By Mrs. L D. Anderson

I have followed my mining engineer husband from job to job over much of the civilized, (and I use the word loosely) world. I have been content by his side snow-bound for months on end in high mountain mining camps. I have sweltered happily with him in desert heat miles from the nearest town. I will continue to follow him wherever he goes from the Andes to the Arctic Circle, from Baguio to Bolivia; but there is one vast region which the soles of these little feet will never tread again. Never again will I venture beneath the surface of the earth-not even in a subway. Henceforth and forever more I will leave the nether regions to moles, miners, and leprechauns.

The reason for this never-to-be- shaken resolve involves a story which I would like to pass on as a warning to other overly curious "miners'" wives.

Not very long ago, my husband was working at one of the remote, isolated mining camps high in the mountains of our West. In a moment of madness, I, along with several other "miners' " wives, conceived the brilliant idea of going down into the mine on a sort of tour of inspection.

Our husbands objected strenuously, saying that it wasn't safe and mentioning the old miners' superstition to the effect that the presence of a woman invariably ruins a mine. But we overruled their objections and permission was obtained for us to go down into the mine. I am happy to report that the mine did not appear to suffer in the least from the encounter; I cannot say the same for myself, however.

"Well, here you are girls; sign your life away," said the Superintendent, with a grin which wasn't exactly calculated to inspire confidence. I noted that the slip of paper he handed us to sign was a release, absolving the company from any responsibility in the event of an accident in the mine. At this point I began to doubt the wisdom of the whole idea.

Looking around at the other girls, I couldn't help being amused at the costumes they had donned for the occasion, until I realized that my own ensemble wasn't exactly what one would wear in the Easter parade, either. Clad in old slacks or jodhpurs, heavy, hard-toed shoes, rubber coats, hard-boiled safety hats which were not designed by Lilli Dache, and electric hat lamps with batteries which fastened around the waist, we were ready to go down into the mine.

"Get on the cage and keep your elbows inside," advised our elevator man, (or "cager" as the miners call him) as he closed a heavy wire gate that wedged us tightly together. Then, without warning, he jerked on a piece of rope and the bottom dropped from under us as the cage plummeted down the shaft.

My stomach pushed up into my throat and my breathing stopped, but the descent didn't seem to be bothering the men so I swallowed a few times and managed to relax a bit, that is, until we came to a place where the shaft cut through a stream and some of the icy water hit me on the back of the neck. I stifled a scream and blessed the rubber coat I was wearing. Without those coats we would all have been drenched.

"First level, second level, third level," chanted the cager as we whizzed past spots of light. Then, suddenly, we stopped. My knees buckled and I would have fallen to the ground floor if we hadn’t been jammed so tightly together. The hat lamp battery, which I was to learn to hate as the day wore on, gouged me in the stomach and gave me the first of the many black and blue marks I got that day.

"That hoistman is sure cutting her short today. I’ll have to talk with him," remarked the Super who was our guise through the mine. Then he told us that the cager rings a certain number of signal bells for informing the hoistman where he wants to go, and the hoistman, then, hoists or lowers to that place.

We stepped off the cage into a large room where the exposed wall and ceiling timbers lent a sort of "Old Colonial" effect. It must have been very old Colonial for the water was dripping from the ceiling in a hundred places. I found out that the leakage was from the several small underground watercourses through which the shaft had been cut.

Three hallways, dark and endless opened off the room. I learned later that the room was a "timbered shaft section" and the hallways were "drifts" or "crosscuts". To me they were just tunnels.

The Super started walking through one of these tunnels and we single-filed after him. We were walking on a train track that was much narrower than the railroad tracks I had seen. There were stretches of track that were wet and slippery and stretches that were dry; sometimes there was nothing to walk on except unevenly spaced ties. All the time my lamp battery kept bouncing up and down adding new bruises and sore spots to add to my already extensive collection.

I thought we would never quit walking. Those boots were threatening to pull my legs off at the hips. A swap of boots for muddy feet would have felt good then. And that battery just dug chunks out of my flesh.

When we did stop it was in a pandemonium of dust-laden fog and deafening noise. Up front, someone, probably the Super, was violently waving a light. The noise stopped abruptly by my ears continued to ring.

"How’s it going, Bob?" asked the Super.

"Fine," replied Bob. "Visitors?"

"Yes, some of the ladies wanted to see what a mine looked like."

"This is a heading and this is an automatic. Bob drills a round a holes, and shoots them. Then the next shift mucks up," explained the Super. Later I learned that the "automatic" was the air drill that made all the noise and that "shooting" a hole means loading it with dynamite and exploding it to break up the rock.

We left the heading, and, walking some distance, arrived at the foot of a ladder leading up into the darkness. The Super began climbing, and we followed. Every few steps we had to crawl through a small opening in a floor. These floors are supposed to catch anyone who falls off the ladder. I discovered that the narrow openings are also handy for catching onto one's lamp battery and almost pulling one off the ladder.

At every floor, we girls had to stop and rest, it was so hot and hard to breathe. But not for long; the Super seemed to be just bursting with energy and we were soon up and at it again.

Ages later we got into a stope. Here, I learned, the rock that carried the valuable minerals was broken by shooting it with dynamite as in the heading. After the ore was broken it was carried to the shaft on car (hence the track along which we stumbled earlier). From the shaft the ore was sent to a mill where the valuable minerals were concentrated.

As we started through the stope, I discovered I needed all my concentration to negotiate the broken rocks which made up the floor of the stope. Meanwhile, that instrument of torture, my lamp battery, kept banging away indiscriminately at the equatorial regions of my anatomy.

Down some more ladders we went and then we walked and walked through a tunnel until I was ready to crawl away into some dark corner of the mine and die. Eventually, when I was just about done in, I saw the Super turn off from the tunnel into the starting station.

We had to wait a few minutes for the cage and I just dropped in my tracks. The cold stone floor felt like a feather bed, but just when my ill-used muscles were beginning to relax a little, down came the cage and the Super herded us though like so many cattle. Up through the icy waterfall, and, then, there it was… daylight, the most beautiful sight in the world.

In unison, we girls breathed a long sigh of relief; right then and there we came to a unanimous if unspoken agreement that we would never again invade the last domain of the male of the species. Since that time I have been chary of going into a basement.

From The Mines Magazine
February 1950