ROBERT N. CHESTER III
On the evening of Wednesday, June 28, 1870, a tunnel collapsed at the Yellow Jacket mine in Gold Hill, Nevada, killing Manuel Alameda, Patrick Doherty, John Kennedy, and Ralph Hanson. The four miners had been at work more than 800 feet underground when the roof caved and tons of debris buried them. According to the Alpine Chronicle, “All four were new hands in the mine and are believed to have been single men.” The next morning, reporter Alfred Doten ran down to the scene of the accident. He recorded the grisly details of the recovery effort in his journal: “They got out one body about 1 oclock this morning and after working all day got out another about 5PM—I saw both—The first was not much distorted, but the last was—His bowels were crushed out of the lower part of his belly—& he was black & blue & stunk very badly—2 more left in the mine.” The next morning they pulled the third body out of the mine, and workers recovered the fourth corpse later that same day. As this incident suggests, a small cave-in could have a large impact in the death toll it delivered.1 Hundreds of other men mining the Comstock also suffered death or sustained catastrophic injuries that left them permanently disabled.
As social historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen have remarked, “The meaning of the large lay in the stories of the small.”2 So what do these deaths reveal about the miners’ working environments on the Comstock Lode? How did environmental forces in northwestern Nevada shape demands for labor and the occupational hazards encountered by workers underground? How in turn did subterranean environments contribute to the rapid expansion of technological systems and the rise of the corporation? As the largest silver strike in the history of the United States and the nation’s most dangerous mining district from 1860 to 1880, the Comstock Lode proved hard-rock mining’s earliest industrial crucible in the nineteenth-century American West.
The vein’s rich concentrations of ore occurred within a matrix composed of both silver and gold. The abundance of both metals made this mining district extraordinarily productive and valuable. Within the first two years of production, eighty-six corporations formed to establish mines on the Comstock. The combined capitalization of these companies exceeded $61 million. By 1880 more than one hundred mines still operated on the Comstock. However, very few Comstock corporations ever returned profits to their investors. In part, these failures reflected both the unpredictable and finite character of mineral veins and the manipulation and mismanagement of these companies by unscrupulous financiers. Equally important, though, were the immense costs of operating these mines. The many hundreds of millions of dollars that mining companies spent on labor and highly elaborate technological systems laid the foundation for the rapid expansion and enormous scale of hard-rock mining for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, between 1859 and 1880 the mines of Gold Hill and Virginia City produced silver and gold worth more than $300 million.3 Opportunities for profit appeared real enough, but the risks for workers often exceeded the rewards.4
Between 1863 and 1880 approximately nine hundred men died or suffered severe injuries while working on the Comstock. The gruesome fashion in which most of these men died reveals the dynamic and dangerous character of the working environments they helped to build but could never fully control. A diverse array of unpredictable and overlapping forces made the Comstock Lode’s subterranean environments expensive and dangerous to mine: flooding, extreme heat, cave-ins, mechanized drills, explosions, the depth of shafts, the lowering and hoisting of cages, steam engines, pumping machinery, and elaborate ventilation systems. Corporations, engineers, and hundreds of laborers worked together to construct new and elaborate technological systems to stabilize loose earth, remove immense quantities of water, and mitigate the intense heat encountered during extraction. Industrial managers repeatedly expressed great frustration with these environmental conditions.5
Death records, newspaper articles, and the reports of superintendents provide historians rich insights into the work routines, occupational hazards, and costs of doing business on the Comstock Lode. Although many scholars have examined the ways that capital flows, technology, community formation, and unionization both shaped and reflected conditions and opportunities on the Comstock, the central role played by environmental forces in the industrialization of this region remains underdeveloped. Large-scale, industrialized precious-metals mining on the Comstock unfolded according to a series of dialectical relationships among the imperatives of corporate capitalism, enormous demands for labor, and the unpredictable forces encountered in subterranean working environments. The technological systems that mining companies introduced on the Comstock Lode made mining more feasible in the face of treacherous natural forces, but some new technologies also introduced hazards to the miners’ working environment.
The expansion of industrial technologies and the adoption of the corporate form help explain why the Comstock Lode dwarfed all other mining operations elsewhere in the 1860s and most of the 1870s.6 Thanks to the capital generated by the California Gold Rush and the subsequent emergence of hydraulic mining, investors increasingly exploited a favorable legal environment that allowed them to create new mining corporations. In response to a boom in mining stocks, enterprising investors established the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board of Trade in 1862. The board’s centralization and standardization of transactions dramatically increased the volume of commerce and facilitated the flow of capital across the Sierra Nevada into the mines of Nevada’s Comstock.7
Some close observers believed the costs of labor and technological systems on the Comstock were unsustainable for corporations trying to make profits.8 By the 1870s, the Comstock increasingly witnessed more prominent patterns of corporate consolidation, as fewer syndicates controlled an ever-larger share of both mines and mills. In addition to the particular financiers and investors who stood to profit from such trends, Rossiter Raymond, the U.S. commissioner of mining statistics, also favored these developments. He believed that competition between companies impeded coordination and standardization in the construction of large, expensive systems for drainage, ventilation, and hoisting. The diffusion of capital created massive administrative inefficiencies in the Comstock’s mining economy. Writing in 1869, he insisted that “foremost among the necessary reforms is the consolidation of companies, and the consequent reduction in the cost of administration.”9
Although corporate consolidation did occur, it never approached the level of uniform coordination and control Raymond thought necessary for the maximization of profit. Environmental obstacles underground and corporate competition increased the costs of expansion, maintenance, and machinery. In Raymond’s view, without more systematic and rational improvements offered by consolidation, the methods employed by many competing companies were “fast approaching their economical limit of application to these mines.”10 In the abstract, Raymond’s conclusions logically followed from the evidence he presented concerning potential profits and projections of the costs of operations at ever-lower depths. Despite the inability of most of these corporations to deliver consistent dividends to their shareholders, mining continued as it had, and companies survived these inefficiencies far longer than Raymond thought possible. Obstacles to extracting ore and making money on the Comstock remained numerous and severe over the course of its development.11
Placer miners first discovered the surface deposits of the Comstock Lode in June 1859 while digging a reservoir. The massive deposits they soon encountered overwhelmed the earliest prospectors, who lacked adequate capital and the technical expertise to extract and process these ores. The earliest and most dangerous obstacle encountered by miners on the Comstock Lode was cave-ins. Because of the large size of the ore bodies extracted and the geological peculiarities of the lode, mining companies faced entirely new challenges concerning the timbering of mines. Wet, porous, and crushed quartz led ceilings to sag and collapse. In December 1860, less than 200 feet from the surface of George Hearst’s Ophir mine, workers uncovered an ore body more than 40 feet wide. More than a decade later, reporter William Wright, writing under the penname Dan De Quille, described the new challenges in his hyperbolic style: “No such great width of ore had ever been seen before and the miners were at their wits’ end to know how to keep up the superincumbent ground.” Workers refused to keep excavating until they believed the mine was again safe.12 The shortage of large timbers in the immediate vicinity of the mines prompted these companies to use composite support beams created by splicing separate lengths of wood together using iron fasteners. These longer, thinner supports failed to withstand the weight and pressure exerted by the relatively loose rock that constituted much of the mountains.
