U.S. mining: A bloody industry

Mine disasters. Until the April 10 tragedy in West Virginia in which 29 were killed, we could be pardoned for thinking they are now few and far between, what with all that impressive modern technology. We would be wrong. They are fewer, but not very far between.

The United States Mine Rescue Association defines a mine disaster as an accident in a coal or other type of mine in which five or more lives were lost. (Can you still wear black if your husband was one of only four men killed?) No question but that the period between 1900 and 1925, when there were 305 coal mine disasters, plus accidents in 51 metal or nonmetal mines — generally known as hard rock mines — was the bloodiest. The worst single coal disaster was in 1907, when 362 died in a mine in West Virginia.

 In the last 35 years there has been a steady beat of trouble — nine deaths in Utah in 2007; 17 in separate tragedies in Kentucky and West Virginia in ’06; 13 in Alabama in ’01. Just since 1980 there have been 102 lives lost in 11 explosions, fires, structure collapses or suffocations.

 I chanced upon the bloodiest of all the non-coal, or “hard rock,â€� catastrophes during a trip last summer: the Speculator-Granite mountain tragedy of 1917 in a copper mine in Butte, Mont., almost in the middle of town, on what has been described as the richest ore hill in the country. One hundred and sixty-eight men died there, the worst hard-rock disaster in American history. A fire and suffocation did the job.

 Butte is now much reduced in size from the booming city of nearly 100,000 it was in 1917, and much of its original “downtown,â€� which was famously uptown on the side of that steep copper-rich hill, is half empty. The biggest and best hotel, the Finlen, where Truman and John F. Kennedy visited, has a magnificent high-ceilinged lobby built to resemble the Astor in New York, and almost no one in it.

 The site of the mine disaster has now become a tourist attraction. One sunny day I drove to the top of that high hill, looked out over the Summit Valley to the snow-capped mountains in the distance, then examined the scroll of names on the walls. I wrote some of them down:

 Budovinac. Fitzsimmons. Galli. Gustafson. Hyttenin. Janicich. Mostoski. O’Neill. Reichle. St. Jacques. Vaari.

 Underfoot, as you stroll around the open-air plaza, are “bricksâ€� with the names of people who gave them in honor of the miners.

 One brick reads: “Here’s to all Serb hard rock miners who worked the hill.â€�

 Another bears only the outline of a shamrock and the unadorned words, “Mary Dolan.â€�

 Says a third: “When we put in our final shift we will say, ‘I’ve been to Butte, I am a trade unionist. I believe a man is more than a mule.’â€�

 At some point in my visit I asked a young woman in a coffee shop what was the name of the skeletal structures at the mine entrances, which support the winch that lowers workers into the mine shaft and brings ore back up. You can see them on the skyline all around Butte.

 She told me that they are technically known as head frames. But many Butte people , she said, call them “gallows frames.â€�

Edward A. Nickerson of Salisbury is a former newspaperman and professor of English.