Blood For Rock Silverton Colorado Mining

Story by Scott Fetchenhier for San Juan Publishing
Photographs courtesy San Juan Juan County Historical Society. All Rights Reserved.

History books and romance novels abound with stories of men who headed west and started their lives anew, finding fabulous riches while prospecting or mining underground. Unfortunately, there were just a few who “struck it rich” in the mining industry. Many ended up working for someone else in an extremely unforgiving and dangerous environment.

There was nothing romantic about the work in a mine. The places were cold, damp, dusty, and filled with noxious gases. The work was brutal. Many miners in early-day Silverton never lived to see their fortieth birthday. Terrible accidents occurred on a daily basis, killing and maiming hundreds of miners, while the “miner’s disease,” silicosis, decimated hundreds more over a longer period of time.

Over 200 miners, who died violent deaths in the mines, are buried in Silverton’s Hillside Cemetery. The mines were a hostile environment fraught with hazards: open holes, bad ground, poor air, deep water, rotten timber, molds, and bacteria from human and animal waste. Miners were killed by falls down shafts or ore passes, crushed by huge slabs that fell off the overhanging walls, suffocated by bad air that collected in the bottom of shafts or at the end of tunnels, drowned in deep water, or smashed by the heavy equipment used in
mining. Without antibiotics, small cuts turned into life-threatening infections.

Explosives were the cause of many deaths. Accidents occurred when dynamite that had not exploded in a drill hole was set off by a miner drilling his next round of holes. The resulting explosion could vaporize a miner. Those that escaped death were crippled with the loss of limbs or eyes. Premature explosions happened when fuses would run, burning so quickly a miner could not escape the blast. Other fuses burned slower than normal, setting off an unforeseen charge as miners came back into their working areas.

Miners always dreaded fire, as smoke and carbon monoxide from a surface or underground blaze could easily suffocate those working underground. Two of Silverton’s larger mining disasters occurred at the Gold King mine in 1908 (six dead, nine injured), and the Pride of the West mine in 1942 (eight dead), when surface buildings caught fire and deadly fumes were sucked into the mines’ ventilation systems.

Over 130 of the miners buried in Hillside Cemetery died in snow slides. Heavy snowfall, combined with steep slopes and deforestation, sent devastating avalanches roaring down the mountainsides. On one day alone, March 17, 1906, eighteen miners perished in snow slides. Miners caught in these slides were often not found until the spring.

One of the worst hazards in the mines was the dread disease silicosis. Called “miner’s consumption,” “the con” or “rock in the box,” it resulted from miners breathing in small, razor-sharp particles of silica dust. Scar tissue would eventually fill the miners’ lungs, slowly suffocating them to death. Many would literally cough themselves to death as their lungs hemorrhaged with blood. Weakened lungs were also susceptible to other diseases such as pneumonia or the flu.

“Widowmakers,” primitive air-driven drilling machines that were later replaced by hollow-drill steels using water, created huge clouds of silica dust that killed miners at alarming rates. Over 200 of the miners buried in Hillside Cemetery died of silicosis. The disease killed thousands of miners across the west, and was one of mining’s greatest tragedies.

Though millions of dollars of gold and silver were taken from surrounding mines, the silent tombstones of miners who perished serve as grim reminders of the toll that hard rock mining really took.

Scott “Fetch“ Fetchenhier is a geologist, historian, and longtime member of the San Juan County Historical Society. He is the author of Ghosts and Gold – The Story of the Old Hundred Mine (Packrat Publishing, 1999).