Frank walked down the hall of the old building. It was one of the two oldest on the site and was primitive, dark and drafty. The engineers and foremen maintained offices and rooms there. Several years ago the company moved most of the men in the much newer and larger Barracks No. 4. The management and support staff remained in the oldest building. Frank walked down the narrow hallway with the creaking floor to the office in a front corner looking toward the aerial tram. Bill Morris was seated at his large desk examining one of Frank’s engineering drawings.
“Frank. I was just looking at these. It sure doesn’t look like much after what we’re used to here at Jumbo, does it?” “No. There’s not really much out there, Bill. I’ll probably want your men to run some prospect tunnels into each one of them, starting with this third one. It looks like the most promising of the four. “Bill, I got a phone call from the office. I need the battery locomotive ready. Could you call down there and have it waiting for me at the landing? I’m heading to the incline now. Have to go over to the Erie side and bring back the Indians.” “It’s over?” “Looks like it to me, Bill. I’m escorting them back to camp. Emil’s probably not going to make it.” It took ten minutes for Frank to reach the 1,500 level of the Jumbo incline. The operator stood ready with the new rechargeable Westinghouse locomotive pulling five large, empty ore cars. It took another twelve minutes to reach the Erie incline close to the main portal of the camp. Johnny and Cap were working down the new incline near the 300 level where one of the tunnels led to an adit at the surface on a high cliff above Root Glacier. The tunnel opening kept the area well ventilated. Like the other inclines, this one had a stairwell compartment paralleling a set of thirty-inch skip tracks. It proved to be quite a long run down the stairs to the working level at its base. Eldon Johnson was near the landing, supervising the incline extension work crew. “Frank, what a surprise to see you here. Thought you’d be working up on the main level in the new prospect area. Is there a problem?” “Actually, Eldon, there is. I need to have you release Johnny Gadanski and Cap Goodlataw for me. I’ve come to notify him that his father is very ill. We don’t expect him to last. I imagine both he and Cap will be leaving the job for the season under these circumstances. I’ll be escorting them out of here.” “Sorry about Emil. I’ve heard many good things about him, though I don’t personally know the man. I regret even more that we’ll probably lose two of my best men. Oh well, these things happen. I’ll summon them for you and let you tell them.” Eldon turned and headed farther into the darkness of the shaft. Somewhere out of Frank’s sight he could hear Eldon yell out for the two. Like the other miners and muckers, these men were dressed in heavy work clothing and rubber boots suitable for the deep mining environment with its below-freezing temperatures and constant winds running throughout the tunnels. With the helmets they were wearing and the light-colored grime covering them, they were indistinguishable from anyone else in the workings.
“Hello, guys. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, Johnny, but your father has turned gravely ill. Doctor Gillespie does not expect him to last much longer. The suddenness of it is a surprise to all of us. He’s having extreme trouble breathing. We don’t think he’ll leave the hospital alive.” Johnny stared at Frank, his mouth slowly opening, then he darted straight for the incline shaft, not waiting for Frank. Cap followed. As he brushed past the engineer, he yelled back. “Bastards, you should have told me sooner.” Eldon emerged from the darkness. “We’ll take care of the paperwork at the office. I’m quite sure they won’t be back. I’ve got a long run back up those stairs to catch up with them. They don’t know how to get back to camp the fast way.” Frank rushed back up the incline stairs. Somewhere far ahead he could hear Johnny and Cap running up the thirty-degree shaft toward the main level. It was a long exhausting trek up the new stairwell. Frank sprinted all the way up. By the time the engineer reached the top, he found the two out of breath at the 100 level landing. “Look, Johnny, no one realized how ill your father is. He was still working a few days ago. Then he told us he needed to take some time off. It never occurred to anyone to have him checked. When someone finally found him in his room we rushed him over to the hospital.” Cap, standing behind Johnny, looked toward Frank and signaled with a silent okay sign. Johnny looks very depressed. He seems to have lost his energy. As usual, the two balance each other well. Johnny is far more subject to stress than Cap, I would guess. Cap seems to serve as a buffer to Johnny. Similarly, I’ve seen Johnny hold Cap back from engaging in an unnecessary confrontation with some of the loudmouths we occasionally have working here. “Look, you guys, leaving the mining outfits in the changing room, then get your gear together. I’ll return with you to camp. The fastest way back is not the way you arrived here over the glacier trail. I’ve already got a mine locomotive standing by at the Erie portal. Those