To prevent catastrophic cave-ins and loss of life and capital, Hearst and his associates hired an imaginative engineer from California to solve the problem. A Hessian Jew who had left Europe for California at nineteen, Philip Deidesheimer arrived in the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1851. A decade later, he had accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience in California’s early hard-rock mining operations. Applying lessons he had learned in the young quartz-mining operations in El Dorado County, California, and adjusting his plans to the particular demands made by the Comstock’s geology, he devised a system of timbering that became known as square-sets. These hollow rectangular frames were typically 4 feet by 5 to 6 feet and held together by mortise-and-tenon joints at the corners of both top and bottom. The tenon—a notch protruding from either end of the beams—fit into the mortise joint chiseled into the inside ends of beams, thus creating a system of interlocking frames.13
This design used the extremely snug joints at the corners of the square-sets as a way to help redistribute weight more evenly over space. The new invention stabilized the spatial voids produced by ore removal. Workers filled these empty cubes with waste rock to provide more solid foundations for the mines as they continued to expand. Deidesheimer’s innovation allowed the Ophir to expand operations and made Hearst’s first fortune possible. It also made mining the rest of the lode viable.14 As a result, mining companies had a much easier time convincing investors to purchase their stock, and workers to go back underground. Companies began to expand their operations at rates unprecedented in the history of hard-rock mining. Square-sets became a common feature of the underground landscape in working environments throughout the West for the rest of the century.
Although this innovative response to nature’s subterranean obstacles facilitated the success of mining and made working conditions safer, Deidesheimer’s ingenuity and artifice could only delay gravity’s will. Charles Bonner, superintendent of the Savage Mining Company, recognized these persistent obstacles, as he wrote about the difficult task of preventing cave-ins. In early April 1868, he complained that “the ground is very soft & so full of water that it is very [difficult] to keep from caving.” Thus, Deidesheimer’s square-sets may have been the best answer available to the uncertainties encountered underground, and they undoubtedly saved many lives, but cave-ins remained a common occurrence and would persist as long as people and companies chose to chase the treasures inside Nevada’s Virginia Mountains.15
Long after the development of the square-sets, dozens of miners continued to die each year due to cave-ins and falling rock and timber. Nearly half of all those miners killed underground between 1869 and 1870 died from causes directly attributed to collapsing tunnels or falling matter.16 In October 1877 a cave-in occurred on the 1,700-foot level of the Savage mine. The accident killed Richard Kitz—a twenty-nine-year-old miner from Kentucky.17
On the morning of September 11, 1874, foreman Jerry Cross knelt down on the 1,100-foot level of the Yellow Jacket mine. As the Territorial Enterprise recounted, “He was in the process of leveling a sill, which was being put down as the foundation for a tank. While he was engaged [in this task], two or three carloads of rock suddenly fell from the top of the chamber [. . .] crushing him to the ground and covering him up.” Although his co-workers immediately pulled him from the rubble, “it was ascertained that he was much bruised in the region of the abdomen, that he had received a frightful gash across the temple, another on the top of his head, and that one of his ankles was badly lacerated if not fractured.” The reporter concluded, “His recovery is considered doubtful.”18
Men would often hear the groaning strain of crumbling earth and cracking timbers prior to the collapse of sinking floors and falling roofs, but such audible omens did not necessarily allow workers to escape. Sometimes these warnings saved lives, and other times they simply foretold a fatal end. But more than simply cave-ins threatened their lives and health. Rock could also fall through the square-sets without crushing the timbers or the tunnel, and sometimes fell upon workers. Jerry Cross had been an experienced foreman working in a “place [that . . .] appeared perfectly safe, but, as was afterwards seen, there was a clay seam above the flake of rock which fell, therefore there was nothing to hold it in place.”19
Randomly distributed seams of pliable clay further contributed to the unpredictable movements of the Comstock’s subterranean geology. As William Wright observed, “The whole body of the clay appears to be creeping. It has the almost imperceptible motion of the glacier. [. . .] Its action is so mysterious that some of the miners [. . .] explain it by saying that the clay comes out and fills up the drifts because ‘nature abhors a vacuum.’” Though hyperbolic, stories recounting the destruction wrought by geological blobs reveal the exceedingly unpredictable and volatile nature of the miner’s working environment. A number of unseen variables complicated attempts to mine in a safe and predictable fashion.20
In his misanthropic style, reporter J. Ross Browne anthropomorphized the battle waged between miners on the Comstock and the mountains they attempted to exploit:
Perhaps there is not another spot upon the face of the globe that presents a scene so weird and desolate in its natural aspect, yet so replete with busy life, so animate with human interest. It is as if a wondrous battle raged, in which the combatants were man and earth. Myriads of swarthy, bearded, dust-covered men are piercing into the grim old mountains, ripping them open, thrusting murderous holes through their naked bodies; piling up engines to cut out their vital arteries; stamping and crushing up with infernal machines their disemboweled fragments [. . .] while the mighty earth, blasted, barren, and scarred by the tempests of ages, fiercely affronts the foe—smiting him with disease and death.21
Although Browne’s rhetoric may have rung hollow for most people, the miners themselves could appreciate such metaphors. Nature in the mines was to be respected. This respect came from fear and the wisdom of lived experience that instilled poignant lessons about the earth’s power to crush even the most cautious miners.
