The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1895-07-21

be dreaded, for after the ore was ex-
tracted the Comstock mines were man.
moth finder boxes. The rich silver ore
Nboties were sprinkled through the
mass of the lode like raiSinS in duff,
as John Mackey the bonanza king,
used to say, and in the excavation cribs
of timber were reared, one above an
other like the successive stories of a
house and extended over the floor of
the ore chambers. To these enormous
stacks of wood were added the timbers
of the shafts and drifts, until the great
lode had become the tomb of forest,
as the stripped slopes of the Sierra
Nevada bore witness. Cut in volcanic
rock the mines were hotter than
Turkish bath house and their wooden
walls and prope We're as infiammable
as the stubbIe of a harvest field.
So when the flame of the SIrning
candle touched the wood in the drift
the fire began to run quickly along
the gallery Nobody caught sight of
the stealthy, racing horror until it had
made such Roadway that the charred
timbers broke under the weight of the
crumbling roof Then the unsupport-
ed rock fell with a crash, choking up
the gallery and putting a blast of foul
air and smOl : through the connecting
drifts into the shafts of the Crow
Point and Yellow Jacket mines.
Imprisoned Miners Fall Stricken.
It was the hour when the shifts were
changing so that fewer slen were at
work in the mines than usual and this
was the saving of many lives. John
Murphy, station man at the 500 foot
level of the Yellow Jacket shaft, heard
a sound like a gust of wind roaring
through the drift and saw the fifteen
lights in the station at once extin-
guished. The foul blast stifled him
and he crouched on the floor, wrap
ping his rubber coat about his face. In
a moment he lost consciousness, but
could remember when rescued that he
heard pitiful cry come up the shaft
from lower level. Murphy. send me
a cage, am suffocating to death"
So men fell stricken in the adjoining
Kentuck mine, but it was in the Crown
Point that the gust was most deadly.
Forty-five men had just been lowered
into the mine. getting off the shaft on
different levels. The cage was again
descending with it's load when It
plunged into a rising current of foul
air at the 700 foot level; still it went
down steadily to the 500 foot level
where men were found crying for help
in the dark, amid suffocating smoke
The terrified sufferers rushed toward
the cage as last hope and crowded in
and upon it until not bar was left to
cling to. All could not be saved and
the surface from the station knew that
they were left behind to die.
AS soon as the rescued miners could
leave the cage at the surface it was
lowered agin swiftly to the 500 foot
station, and after a moments pause
the signal was given to hoist and the
cage was once more pulled at full
speed. Only two came up. They were
brothers, sturdy young Yorkshiremen
One was standing in the cage inSensi-
bic. holding the fearfully mutilated
body of his dead brother with a grip
that could hardly be loosened. The
head and right arm had been torn away
by the side timbers of the shaft as the
cage shot upward The dead and dying
men were parted by kind hands and
every effort made to revive the latter.
A rude couch was laid for him and
other sufferers in the hosting works,
but he was past all help of medicine
He gasped family for some hours and
then his troubled breathing ceased for
ever.
At the first warning of fire the steam
whistles of the mines began to blow
their shrill alarm. Fire engines from
Gold Hill and Virginia City came sat-
Ting up to the shaft house. With the
firemen came also thousands iof men.
women and children from the mining
towns on the lode. clustering about the
smoky works and pressing in passion
ately to catch a moments glimpse into
the black pits where fathers, sons. hus-
bands and brothers were dying.
The Cages Traverse ReekinE Shafts.
Every moment the streams of smoke