Olsen - Trapped in the Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in Americas Richest Silver Mine

The Deep Dark

TRAGEDY AND REDEMPTION IN AMERICA'S RICHEST SILVER MINE

Gregg Olsen

Advance Praise for The Deep Dark

An extraordinary tale of the uncommon courage, perseverance,
and heroism of everyday people

Compellingly told, honestly written, The Deep Dark is a story that resonates and lingers, long after the final page is read. In addition to being a gripping account of an American tragedy, it is a brutal, enlightening, bone-chilling glimpse into the underground of the nation's mining industry.Gregg Olsen skillfully captures the details of Sunshine Mine, its ill-fated miners, the friends and family left behind, and the disaster itself with the intimacy of an insider, making you feel the smoke, the heat, the confinement, and, ultimately, the terror of that May day in 1972. It is a story at once horrific and poignant, wholly absorbing and extraordinarily moving.

Jennifer Niven
The Ice Master

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Mining disasters are not often the stuff of literary achievement, but The Deep Dark is a remarkable work that not only captures life and death in a hardrock mining town, but turns the tragic men and women who live there into friends, family, and neighbors. Gregg Olsen is an impeccable researcher and the truth shines through on every page of this book, but that is not its only strength. Olsen is one of those rare writers with the self-confidence to simply let a story tell itself. It is some story, well worth telling, and never to be forgotten.

Homer Hickam
October Sky and Sky of Stone

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Absolutely wonderful... not only did [Olsen] make it come hauntingly alive through [his] prodigious reporting, but it is simply a super story that is at times heartbreaking but importantly filled with hope through the perseverance of the survivors and the victims' families.

Gerald Posner
Pulitzer Prize finalist and author,
Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11

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The Kellogg mine fire is a sad and fascinating piece of American history, and Gregg Olsen is the perfect guide as he leads the reader down into a whole new world underground, with its own lore, language and laws. The Deep Dark is as gripping and necessary as true-life drama gets.

Stewart O'Nan
The Circus Fire and Snow Angels

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In the tradition of Young Men and Fire, The Deep Dark is an exceptional, haunting documentary. Like an epic folksong, it crackles with the language of rough men workingand dyingin unspeakable ways, and pays tribute to a community that might otherwise be bleached from our memories. This book does what all superior journalism should do: it unearths an important story, and tells it with great feeling.

McKay Jenkins
The White Death and The Last Ridge

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Gregg Olsen's narrative is so riveting I had to keep reminding myself that this is anonfiction page-turner, not a suspense novel.The grit, the darkness, the stifling air and choking smoke, the fear of being trapped deep underground, the tender camaraderie between the toughest of menI experienced all of them reading this book.Olsen has paid worthy tribute to the victims, survivors, and their families by unveiling their world and allowing us to share their struggle.

Stephen Puleo
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

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Olsen presents the extraordinary story of the Sunshine Mine disaster in gripping, heartrending prose. His dogged research and extensive interviews with survivors, relatives of victims, and rescuers has given the book a you-are-there feel as it weaves together a compelling narrative of the agonizing scenes above and below ground. In Olsen's telling, we come to see that the story is not merely a deadly disaster, but rather a tale of the uncommon courage, perseverance, and heroism of everyday people.

Edward T. O'Donnell
Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum

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Gregg Olsen has presented a well-researched, graphic account of the worst disaster in Idaho history and the worst underground fire in a hardrock mine in American history eleven days of searing heat, choking smoke, death and misery that spawned a flurry of lawsuits and court battles that changed safety procedures in mines worldwide. When the Shine resumed underground operations in December of 1972, I hired out as a replacement for one of the guys who died in the fire... I eventually mined for 16 years and I can tell you The Deep Dark is as real as it gets. I actually found myself short of breath as I read.

Jerry Dolph
Fire in the Hole: The Untold Story of Hardrock Miners

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Gregg Olsen has written a harrowing story about the men and metal that inhabit the earth. It is a dark, grimy world of hoistmen, skip tenders and their grail, silver. When tragedy strikes below, a miner's hell, all smoke, dust and blackness, Olsen makes it vivid, real. He puts you there. Cap lamps go dark, but he finds the lighthumanity. First the earth moves, then the Spirit.

Gary M. Pomerantz
Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds

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Gregg Olsen brings all his considerable talents to this story and the result is a gripping account of men facing their last moments and struggling to survive. Olsen's research is meticulous, and he tells the story in a way that makes you feel the damp air on your skin and smell the deadly smoke coming up behind you. By skillfully drawing the reader into this tale of terror and desperation, Olsen ensures that these men and their bravery will not be forgotten.

Gregory A. Freeman
Sailors to the End:
The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal
and the Heroes Who Fought it

In Memoriam
Jack Olsen
1925-2002
Author, mentor,
and champion for truth in nonfiction book journalism.

Hearses were in short supply in Kellogg, Idaho in May 1972. A pickup hauled a dead miner to a hillside cemetery slashed with freshly turned earth. Another arrived in a station wagon. Still others waited on an assembly line to meet their maker. Just after the tragic outcome of a fire that trapped almost one hundred hardrock miners in Sunshine Mine, my salesman dad passed through Kellogg on his way home to suburban Seattle. He saw that coffin in that pickup bounce up and down, threatening to pitch out onto the road. That bumpy ride was the culmination of a cruel eight-day wait; a vigil, both stoic and shattered, that was captured in the media. For outsiders the serial funerals were the end of the story. For those living there resolution has not been so easy. In the world of hardrock mining, a volatile place of explosions gone awry, cave-ins, and fortunes made and lost overnight, nothing has ever been easy.

Northern Idaho was the epicenter of America's hardrock mining industry. Within the region were the nation's largest, deepest and most-prosperous silver and lead mines. Bunker Hill had more than 180 miles of tunnels honeycombing under craggy, yellow tamarack-faced mountains. The deepest was Star-Morning at 8,100 feethalfway to China, locals insisted. And the richest, Kellogg's Sunshine Mine, had given up more than 300 million ounces of silverone-fifth of America's total output. When ore prices were good, Sunshine was a treasure trove of staggering wealth.

In good times, the most ambitious and, some would say, luckiest minersthose with the very best contracts with the companydrilled and exploded their way to paydays of $1,000 or more a week. In less prosperous eras, during labor strikes or when operations were cut because high quality ore was scarce, families only just eked by. And yet no matter how long the downturn, men stayed because mining was about being a man as much as it was about bringing home a paycheck. Fathers like my own put in long hours and worked hard. I can't say they didn't. Coming from Seattle to Montana several times a year and back again, my dad covered a substantial sales territory. But his job was air-conditioned. Highball-lunched. Miners didn't push paper. Their work was of the type that we mimicked when we had played at being men. Firefighters, policemen, soldiers, and the rest. Though we were destined for desk jobs, we still pretended to catch the robber. We fantasized about blowing up a mountainside. Dirt clods were bombs. Nobody played at being a sewer pipe salesman, my dad's occupation.