In addition to the settling and shifting of crushed quartz and creeping seams of clay, the Comstock’s peculiar geology had also created throughout the lode large, hidden deposits of water. Pumps more than once failed to keep pace with the flooding caused by the puncturing and release of underground aquifers. The challenges confronted in the Ophir mine provide an instructive example of the disasters wrought by flooding in the mines and demonstrated how imperfect pumping remained. Eliot Lord from the U.S. Geological Survey recounted how workers cut a hole in the rock face in the fall of 1869 only to find to their horror “a flood [that] poured so violently that it rose irresistibly in the shaft, though the pumps were worked at their full capacity and discharged 20,000 gallons hourly. [. . . T]he water was 270 feet deep in the shaft.” The flooding overtaxed pumping machinery on the lower levels, causing the equipment there to seize up and stop working. It was not until April 1870 that the company finally succeeded in draining the mine to the point where the flood had started.22
The more flooding that occurred and the longer the water filled tunnels, the faster timbers would decay and collapse, which in turn endangered more men and cost companies more capital. Moreover, because the water increasingly strained the machinery as the pumps lifted it ever higher, mining companies typically set up a series of pumping stations every couple of hundred feet to work pumps more efficiently and to keep them in good repair, which increased operating costs even more. Nature on the Comstock would not yield silver and gold easily or cheaply; rather, it imposed huge costs on corporations that built and maintained these mines, and these companies repeatedly turned to their shareholders to bear these expenses. Investors thus assumed added risks in pursuit of potential profits. The worker who labored underground, however, confronted both economic and physical risks in the form of injury and death.23
The Comstock Lode’s enormous veins formed in response to rupturing mountains pulled apart by tectonic extension. Plates in the Great Basin have continued to diverge from one another over the course of millions of years. In the process, this movement has slowly wrenched the earth’s crust into pieces, leading to the deformation of mountain ranges generated by earlier geological epochs.24 This process eventually allowed the mantle to rise closer to the earth’s surface and created enormous fissures surrounded by extraordinarily hot rock. Over time, rainwater accumulated in these fissures. Minerals embedded in hot rocks dissolved into the water. The water then continued to lift and deposit much of this matter in the fissures, which ultimately created the veins of the lode. The same sort of processes that created gold and silver deposits also led to both unstable matrices of decomposing rock and the formation of thermal hot springs throughout Nevada and eastern California. Where these types of ore deposits existed in the Great Basin, mineral springs commonly occurred. Some of these springs remained trapped in the subterranean depths of the mountains until a miner’s drill or a blast of black powder released their contents.25
In addition to their volume and the flooding they caused, many of these waters reached scalding-hot temperatures. In early February 1878 Ophir superintendent James Fair reported “a strong flow of hot water from the top of the drift which is very hot rendering it almost [im]possible to work in the drift [even] with the aid of two strong blowers.” This problem continued to trouble the Ophir for the following month.26 Mining engineer and professor John A. Church examined this phenomenon as part of his report on the occupational hazards caused by the Comstock’s extreme depths and peculiar geological features: “[W]e have some of the most singular occurrences known in mining. The injuries by scalding were occasioned entirely by falling into hot mine waters. Their temperature varies by locality, but the maximum which I have observed 156°F. [. . .] The water is hot and gaseous, and the unfortunate man who falls in it sinks deeply and probably finds it difficult to regain the surface.”27 As the Comstock mines pushed ever deeper into Mount Davidson, the temperature of water, air, and rock continued to rise. “One of the most striking phenomena [. . . in] the mines on the Comstock lode,” Church observed, “is the extreme heat encountered in the lower levels. The heat [. . .] proceeds from the rock” and its “temperature [stays] very much higher than the average of the atmosphere in Nevada.”28
Church argued that the intense heat of the local rock and abundant water distinguished the Comstock from other mining districts not only in the United States but throughout the world as well. He believed that “the heat of the mines is a matter of more than usual interest, for they are the only hot ones now worked in the United States, and both in the present temperature encountered and in the increase which is to be expected as greater depths are reached, they appear to surpass any foreign mines of which we have a record.”29 The heat exuded from the rocks in the lower levels of the mines raised the temperature of the air and contributed to a stifling working environment. Even with the aid of blowers that fed cooler air through thousands of feet of ventilation pipes and tons of ice stacked against the walls, the temperature in the mines often remained well above 110°F. Many workers encountered great difficulty laboring in such conditions. James Galloway reported in 1875 that the heat got to him while working in the Consolidated Virginia mine. He wrote in his diary that the heat inside the mines at the 1,400-foot level made him sick.30
Fierce heat, shifting rocks, and immense depths increasingly drove the rapid innovation of new technologies and made the Comstock Lode a laboratory for modern industrialism. By transforming inhospitable, alien spaces into habitable work zones, mining companies encouraged the implementation of more capital-intensive technological systems to surmount ever-more extreme environmental conditions. For example, many companies began using larger ventilation pipes to distribute more compressed air to lower levels.31
The very task of extending ventilation pipes, however, was itself fraught with peril, especially for newer employees unaccustomed to working in such extreme heat. In the first week of March 1877, Thomas Wilson, a thirty-eight-year-old miner from Edinburgh, Scotland, was working deep in the Imperial mine. Workers were extending an air pipe and had only been at work for about fifteen minutes when Wilson began to suffer from heat exhaustion and slipped while trying to climb up the incline to the “cooling off room.” He then tumbled backward, falling down a series of steps. Co-workers carried Wilson back to the cooling station, but he died before they got him near the surface. Nearly four years later, Phillip Harrington, a twenty-four-year-old Irishmen, also died from the effects of extreme heat in the mines.32 Sometimes the very technological systems designed to make the working environment cooler and safer could fail and cause deadly accidents. In August 1879, the Territorial Enterprise reported the death of P.E. Woodward and the injury of John Allen, noting that a flywheel on an air blower nearly sliced Woodward in half and that shrapnel gashed Allen’s hip.33
