Life Underground Episode 9 - Going Underground
Life Underground Episode 9
“Going Underground”
Today we’re underground in a Butte mine with Larry Hoffman, an old time miner and instructor of mining engineering at Montana Tech. Along with my colleague Daniel Hogan, we’re descending into the mine on foot with Larry. This educational mine operation isn’t powered by one of the giant head frames and hoist engines like you see dormant on the Butte hill today. This mine has an opening big enough to drive a pickup truck down into it.
Opening a large metal gate, Larry leads us down into the dark tunnel for my first experience going underground.
This is Life Underground and I’m Clark Grant. Today we’ll start by getting a taste of what the underground mines are actually like, with the help of our gracious tour guide Larry Hoffman. Later in the show, we’ll hear from more old time miners about their time underground when the Butte mines were really running. Stay tuned.
We’re underground at the Orphan Boy mine near Montana Tech. After we checked out hard hats with lights, laced up our boots and said goodbye to the daylight, Larry Hoffman lead the way.
Standing in a big room underground with Larry, there are rock bolts driven into the granite above our heads, with bits of what looks like chain link fence held up to prevent baseball size rocks and larger from coming down on our heads. It’s wet, muddy, and dark.
There’s a portion of the workings that looks like it had a cave in, with a giant pile of loose rocks blocking an offshoot of our walkway.
Larry picks up an enormous drill bit as we walk through the muck and past some tool stashes.
As we walk to new parts of this underground mine, Larry points out the construction of some large wooden timbers that are holding up a mine tunnel we shine our lights on.
Walking down this drift that was held up by large wooden timbers, I felt I finally connected with the underground Butte that you see in the old pictures. It had that damp smell of decomposing granite, and that true black darkness of the underground you hear about in stories. This was the underground world that built Butte, the mining city. These dark, cramped tunnels are where fortunes and widows were made. We remark to Larry about the colors we see on the rocks shining beneath our headlamps.
We continue on through the Orphan Boy mine with Larry Hoffman, who at this point has only taken us 100 feet below surface. With the utter darkness swallowing up our field of view and the enormous rocks hovering above our heads, I felt like we could have been a mile underground. Thanks to Larry’s all-knowing expertise and confident demeanor, I never once felt unsafe, but there was something deeply unsettled inside me when I thought about how much mass was hanging above us, and how implausible it seemed that the rock bolts and timber could hold up the earth overhead. Nevertheless, we pressed on.
As we get deeper into the mine, there are tunnels branching off and going all kinds of directions. We see another small tunnel held up with timbers and stretching off into the darkness past where our lights can shine.
We made it to a spot that to me felt like the center of the earth, but which was really about a 30 minute walk from the entrance at our leisurely pace, and Larry had us turn off all the lights. I hid my recorder under my jacket to block out its light.
Our underground tour with Larry Hoffman left an impression on me. I knew right then and there that underground mining was not for me, and it made me grateful for the work I do have on the surface, no matter how hard it gets. Larry was reminiscing there about the Granite Mountain Speculator Mine Fire in June of 1917, which killed 168 men.
Being underground, even for the couple of hours we spent with Larry Hoffman at the Orphan Boy training mine at Montana Tech, deepened my understanding of the work all those men did on the Butte hill, and helped me appreciate what built this city. When we come back we’ll hear from Al Beavis, a man who spent the better part of 40 years underground in the mines of Butte. This is Life Underground.
Al Beavis was born in Walkerville in the summer of 1937. He had the usual experiences of a neighborhood kid on the Butte hill growing up around the mines. He played on ore dumps, played around the trains, and threw rocks at kids from nearby Centerville. When he was just a teenager, he hitchhiked from Montana to South Dakota to stay with his grandparents, but he didn’t stay long.
[Al Beavis]
Al comes from a family of miners, and with the hard work of the underground came all the common afflictions that faced the men of Butte and their families. One major part of life was drinking.
[Al Beavis]
With life at home the way it was, Al went to work young.
[Al Beavis]
As we sat around Al’s kitchen table at his home in Walkerville, he was telling me all the things he was gonna tell me in a future recording session. I ended up going to Al’s home twice for oral history recordings. On the first visit, where he was speaking there, we spent nearly two hours just talking about his ancestors and his life up to the age of fourteen. I ended up coming back nearly two years later and we talked only about mining for another two hours. For the next portion of this episode, listen in as Al Beavis relays his tales of underground mining, giving out knowledge that has all but disappeared from the living memory of the Butte hill.
[Al Beavis]
Al first went underground when he was basically still a kid. At 16, he weighed about 100 lbs, and he needed to look more like a man in order to get the special card you needed to work in the Butte mines. After ongoing labor disputes in the early 20th century, the Anaconda Company instituted the rustling card system in 1912. You had to have the card to work in the mines, but the Company could decline to issue you a card for any reason, including political affiliations or labor union activity. Speaking in Missoula in 1917, an Anaconda Company official said that ‘it had become apparent to the officials of the Company that in view of the increasing number of characters such as IWWs and radicals generally in Butte, many of whom were working in the mines, that in order to do any part of its duty to the community and to itself, it must establish some system of knowing its employees. This was the main reason for the adoption of the rustling card system.” Back to Al Beavis. It would have been in 1953 or so that he got his start in the underground mines.
[Al Beavis]
This is Life Underground, and today we’re visiting with Al Beavis, who spent most of his working life working in the underground mines of Butte. Later, as mining changed and transitioned to the big open pit at the Berkeley, Al went to work as a foreman and eventually as blasting superintendent of the Berkeley Pit. How Al lived his days is how he lived his life, which is to say he figured things out on his own and did them in his own way.
[Al Beavis]
That was Al Beavis, interviewed at his home in Walkerville in 2018 and again in February of 2020. After retiring from mining in the 1980s, Al went on to become the Mayor of the small town of Walkerville, and he remained active in Butte politics and Superfund work for years. He was also instrumental in the design and construction of Our lady of the Rockies. His contribution to that project is documented in a book called Memories of Our Lady of the Rockies. Al passed away just six months after that interview where he shared those stories of the underground mines, peacefully, at home.
The living memory of the underground is fading away in Butte these days, and with Al’s death we lost a huge amount of institutional memory of the mining practices that made Butte the richest hill on earth.
Earlier in this episode, back when we were underground with Larry Hoffman at the Orphan Boy mine, he mentioned what a huge mistake he thought it was to have turned off the underground water pumps that kept the Butte mines dry. Al Beavis also mentioned that he couldn’t live with himself if he was the guy who turned the pumps off. That hugely consequential decision is the subject of a future episode of Life Underground, so we’ll return to that topic and speak to the man who claims to have flipped the switch. That’s coming up next time, on Life Underground.