iron rails your sitting on that head into the darkness away from Erie extend all the way to the Jumbo incline and beyond. We’ll ride them and hoist to the surface and then ride the aerial tram back down to Kennecott.” Cap looked puzzled. He had never heard of underground locomotives. No one on the present crew had ever seen it. The battery-powered engine would soon begin making regular runs once the Erie incline began sending ore to the 100 level. But Cap nodded and followed Johnny toward the barracks rooms. Frank followed. Up ahead, as the tunnel veered left, the line of five cars stood by. The operator had turned the locomotive around and had moved it to the front, so he could use the headlamp for the return trip. Cap and Johnny both stopped long enough to look at the curiosity, then they rushed off to the barrack. The two Indians showed up at Eldon’s office, where Frank patiently waited. They still had light-colored mine dust grime on their faces. Johnny came in and slumped down into the chair. Cap moved in place behind him. “I’m sorry, Frank. I didn’t mean to swear at you like that. I’m sure you can understand. We have our potlatch blankets, which is all we brought with us, and now we need to get back to camp by the fastest way we can. Did you say something to Cap about using the underground locomotive?” “That’s the one you just passed. It’s there just for us, so we can make a fast run to the Jumbo inline, which leads to the surface where an aerial tram will bring us back to camp.” “Then, let’s go.” The two were out the second story door and down the stairs in a flash. They rushed down the covered, elevated board walk for the portal. Inside they passed through a winding corridor, cut very unevenly because it was originally just a prospect hole. The first several hundred feet ran a very crooked line around winzes, raises and prospect drifts before reaching the main haulage tunnel.
The operator waved them aboard. He started to pull out as they boarded, gaining speed until it was silently racing down the long quiet tunnels. The company still had not finished installing the overhead lighting on the Erie end of the new cross-cut. The tunnel was illuminated entirely by the large front-facing lamp as it whirred toward the Jumbo incline 1500 level landing. Frank Buckner had been involved in shooting the line for the new cross-cut connection from the Erie 100 level side on the extreme northwest. The tunnel would have been shot in a straight line except for the presence of the Amazon Gulch rock glacier somewhere overhead. To avoid any problems with the natural grinding glacier action, the engineers veered the tunnel north outside the preferred path. This caused the tunnel to temporarily leave the desired level near the contact zone. Finally the tunnel swung back into place. Somewhere directly ahead in the darkness was the Jumbo incline. The top speed of the battery vehicle was just over ten miles per hour. The group arrived at their destination in ten minutes, even though the tunnel seemed to go on and on. “How much farther does it go, Frank?”
“This tunnel ? When we’re done with it, Cap, this tunnel will end on the far side of the ridge. It’ll be over four miles long, coming out somewhere above McCarthy Creek in a place known as Independence Gulch. It’ll be the longest tunnel in Alaska. Frank, like Johnny and Cap, found himself wanting to get out of the mines as quickly as possible. The Jumbo had a very large incline which dwarfed the one being built at Erie. It was double-tracked so it could hoist in balance. This was necessary due to the projected length of the incline, which was expected to continue down another thousand vertical feet, making it the longest of the incline shafts at over a mile in rail distance. That would be an impossibly long run for a single-track system. Even down to the 1,500 level, the run was considered a long one, as it was over half a mile long. With the hoist-in-balance system, one set of loaded ore buckets moved toward the surface while the other set returned to the ore stopes, which was the working area. The special man-skips were in place when the three men arrived. An attendant was on hand to see them aboard.
He signaled the hoist operator 1,550 feet above. It took another ten minutes to reach the surface, which was the 180 level tunnel. The was the new main adit level, where a large conveyor transported the ore from the end of the skip dump to the ore bins at the back end of the top of the aerial tram. The tram terminus had been moved underground in 1919 to protect the men from the heavy winds and extreme cold temperatures at the surface and to otherwise speed up the tram-bucket loading operation. The men off-loaded from the personnel skip at the upper level and followed the ore conveyor belt to a point near the surface where the top of the Jumbo tram was set to haul ore to the mill. Loaded ore buckets were already on the line ahead of them, moving out in two-hundred-foot intervals. It is the weight of those loads which caused the tram to move down at the proper speed of about five miles per hour. An operator waited at the platform to help them on board. |
06 February 2011
Chapter 31: "Departing the Camp," Pt 2
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