Ever-deeper mines demanded ever-larger ventilation pipes. The longer and wider iron pipes allowed engineers to conduct more air from compressors with greater force to the work sites below. On September 28, 1872, Superintendent Smith reported progress in the Belcher mine. Workers put air boxes into tunnels more than 1,000 feet below to improve ventilation to a level at which miners could resume their work. By December the company had begun to see results in its efforts to create a safer and cooler environment.34 To the modern reader, large pipes may not seem an advanced technology, but placed in the context of environmental engineering in the 1870s, these systems were revolutionary and can be compared to the elaborate systems of hydraulic engineering and energy-intensive air conditioning in the rapidly growing cities of the American Southwest after World War II. The scale of environmental hazards and the expenses incurred in implementing these technological remedies only further amplified the unparalleled power of corporations to overcome physical constraints more rapidly than other forms of economic organization could.35
Even with the vast corporate expenditures on machinery for ventilation, cooling, and drainage, the heat, moisture, and work on these lower levels continued to tax the health and endurance of miners. The wet, poorly ventilated, and exceedingly close quarters in which miners worked combined with the intense heat to create an optimal breeding ground for the spread of respiratory and infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever. And the transition from this oppressively hot, moisture-laden environment to the cold mountain air on the surface throttled the breathing capacity of even the most acclimated of miners. This problem especially assaulted miners during the early 1870s when mining companies first reached the hotter levels.36
Another lethal hazard was gravity. The deeper mine shafts went, the likelier it became that falls were fatal. In late August 1873, the Virginia Evening Chronicle reported one such horrible accident: “James Stile [. . .] working in the Savage [mine . . .] falling from an ascending cage. [. . .] about 600 feet [. . .] was instantly killed.” The poor lighting and fierce noise of explosions and drills often distorted worker perceptions. Occasionally men would walk into the shaft without first making certain that the cage had not left his level.37
Such accidents happened throughout the Mining West, but because the Comstock expanded so rapidly and became the first truly massive hard-rock mining district in the American West, contemporaries alleged that the Comstock suffered more such casualties than did other mining districts. John Church also repeated the claim: “The most appalling accident which can occur in mining work, the falling of men down a deep shaft, repeats itself in the Comstock mines with a frequency which I believe is unknown elsewhere.”38 Since the Comstock dwarfed all other hard-rock mining operations in the American West in the late 1870s, this was certainly true for the preceding two decades, but there is no reason to believe that other districts that achieved equal or greater depths in later years did not suffer just as many or more such casualties.
Deep shafts exacerbated the risk of fatal falls. The movement of shifting rocks also warped timbers and bent tunnels into less symmetrical configurations. Offering a complex analysis of how a diverse array of environmental factors may combine to cause more falls on the Comstock than elsewhere, Church again looked to heat as a probable co-conspirator, but he pinpointed another variable to account for the number of men who fell down shafts and winzes: “[T]he Comstock rocks are forever moving, swelling, and forcing the shafts out of line. [. . .] The work of repair is necessarily dangerous and more hazardous in a hot steaming upcast than in a cool one, and it is to the frequency with which the miner is called upon to perform this work that the number of falls in the shaft is attributed.” Church also emphasized “the unfavorable local conditions [that] may contribute essentially to the result. But of the two causes I consider that frequent opportunity is greater.” Church failed, however, to connect all the dots, as the “opportunity” to repair the shafts remained inseparable from the very local conditions he cited.39
One could also fall down a shaft while still on a cage. A falling cage could crush workers at the shaft’s lowest levels, especially if a cable broke or an inattentive engineer failed to stop winding the hoisting mechanism. In late August 1870, Alfred Doten reported a horrible accident in the Hale & Norcross mine in which “bolt of brake strap broke and let cage fall 1150 feet to bottom—killed two men working there & hurt another so bad it is thought he will also die.” Four years later, Joseph Farnsworth was the lone victim in a less deadly cage accident. The Territorial Enterprise reported: “[H]e was severely injured while at work in the bottom of the main shaft of the Sierra Nevada Company by the cage being lowered upon him. [. . . T]he weight of the cage [. . .] crushed him down to the ground. [. . . H]e was insensible when taken out of the shaft.” As a result of the accident, Farnsworth sustained severe injuries to the head and spine.40
In addition to workers and cages plunging down these shafts, the act of raising men on cages also led to a series of horrific accidents. Eliot Lord recalled one of the worst hoisting accidents ever on the Comstock. In December of 1879 the engineer of the Union mine began to lift a cage carrying seventeen men from the bottom of the shaft. Lord recounted how the engineer mistakenly sped up the ascending cage when he had actually intended to slow it down. Instead of slowing and stopping, “the cage shot upward with a sudden bound under the increased pressure. [. . .] in a moment the cage was torn out of the shaft as if shot from a catapult [. . .] and the men on the cage [. . .] were thrown sprawling over the floor of the shaft-house.” Two miners died and six more were permanently disabled as a result of the accident. Ultimately, authorities deemed the engineer at the Union mine sober and attentive. Instead, they attributed his mistake to a fit of absentmindedness.41
Some hazards reflected the peculiarities of the Comstock’s subterranean environment. Others derived from the dangers of new technologies and human error. Of course, even in environments as dangerous as those on the Comstock, on most days, most engineers and other employees regularly performed their duties without incident, but danger and death lurked in every mine.
