Life Underground Episode 2 - The New York Drift
Life Underground - Episode 002
“The New York Drift”
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana, one of the richest mining districts in the world. Today, on episode 2, we take a look at what it was actually like to work underground on the Butte hill, and we hear the unique voices of the men who were there, as we draw from the oral history collection at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. I’m Clark Grant. Today’s episode is called “the New York Drift.”
Teresa Jordan’s oral history collection at the Butte Archives holds many previously unheard treasures, including her interview with Dinny Murphy from May of 1986. Teresa was in search of stories from the underground, trying to better understand what it was like for the men who worked on the Butte hill, and how the eventual shutdown of the mines affected their lives. Dinny was an old time miner who had started work in Butte in the 1930s. We spend the first half of today’s show with Dinny’s interview, starting with his first experiences going underground, which Teresa asks him about here.
[Dinny Murphy]
Dinny Murphy is talking about some of the tough spots he worked underground on the Butte hill. The work was hard, and the miners had to organize in order to make demands of the Anaconda Company to make the workplace less deadly. Murph says the union fought not only to improve a miner’s base pay, but to ensure that all the other factors of working conditions could be properly addressed and resolved through a system of grievances.
[Dinny Murphy]
Over the course of her oral history project in Butte, Teresa Jordan encountered men that, time and time again, loved the work they did underground. Here she asks Dinny Murphy to explain why that might be.
[Dinny Murphy]
This is Life Underground, and you’re listening to an interview with Dinny Murphy from 1986, conducted as part of an oral history project by Teresa Jordan. This is episode two in our twenty-part series on the history of underground mining in Butte, Montana, as told by the men and women who lived it. I’m Clark Grant, Project Director for the Verdigris Project, and host of Life Underground.
Dinny Murphy’s wife was right to be concerned about her husband’s safety when she didn’t hear from him that night. The work in the Butte mines was some of the deadliest in all of American industry. Today the mineyards are quiet on the Butte hill; the enormous coal-black gallus frames still stand as Butte’s legacy to industrialization. Each of the shuttered mineyards now has a sign out front that lists the name of the mine and how many men are known to have died down in them. The Original - 43. The Steward - 79. The Mountain Con - 172.
We continue with more from Dinny Murphy and Teresa Jordan.
[Dinny Murphy]
Work in the Butte mines was highly skilled, and Dinny Murphy worked at it until he got better jobs over the years. He worked in hot places like the New York Drift, but also in the intermediate tunnels, the tunnels between the tunnels, where the work was claustrophobic and all done by hand. Just getting the materials in place to perform the work at hand might take half the morning, and the hand mucking of multiple tons of hard rock would take up the rest of the day. Murph talked about his headaches he would get while working in these tight spaces, a side effect of the powder gas from blasting. He said he would often vomit into the chute when he was mucking rock out of the drift and go home so sick that he couldn’t eat his supper. Years of this work took a toll on his health, so he eventually decided to try and get another job in the mines. He went to the foreman.
[Dinny Murphy]
The nippers in the Butte mines were the guys who kept all the miners stocked with fresh picks, shovels, drill bits and other tools. The nipper knew his way around the mines and sometimes had hidden caches of tools that he would keep in order to have a good supply of fresh tools for the right miner.
[Dinny Murphy]
So Dinny Murphy was a nipper. The nipper and his secret cache of tools is a common story on the Butte hill, one of those unique and wonderful facets of the underground world beneath the city of Butte. The nipper is also a figure in Butte literature, including Richard K O’Malley’s Mile High Mile Deep, whose protagonist, as a greenhorn in the mines, goes down an abandoned mine tunnel in search of a nipper’s tool stash.
[Mile High Mile Deep Excerpt as read by Butch Gerbrandt]
That was Butch Gerbrandt, reading an excerpt from Richard K. O’Malley’s Mile High Mile Deep.
This is Life Underground. On today’s episode, we’re learning what it was actually like to work underground in the Butte mines from the people who lived it. We’ve spent most of the program so far listening to an interview Teresa Jordan conducted with Dinny Murphy in 1986. When we come back, we’ll hear from another old timer who worked on the Butte hill, Elmer Isakson. Stay with us.
Life underground in the Butte mines was dangerous. Elmer Isakson tells the story of his major injury in this archived interview with Brandon West. Elmer was working in the Anselmo mine in 1953.
[Elmer Isakson]
Elmer Isakson was interviewed by Brandon West as part of an assignment for a Butte High School history class. Elmer went on to have a 40-year career as a barber and was featured in a Montana Standard newspaper interview in 2001. He died in March 2007 at the age of 92.
Elmer left off describing the thrill of riding the skips as he was hoisted up the three-thousand foot mine shaft at the Anselmo at breakneck speed. Up next on today’s show, we hear from some of the men who operated those hoists and did the tedious work of repairing them. Without the hoisting engineers and the rope gang, none of the men or materials would have been able to make the trips up and down Butte’s mine shafts. We hear their stories next on Life Underground.
The Butte mines relied on immense motors to operate. In order to get the men and materials up and down the thousands of feet of mine shafts that led to the underground workings, companies constructed the giant gallus frames that still dominate the landscape today. At the top of these giant frames is the sheave wheel, upon which steel cables would turn like a giant pulley. Connected to the steel cables on one end are the cages and skips, which carry the men to and from surface and carry tons of ore from the depths of the deep granite bedrock to the train cars awaiting them on surface. On the other end of the cable is a giant spool which collects the cable as the cages are raised to the surface. Within the hoist house where these spools of cable reside is the hoist motor and the men who operate it. For years, one of those operators was Louis Loushin, and as part of the Verdigris Project, we had the opportunity to talk to Louis about his time in the mines. He started out as a young man at the mill in Rocker, near Butte, but soon enough made an effort to work on the Butte hill.
[Louis Loushin]
That was Louis Loushin, who was 94 at the time of his oral history at the Butte Archives. Louis is also a combat veteran of World War 2, and we’ll hear of his time in the Navy on another episode of Life Underground.
Everybody inthe Butte mines relied on the hoisting engineers to keep the operation going. Their careful control of the cages and skips made it possible to reach the ore bodies resting thousands of feet below the surface. These mines ran 24 hours a day, and the bells of the mines and the humming of the motors were a constant backdrop to life in Butte throughout the 20th century. With the whole operation relying on them, the hoisting engineers like Louis Loushin relied on a special group of repairmen to help them keep the hoists running in the Butte mines. These special repairmen were the rope gang, and in our quest to explore what working on the Butte hill was like for those who lived it, we had the pleasure of speaking with a longtime ropeman named Tom Holter. Aubrey Jaap of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives conducted his oral history.
[Tom Holter]
Tom Holter mentioned a moment ago about how he had an injury that ended his mining career. Here, he relays that story.
[Tom Holter]
That was Tom Holter, longtime ropeman in the Butte mines. That does it for today’s show. I’m Clark Grant and this is Life Underground. Join us next time for a two-part examination of working for the Anaconda Company. Thanks for listening.
[Credits]