In October 1922, Kent Englehutt fell lout of a bucket, plunged 300 feet down a shaft and landed in 200 feet of water at the bottom. Shattering his skull and most of the rest of his bones. Henry Melong s new boots made him slip and he fell backwards onto some machinery, dying with his head bumping on the hub of a revolving wheel. Jaworsky has reproduced Melong s photo from a tiny one the miner s grandsons found on a cufflink. Hard rock, steel and blasting powder are not considerate of soft flesh, Jaworsky says.
Death is gruesome, lonely, painful, bloody or suffocating.
Death in a mine is not gentle. Many of the men were eastern European or Scandinavian immigrants working to bring families over. Their grainy headstone photos dot the pages of the book along with snapshots of children soon to be fatherless, sports teams that would lose a player to some horrendous underground accident, and even a Polish Christmas party where the miner playing Santa Claus was destined to die six months later, his face blown to bits by a freak explosion. Jaworsky has sagely refrained from intruding on the dead. He does not comment on their stories beyond offering the bare minimum of necessary historical information on Kirkland Lake gold mining.