The scale of hard-rock mining on the Comstock called upon each company to employ several score to hundreds of miners. With fewer available workers, a cost of living that was inflated due to the geographic isolation, and competition between employers, labor proved very costly at more than $3 per day per miner. Occupational hazards eventually helped unify workers in their efforts to organize. With unionization in the mid-1860s, the daily wage for all men who toiled underground eventually climbed to $4 per day. By comparison, most common laborers in industrial manufacturing firms during the 1870s averaged a daily wage just over $1 per day. In the West the wage scale was typically higher, at approximately $2 per day for a common laborer.42 Because of the number of miners needed, labor quickly became the most expensive cost of doing business on the Comstock. In 1860 alone, nearly 2,000 miners already worked on the lode. That number rose slowly to approximately 2,700 by 1870. However, after the discovery and development of the famed Big Bonanza ores starting in 1873, the number of miners working on the Comstock shot up and peaked in 1875 at more than 4,900. With major declines in production in the second half of the 1870s, the workforce shrank rapidly thereafter, but as late as 1880, it still stood at more than 2,400.43
By the 1870s, miners typically worked one of three eight-hour shifts: morning, afternoon, or night. Most mining companies rotated these shifts among their workers, so that each man would work each shift for a series of weeks. Miners showed up at 7 A.M., 3 P.M., or 11 P.M. every day of the week. However, such structured schedules were often the ideal, not the reality. Employment was frequently erratic. James Hezlep Galloway worked for at least three mines—the Consolidated Virginia, Ophir, and Consolidated Union—between 1875 and 1877. He recorded in April 1876, “Did not work machinery broke at Ophir.”44 Although wages were high at $4 per day, frequent disruptions of the work routine could undermine financial security. The very technological systems that required so much labor and capital to build could and did fail. Technological interventions intended to improve natural environments could also result in unexpected outcomes. The costs sunk into infrastructure and equipment could not be recouped when these systems stopped working and halted ore production. Both workers and corporations suffered adverse effects. For some, these delays would prove costly but temporary setbacks; for others, depending on the length of work stoppages, such obstacles might be devastating.
The management of the labor force reflected the increasingly corporatized structure of work. The superintendent represented the highest link on the chain of authority in the shaft house. Beneath him a shift boss monitored and directed work and attempted to solve any problems that might occur on his watch. He also recorded a summary of his crew’s progress. A clerk or timekeeper kept track of each and every miner who entered and left the mine. Men starting or ending their shift checked in at a window. Mechanics, engineers, blacksmiths, and carpenters also worked in the shaft house. Mechanics installed and repaired the equipment, and engineers operated the hoisting works that lowered and lifted the cages. Blacksmiths kept tools sharp, and carpenters performed a variety of tasks in the shaft house and down in the mines.45
The hierarchy and delegation of specialized duties, along with the indispensability of constantly evolving technologies, demonstrate both the corporate and industrial character of hard-rock mining on the Comstock Lode. Upon entering a shaft house, reporter William Wright inventoried the equipment and noted both the sophistication and scale of the machines: “In the mass of buildings before us we see nothing to cause us to think of a mine. What we have before us more nearly resembles a large iron-foundry or big manufactory of some kind.” The new, massive industrial machinery led people to start referring to these large operations as “extractories.” This term revealed the hybrid quality of mining economies in the mid-nineteenth century. Though an extractive enterprise, the techniques employed to remove, transport, and reduce ore involved a series of highly industrial processes. Moreover, the most modern and sophisticated of new technologies—such as elevators (cages and hoisting works), ventilation systems, and mechanized drills—often emerged as a result of the immediate needs of the mining industry.46
Upon descending a shaft, one found a working environment that appeared far less industrial than the world above. The orderly appearance of each station, with its stocks of supplies, hid the tedious backbreaking labor that occurred further down the drift. In every level of the mine, a foreman supervised a crew of miners, muckers, and timbermen. Miners stoped—excavated steps or layers of rock in—the breast or face of the drifts and crosscuts and drilled holes into which they inserted charges of blasting powder with fuses they typically ignited from relatively safe distances. Muckers filled carts with waste rock and ore, being sure to keep them separate when possible. It fell to these men to clean up the rubble and knock down any loose debris that hung from the blasted areas. One mucker might serve as many as a dozen miners and assumed a position akin to an apprentice. Timbermen floated from place to place in order to insert new square-sets, replace rotting timbers, and inspect the general health and stability of the mine’s supports.47
Each miner received three candles per shift. Employers expected that he would make them last throughout his eight-hour shift. Due to foul air quality, these candles frequently flickered out. Some miners used a steel holder with a sharp end to stick these lights into the walls of the mine, while others mounted a candle atop their hats. Both strategies allowed the miners to keep their hands free and illuminate their workspace. The dim light made the miner’s work all the more difficult when drilling—swinging a hammer against a hand drill. Sometimes a man did this by himself, and in other instances two men worked in tandem, as one held the drill and the other swung the hammer.48
If mechanization made the work of the miner more productive, it did not necessarily follow that the new technologies were safer. Ventilation and pumping equipment typically improved working conditions and made them safer. But other technologies created new hazards, such as the corrosive effects of increased particulate matter and violent explosions from drilling and blasting rock. Machine drills and dynamite increased levels of productivity, and workers on the Comstock, unlike miners in other mining districts, did not actively oppose these changes. Instead, miners quickly and efficiently integrated these new tools into their age-old rhythms.
