Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1890-06-19

BARNEY MAUsT.
EMANUEL MAUsT.
PAT COURTNEY.
J. w. MITCHELL.
JOSEPH BIGLEY
PETER EAGAN-
ROBERT MCGILL
MARTIN CAvENE.
JOHN COPE.
ANDREW Core.
PATRICK DEvLIN.
JOSEPH DELANEY.
john JOY.
JOHN DEvANNEY.
DAVID DAVIS.
THOMAS DAVIS.
PATRICK CAHILL.
VIM. CAHILL.
PATRICK COURTNEY.
JACK MITCHELL.
DAN SMITH.
DANIEL S. HEARN.
VIM. HAYES
JAMES MCCLEARY.
ELMER DEANY.
OF these. twenty-one were married and
have families.
The mine, it seems, has been some
what troubled with water, and the air
shaft had been drilled from the surface to
the juncture of the right and left shafts,
where the water seemed to be most
abundant. As the miners branched off
from this point they knew an
air hole had been drilled there that had
not yet been broken into the mine, but
they did not know that the shaft was to
be broken into today. This shaft was a
six-inch hole. A miner named Kerwin
bad been left in the right drift near
where that branch joined the mine exit
and in the course of his labors, he
broke into the perpendicular shaft. The
moment this was broken into food of
water gushed out and Kerwin and a man
named Mandy standing near, yelled out
shaft, as the water poured down hill in a
stream and he feared that they had
drowned. Young Davis Hayes who
had seen the affair leaped forward
and turned down the left drift
to warn his comranes below. Just as he
passed the air shaft that had been broken
into, the rush of waters changed to an
ugly roar, which blanched the cheeks of
the men. The flow of water had changed
to deadly volume of fire damp, and as
young Hayes swung by the shaft, flash
of blazing light seemed to slide through
the shaft from end to end. The
daring young man carried an open and
barning miners lamp in his hat, and had
hardly taken step beyond the roaring
shaft, when spark ignited the reservoir
of deadly fire, and he sank corpse 10 feet
toward the men he had hoped to save and
the men whom he had certainly doomed
In an instant an unquenchable fire sprang
up in the nine foot vein, just between the
main entrance and on the right drift, for
ever shutting off thirty-two men, imprisoned
there. Poor old David Hayes, father of
the mistaken hero, driven mad by the fate
of his son, dashed into the sulphurous
smoke and stranging fire. only to fall
be { avn ont an hour later with James S.
Hearn, both being recognized only by
their wives. The fire, famed by the air
from the main drift and from the fata
shaft itself, soon sprung into an awful
conhagration.
The miners from the left DRIFT escaped
all blackened and bruised, bull safe, and
they tell a fearful story of the sight beyond
the blazing coal on the right
Willing hands and hearts were not
wanting on the outside, and Clerk
Cook, with Mine Inspector Reagh
ley, headed a party of one hundred
who entered the main shaft, and after
cropping on for a quarter of a mile at least,
were driven back again by the deadly gas,
only to recover breath for a moment and
again plunge In to find that the
light drift was impenetrable and
no man living could pass.
At midnight smoke and gas from the
right shaft poured up the main exit in an
unbroken volume, and after trials
almost beyond human endur-
ance, the rescuing party gave up
all hopes of ever recovering their cam
rades from that entrance, and turned their
attention to the Ferguson mine, mile and
a half away At this hour e a. M they
are striving to penetrate from that mine,
but flames and smoke balk their every eff
tort. The universal verdict from
Old miners about the shaft tonight