EMPIRE MINE STATE PARK, Calif. — Whenever I visit historic sites, I try to take something away from each visit.
We came to this mining exhibit in Sierra Nevada and discovered something quite unusual.
After they struck gold in California in 1849, they opened the Empire Mine and began digging the precious metal out. For 106 they mined gold at Empire Mine. The takeaway?
Only 26 miners died during the entire time the mine was operating.
I heard that statistic and was astounded.
The mine was primitive by the standards we know today. They lugged the metal out from deep within the surface of the planet by hand. They brought mules in later, treated them very well, and used the pack animals to haul it out.
Of the 26 miners who died while the mine operated from 1850 until 1956, only a handful of them — fewer than a half-dozen — died from rock falls. Cause of death might have been equipment failure or perhaps even mine-related illness.
The state park system has established a wonderful exhibit here, in Grass Valley, that gives visitors a marvelous look into the past. The offices contained an upright typewriter, an adding machine, table tops with T-squares and protractors and a vault that looked vaguely like a washing machine.
We stood at the top of a mine shaft that sank hundreds of feet into the dark. The shafts are now filled with water to about the 450-foot level below the surface, we were told; the water table here has filled it naturally.
Hundreds of men worked the mines at any one time. When you think of the thousands of men who toiled deep in the belly of the planet, I find it astonishing in the extreme that only 26 of them died doing this torturous work.
They were paid in the beginning $3 per day; they worked 10 hours a day; they worked six days a week. A state park ranger told us “That was good money in those days.”
They were sturdy, industrious men, to be sure. I quit long ago trying to imagine myself doing that kind of work, given that I live in the moment — today, in the here and now. Perhaps I could be a miner had I lived in that day and in that era.
A corollary question might be to wonder how those tough-as-nails men might fare in today’s world. My hunch is that they likely would fare about as well as we would being transported back to that era.