Mining companies began employing machine drills on the Comstock during the early 1870s. Typically, two men operated these new drills, which sat atop tripods. The same compressed air blown into the mines for purposes of ventilation also served to power these heavy machines. Compared to the rate of drilling by hand, the machine drills accelerated the rate at which miners could move through rock by three to four times. But these advances came with a price, one borne most heavily by the miners’ lungs. As the drills burrowed into walls, they ground the rock and released immense amounts of rock dust into the air. After working for a sustained period of years in such conditions, many miners developed a series of respiratory ailments, the most famous and controversial of which was silicosis, popularly known as “miner’s consumption.” The constant blasting of charges released additional matter that also strained and damaged lungs, but the drill men disproportionately contracted respiratory diseases and suffered their debilitating symptoms.49
A few of the miners on the Comstock Lode may have suffered from silicosis, but the local rock contained much lower amounts of silica than mines in the Rockies. And the wet conditions of the Comstock mines reduced the friction between drill and rock. Nor did the humidity allow the dust particles to move as liberally through the air. However, miners frequently contracted a variety of respiratory illnesses other than silicosis. Pneumonia and tuberculosis, in particular, plagued miners’ lungs and exhibited symptoms similar to those manifested in silicosis. Even when very little silica existed in the rock, mechanical drills still produced corrosive dust that could cut lung tissue and make workers more susceptible to other respiratory ailments. Although precise figures remain elusive, silicosis was eventually thought to be the leading cause of death among hard-rock miners in the nineteenth-century American West. And the limited data on diseases on the Comstock suggest that death rates from respiratory illness remained alarmingly high throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.50 One study of coroner and burial records for Gold Hill and Virginia City between 1863 and 1904 attributes more than 40 percent of deaths to infectious and respiratory diseases. Tuberculosis was the cause of death in no less than a third of cases linked to “infectious and parasitic reasons.” Among respiratory illnesses pneumonia killed more people than any other disease. Such high incidence of pneumonia and tuberculosis also makes sense given the thousands of coughing miners who repeatedly exchanged microbes in the cramped, damp, and hot spaces of the mines.51
The diverse environmental conditions on the Comstock and period death records suggest that prevalent causes of mortality varied from location to location. Where the mines were extraordinarily hot and wet, both pneumonia and tuberculosis prevailed, and the dust that machine drills and explosions produced abraded lung tissue and made miners more susceptible to a variety of respiratory ailments. In drier, cooler portions of the district, where heavier concentrations of silica might have existed, silicosis may have worked in tandem with tuberculosis to claim the health and lives of miners. Historian Christopher Sellers points out that it remains difficult to assess “the biological impact of the workplace.” Silicosis in particular generated a great deal of confusion and controversy. The disease shared symptoms with many other illnesses common outside industrial working environments, making it difficult for many miners to prove their cases in a court of law.52
Black powder and dynamite posed yet other health risks and occupational hazards. Some of the risks in deploying such tools were more insidious than first appearances would indicate. After drilling holes in the rock face, miners would insert a series of charges. They then attached these volatile capsules to fuses that could be ignited from a distance. After igniting the fuses, men scrambled away and awaited the blast(s) that followed. Initially, mines employed black powder to blast the rock, and some companies briefly experimented with nitroglycerine. Although black powder was, due to its superior stability, less powerful than nitroglycerine, it remained the explosive of choice until the arrival of dynamite. Nitroglycerine’s volatility had proved unpredictable and incredibly dangerous. Though more powerful than black powder and less volatile than nitroglycerine, dynamite could explode prematurely or much later than expected. Dynamite also could fail to ignite on schedule and remain inert until someone ignited the hidden charge by accident hours, days, or months later.53
A lack of communication between co-workers could exacerbate the risk of mining accidents. Miners who broke for lunch or ended their shift occasionally left undetonated cartridges in the rock face. Sometimes men on the following shift came in and started drilling only to ignite the explosives. The concussion caused by triggering these cartridges with a machine drill was especially fierce, as the compressed air powering the tool could combine with the hidden explosives to create terribly violent accidents. Charges could also be ignited by the movement of rock caused by work on the levels below and above. However, sometimes simple recklessness on a miner’s part could be his own undoing. In 1880, Charles Richards was working in the Forman shaft and used the handle on the end of his shovel to tamp down a fuse onto a charge of “giant powder.” The cartridge exploded, killing both Richards and a co-worker.54
Charles Richards’s story, though tragic, also offers evidence of improved vigilance on the part of most miners and their employers. Those who testified at the coroner’s inquest confirmed that three of twenty-five charges had failed to explode during the previous shift. These details were passed on from one shift boss to the next in order to prevent any accidents. In response, shift bosses halted all drilling to avoid unintentional explosions. Miner George Greening provided the most pointed eyewitness testimony when he described watching Richards from the other end of the shaft. He recounted that Richards used his shovel handle to force the fuse into the hole containing the charge of powder. A perplexed Greening explained that most veteran miners would never even consider such a dangerous technique. “In putting a cartridge into a hole, if we find it tight, we don’t use force in pushing it down. I would press the powder down with a stick. I think the tamping caused the explosion. The caps are exploded by fire and not by concussion.” The jury decided that no one but Richards could be held responsible for the accident.55
Explosions and corrosive dust were part of the Faustian bargain generated by the increased productivity of labor-saving devices. On the Comstock at least, the injuries miners sustained and diseases they contracted as a result of the mechanization of their profession were not misfortunes that better medical knowledge or militant protests were likely to prevent. Mines on the Comstock adopted these new technologies rather late in the history of this mining district but very early in the history of these technologies. When combined with the handsome wages they earned and the host of other geological and hydrothermal hazards they confronted underground, it is possible that the dangers posed by mechanized drills still remained poorly understood in the early 1870s and that such threats would be considered lesser evils on the Comstock.56
Economic and environmental forces converged on the Comstock Lode to propel hard-rock mining onto a trajectory dominated by large corporations and highly industrial technological systems that allowed miners to work at ever-deeper levels, in ever–more inhospitable places. Not until 1877–78, with the development of large silver deposits in Leadville, Colorado, and gold deposits in the Black Hills of South Dakota, did any industrial precious-metals mining operations in the United States begin to rival the scale of the Comstock Lode’s workforce or elaborate technological systems. By then, the Comstock had begun its steady decline.57
Miners, managers, and investors carried extremely valuable knowledge, technologies, and capital with them from the industrialized hard-rock operations of the Comstock Lode to other mining regions across the North American West. These men and the resources and experience they took from the Comstock contributed to the development of many of the largest mining operations in the world for the remainder of the nineteenth century. From the Hearst syndicate’s Homestake Mining Company in South Dakota to Marcus Daly’s Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Montana, men who made millions from investments in the Comstock and those who accumulated valuable experience working in its subterranean environments would continue to shape much of the industry for the rest of the nineteenth century. In the case of Daly and copper, trends of capital-intensive production and rapid corporate expansion demonstrated that many of the patterns that emerged on the Comstock Lode would also play a large role in shaping the growth patterns in the industrial mining of base metals.
