cheat a copper fitting and
make it work. He gave me a stolen Hecla ax and took up where his kids
left off, and within a week I could make toothpicks out of logs.
Ken Riley was just one of 200 men living an uncommon life, with a
common story. When we met I was a journalist and he was a miner,
working, after the fire, in Sunshine's lamp room. But we shared an
affinity for Heidelberg beer and good conversation. We almost never
talked about the fire. But it hung upon our shoulders like St. Elmo.
He talked obliquely about how the union and the company had screwed
the men, but I never knew his real story until I read Olsen's book.
Ken's kids tell me now that, yeah, I never really knew the Old Man.
He didn't want to unload, back then.
But Gregg, he talked to you.
I was shooting stick at the Long Shot Saloon (formerly the Tip-Top)
in Kellogg one Saturday morning four years ago when Gregg Olsen
wandered in, looking for me, wanted to know what I knew about the
Sunshine Mine Disaster, said he was writing a book. Well, I'd heard
that happy horsecrap before, besides I was always going to be the guy
who wrote that book and who was he? Then he started shooting out
names like Dionne and Beehner and Kitchen and Bush, the real guys.
Told me more about those guys than I knew myself -- and they were my
neighbours. I told him about Ace's nightmares; he'd already
heard,
they'd already talked.
Then Gregg went away, to work over every Sunshine Mine Disaster
survivor and widow still living for their recollection. This part of
research preparatory to writing is the most difficult. And my friends
reported back to me: "I think this guy gets it."
The pre-publication copies of "The Deep Dark" are in circulation this
month up here, prior to its release to the New York snobs. (CBS News,
by the way, does not want to touch this story because it is such
ancient history. Apparently, so is the Hard Rock West. Hurricane Dan
as dinosaur slayer. The story wasn't good enough for them then:
Why
would it be now?)
Here is one widow's reaction:
"You have written such a powerful book.It took me back to those
horrible days when the entire valley waited for words of hope.My
father-in-law was Bob Bush, he was one of three men in his family who
died in the mines.My ex-husband got out of the Shine inthe
early
80's, and we moved to Alaska.We are so much a product of that
environment.So many memories, so many names.Buz and Jenny
remain
dear friends.Thank you for writing it, for giving them
dignity.
"Thank you also for clearing up the mystery of why it was so
lethal.My husband may have known, but he never told me.My
thanks
are so pathetic an expression of what I feel for the miracle of this
book you have written.I had wondered for years why no one had
taken
on the task.You have struck the right note.
"I must tell you also: I consumed this book.Obviously so painful
a
subject would not be savored, but I couldn't stop.I missed my
yoga
class and read for six seemingly short hours."
It was signed by a Sunshine widow, just a few days ago.
Hey, you with the cute charts: Men die for you. Hey you with the pump-
and-dump scam. Men die for you. Ninety at a time, in the exploration
camps, in the hard-rock mines. Does that make you, Mr. Normal with
your accounting degree, feel superior?
Men die. It's a fact of life for all of us. What Gregg does is
dignify, for the first time in American literature, the hard-rock
miner who walks among you. He is not macho. He is simply an American
man. This is the stick-man miner of Hart, Twain, and Solomon,
suddenly flesh and bone.
The men who make lousy charts and stock scams are different from the
men who actually bring you silver. Miners are living, breathing,
sentient human beings who occasionally die for you.
Gregg has breathed life back into the inert bodies of the 91 dead of
May 2, 1972. That the Sunshine Mine is now in the hands of a man who
lost uncles, grandfathers, and friends in the Newcastle coal fields
is of no small consolation to me. To understand mining at that
visceral level -- that mines are holes in the ground that
occasionally do nasty things, especially if management is not
looking -- is not something your average MBA can suss.
Mines kill while you play with your chart toys in your air-
conditioned condo in Florida. The beauty of the miners' dignity is
that they know this and go to work anyway. The least of the day's pay
hands has a triple-nine silver round on his mantle. He believes in
what he's doing.
Thank you, Gregg. You've reminded the miner of the dignity he always
had, a dignity that the poofters in their Park Avenue lofts will
never know.
Gregg has healed us, vindicated our labors. Before you buy an ounce
of silver stock, read this book. And give Gregg Olsen a Pulitzer. The
American West has always had a friend in the hard-rock miner. Now the
miner has a friend.
----------------------------------------------------
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