Gate, once a miner, always a miner.
"The first snow in 1954 was in early November. I asked for a job underground. As winter set in, I was a hard rock miner. My first day underground was strange, but i got used to it. To get down, a bunch of miners squeeze like sardines into a cage. The smell! The ride down! The darkness below!
I was on the 2000 foot level working on a train that hauls the muck we pulled from the chutes that come from the stopes above. I learned the “Mucking Machine” and I was good at it. I even made a good bonus. I was mucking out the drifts as we moved ahed. One shift would drill and blast, and I would come in and muck it out and lay down the tracks, air pipes and water lines (to run the machines, including Jack-legs, Slushers and Mucking Machines) as we go. Some twenty-two ton cars are attached to the motor that we haul down the drifts to an Ore Pass where the muck will be sent up to the mill passing by a huge crusher, where it becomes powder-like and eventually become gold bricks. I worked a couple of times where they melt down the ore to form gold bricks.
Working in the mill was very interesting. Seeing and touching these gold bricks is exciting. Three bricks came out while I was there. At the Aunor Lake mine, I also worked in stopes, which were called square-set stopes. It was very dangerous where we worked and the square sets of timber would be set up to protect us from the loose gravel above us.
The mine was almost all soapstone. I lost a friend I went to school with when he was killed by loose gravel. He broke his neck. He was only 18 years old. Another guy I knew well got his hand cut off at the wrist when he was pulling chutes. I huge rock came down hitting him where his hand was on an ore car. I saw a few other miners get killed.
Mining was so different than it is today. They just don’t mine that way anymore. It’s not as dangerous, but it’s still ringing and you’re deep underground. It somehow never bothered me. “Once a miner, always a miner” was the phrase you often heard and it almost happened to me as you will see in the years to come. It gets in your blood and you begin to think it’s all you can do. It is the miners, the friendships. Only a miner would understand. It’s shift work, dirty work, dangerous and it pays good money, especially the bonuses. But I’ve seen that bonus kill many men. You take chances. We used to work with dynamite sticks and blasting caps at the end of a fuse, lit by a match. As I said, it’s all different today.
But when you’re 18, what is danger? The hours away from the mine were spent mostly drinking and running wild. Miners and lumberjacks love to drink!"