Similar to the ways that men who cut their teeth in the California Gold Rush brought capital and technical knowledge to northwestern Nevada in the early 1860s, many rank-and-file Comstock veterans brought their experiences to bear in scores of mining districts across the North American West in the 1870s and 1880s. The Comstock’s influence radiated across the industry and shaped large-scale flows of both capital and labor. Mining on the Comstock Lode witnessed the first successful attempts to organize western miners into large industrial unions of “nonskilled” laborers. Successful unionization relied on a solidarity forged by the shared risks of death and injury, which seemed to lurk everywhere underground. Both geological and hydrological features contributed to the instability and unpredictability of the subterranean environment. In response to these challenges, corporate capital enabled the construction of massive technological systems to mitigate environmental hazards and facilitate expansion, extraction, and maintenance. These systems played a large role in making mining on the Comstock more productive and in some ways, perhaps, safer. However, cages, steam engines, mechanized drills, blasting powder, and compressed air and ventilation systems introduced new variables into an extremely volatile work environment.
Finally, what went on in the heart of the Comstock’s working environments also shaped the capital-intensive technologies and high labor costs needed to expand operations underground. In an effort to uncover and extract subterranean deposits, corporations and workers constructed new underground environments that strained the reach of technical innovation, human endurance, and financial solvency. Through the sale of stock, corporations accumulated sufficient capital to flex the financial muscle necessary for the operation of mines on the Comstock, but profitable and unprofitable companies alike still relied overwhelmingly on the human muscle power of scores to hundreds of workers to perform the strenuous and debilitating labor required underground. The same volatile environmental forces of heat, water, explosions, and shifting and falling rock that made mining so expensive for corporations made working conditions extremely dangerous for miners. Hundreds lost their lives, and hundreds more suffered horrific accidents that left them permanently disabled.
Environmental forces underground posed grave threats to both physical safety and large capital investments. These obstacles demanded technical innovation, thousands of laborers, and huge sums of capital to defray the costs of doing business on the Comstock Lode. These relationships ultimately made corporations the most expedient business organizations for meeting persistent economic, environmental, and technical challenges. Although scores of corporations failed to achieve the efficiencies found in consolidation, and although few actually reaped the profits hoped for by Rossiter Raymond, they nevertheless contributed to the expansion of an industrialized business paradigm and the creation of working environments that would soon dominate mining. Such forces further facilitated the rapid spread of corporations across the American industrial landscape. The same environmental forces and technological systems that contributed to the growth of corporate power also structured the daily lives, labor, and safety of the thousands of men who worked underground. Their individual and collective stories, both in life and in death, provide us insights into how working-class Americans experienced the transformative impacts of industrialization and the rise of corporate capitalism in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.
1. (Markleeville, CA) Alpine Chronicle, July 2, 1870. Alfred Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1973), 1097.
2. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 93. For an example of the ways that death records can help historians illuminate and partially reconstruct the lives, routines, and material worlds of working people, see Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
3. Maureen Jung, “The Comstocks and the California Mining Economy, 1848–1900: The Stock Market and the Modern Corporation” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1988), 69.
4. Production figures for the Comstock remain contested and somewhat unclear. What is clear, however, is that the district’s mines produced bullion that was worth well over $300 million and, according to some estimates, may have come close to nearly $400 million. Of course, the Comstock was the largest silver strike in the history of the United States, but the gold extracted from these mines generated far more profits in relative terms because of the higher price fetched by this precious metal when compared to silver. For estimates of production totals, see Eliot Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1883), 407–35; Grant H. Smith, The History of the Comstock Lode, 1850–1997, with new material Joseph V. Tingley (Reno: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology; University of Nevada Press, 1998), 310–14; and Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, revised and expanded by Elliot West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 56–86.
5. Death Records Entered by Storey County Recorder, April 30, 1879, to December 10, 1880, Storey County Recorder’s Office, Virginia City, NV; Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 23–30; Gunther Peck, “Manly Gambles: The Politics of Risk on the Comstock, 1860–1880,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau (New York: Routledge, 2001), 73–96.
6. Paul, Mining Frontiers, 57–58, 128–29, 192–96.
7. Joseph L. King, History of the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board, by the Chairman, Jos. L. King (San Francisco: J.L. King, 1910); Michael J. Makley, The Infamous King of the Comstock: William Sharon and the Gilded Age in the West (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006), 14, 214.
8. Many historians have argued for hard-rock mining’s inherently industrial character. Regrettably, the industry still seems relegated to a separate, regional category that obscures the far more compelling connections between eastern and western patterns of industrialization in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. For the best treatment of mining as an industry, see Mark T. Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
9. Rossiter W. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining in the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870), 98–99.
10. Ibid.
11. For more on debates over the advantages and inefficiencies of corporations in a relatively new and rapidly expanding economy, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of the American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).
12. Dan De Quille, The Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World-Renowned Comstock Lode of Nevada (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1876), 90. For a discussion of the climatic, hydrological, and geological obstacles that threatened the lives and fortunes of miners in the Yukon Gold Rush, see Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 89–114. Also see Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
13. Dan De Quille, “Notes on System of Timbering Mines in Square-Sets,” Box 3, Dan De Quille Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
14. Ibid.; Paul, Mining Frontiers, 64.
15. Charles Bonner to unknown recipient, April 4, 1868, Box 11, Folder 202, Savage Mining Company and Associated Records, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
16. 1870 U.S. Census, Storey County, NV (Mortality Schedule). Following are the names and ages of all the miners who died, by date. August 1869: Henry Melchan (47), E. Caine (52) and J. L Roach (50). October 1869: Pat Dalley (38). December 1869: Daniel White (36) and C.E. Brightmore (38). February 1870: J. Monagere (45). April 1870: John (33) and Walter (35) Tregallis. May 1870: Andrew Johnson (33) and Samuel Roberts (29). Others also may have been killed by caving accidents or fallen timbers or rock during these months, but many causes of death as listed in the census data are attributed to unspecified categories such as “Accident-Mining” or “Killed in mine.”
17. Testimony of B.G. Williams, Foreman of Savage Mine, Coroner’s Inquest, attached to Certificate of Death for Richard S. Kitz, written by J.D.F. Hodges, Public Administrator and Ex-officio Coroner, Storey County, Virginia City, Nevada, October 5, 1877, Storey County Clerk’s Office, Virginia City, Nevada.
18. (Virginia City, NV) Daily Territorial Enterprise September 12, 1874.
19. Ibid.
20. De Quille, The Big Bonanza, 391.
21. J. Ross Browne, Crusoe’s Island, California and Washoe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1864, reprinted in A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited (Balboa Island, CA: Paisano Press, 1959, 179.
22. Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners, 296–97.
23. Adolph Sutro, The Advantages and Necessity of a Deep Drain Tunnel, for the Great Comstock Ledge (San Francisco: n.p., February 1865), 16.
24. John McPhee, The Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998), 46–50, 101–5.
25. Ibid.
26. James Fair to Weller, February 2, 9, 16, and 23, and March 2, 1878, Box 10, Records of Ophir Silver Mining Company, Special Collections, Getchell Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
27. John A. Church, Accidents in the Comstock Mines and their Relation to Deep Mining, paper presented at the Pittsburgh Meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, May 1879 (printed for the author), Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
28. John A. Church, The Heat of the Comstock Mines (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1878.)
29. Ibid.; D.B. Barton, A History of Tin Mining and Smelting in Cornwall (Truro, Cornwall, UK: privately printed, 1967), 217.
30. James Hezlep Galloway, “Diary,” entry for March 6, 1875, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
31. H.H. Smith to J.D. Fry, “Weekly Report,” August 31, 1872, Belcher Silver Mining Company, Box 1, Special Collections, Getchell Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
32. Testimony of William Burns and Neil McFarland, Coroner’s Inquest, Certificate of Death for Thomas Wilson, written by J.D.F. Hodges, Public Administrator and Ex-officio Coroner, Storey County, Virginia City, NV, March 3, 1877, Storey County Clerk’s Office, Virginia City, NV; Death Record, Phillip Harrington, August 13, 1880, Storey County Recorder, Virginia City, NV.
33. Daily Territorial Enterprise, August 1, 1879.
34. H.H. Smith to J.D. Fry, “Weekly Report,” September 28, October 5, and December 7, 1872, Belcher Silver Mining Company, Box 1, Special Collections, Getchell Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
35. H.H. Smith to J.D. Fry, “Weekly Report,” October 5, 1872, Belcher Silver Mining Company, Box 1, Special Collections, Getchell Library, University of Nevada, Reno; Records of Ophir Silver Mining Company, Box 10, Special Collections, Getchell Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
36. Elizabeth Baines, “Mortality and Migration: A Study of the Comstock Lode” (Master’s thesis, University of Nevada, Reno, 2000), 50–51; Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners, 374; De Quille, The Big Bonanza, 150.
37. Virginia Evening Chronicle, August 29, 1873.
38. Church, Accidents, 7.
39. Ibid.
40. Doten, Journals, 1103; Daily Territorial Enterprise, September 12, 1874.
41. Lord, Comstock Mining and Miners, 402–3.
42. U.S. Census Bureau, Wages of Mechanics Employed in the Manufacturing and Mining Industries, United States Census, 1880, Volume 20 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), 544–63.
43. For the size of the workforce and the best social history and general overview of the Comstock Lode, see Ronald M. James, The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 26, 92, 139; Baines, “Migration and Mortality.”
44. Galloway, “Diary,” entries for March 1875 through 1877.
45. De Quille, The Big Bonanza, 244.
46. Ibid., 221.
47. Ibid.
48. Lingenfelter, Hard Rock Miners, 17–18.
49. Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 84–93; Baines, “Mortality and Migration,” 15, 50–65. Historian Ronald James argues that the Comstock miners as a rule did not suffer from silicosis, because the local rock lacked silica. While there is no consensus, contemporary Dan De Quille noted the frequency of the disease. Some historians of hard-rock mining have emphasized the ubiquity of silicosis, while others have pointed to the uneven distribution of high and low rates across mining districts in the West. Whatever the reality, one estimate claims that between 1890 and 1930 more than half of the hard-rock miners working in the West died from the disease. James C. Foster, “The Western Dilemma: Miners, Silicosis, and Compensation,” Labor History 26:2 (Spring 1985), 268–87; James, The Roar and the Silence, 121.
50. Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1979); Duane A. Smith and Ronald C. Brown, No One Ailing except a Physician: Medicine in the Mining West, 1848–1919 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001).
51. Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 84–93; Baines, “Mortality and Migration,” 15, 50–65.
52. Baines, “Mortality and Migration,” 15, 50–65; Foster, “The Western Dilemma,” 268–87; James, The Roar and the Silence, 121; Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 21. For more on the history of occupational illness, see Paul Weindling, ed., The Social History of Occupational Health (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
53. Popularly known as giant powder, dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in 1866. See Mark Wyman, “Industrial Revolution in the West: Hard-Rock Miners and the New Technology,” Western Historical Quarterly 5:1 (January 1974): 41–42.
54. Daily Territorial Enterprise, December 11, 1880.
55. Ibid.
56. De Quille, The Big Bonanza, 145–48; Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 104–6.
57. Paul, Mining Frontiers, 57–58, 128–29, 192–96.