STANSFIELD:  This is a tape recorded interview for Mother Lode History. I’m Bob Stansfield and I am going to be interviewing Bill Burke, an old-timer in Tuolumne County. Bill, when did you start working in the mines in Tuolumne County?

BURKE:  Well, actually I started about 1935. And I worked in three or four small mines - you know, mostly prospects. I believe they were on the top above Carson Hill. And I started working there in the fall of 1937.

STANSFIELD:  What sort of operation was Carson Hill?

BURKE:  Well, it was a large, low-grade mine, you know, it had the biggest milling tonnage in California at the time for a gold mine, and a low grade – a low grade mine, it was considered. It could run on about a dollar and a half heads.

STANSFIELD:  Well, what does that mean?

BURKE:  Well, if the ore made a dollar and a half a ton they could break even on the mining, hoisting, hauling and milling.

STANSFIELD:  Do you have any idea what the ratio of gold to, let’s say the ton  - like, let’s say thirty pounds of gold per ton or what sort of thing like that?

BURKE:  Well, they ran on a twenty-dollar gold value, all their assays. So it ran – I think it ran at about two and a half dollars a ton, average. Which approximately would be – about an ounce of gold for every seven or eight tons of rock.

STANSFIELD:  I’ve heard of mines in South Africa that go up to 2.4 ounces of gold per ton. Did you work – you worked there, you said, for about five years – and was this continual or was it sort of seasonal?

BURKE:  Well, it was kind of intermittent. One thing, they just kept married men. If you came to work one day and you were a married man, you got to stay. Some of the men that worked there ten years, they got laid off. That’s the way they worked. There wasn’t any unions or any seniority. And the married men got to stay on if they wanted to. And they figured the second man could go to some other area and get a job. So they had a preference for married men or people who needed to work.

STANSFIELD:  Is that why you married your wife?

BURKE:  Not particularly. (Laughter) It was a nice place to work, Carson Hill, really. The bosses were real nice, they treated you good and like all big mines there were lots of jobs that you didn’t have to work to hard at. Consequently you didn’t feel like you were abused too severely.

STANSFIELD:  What job did you do when you first came there?

BURKE:  Well, I was helping a miner the first job I had. Which’d be a beginning job, the miner’s stuck up in front drilling and he was an old Russian that couldn’t speak any English and I couldn’t speak any Russian, so we used to – it was all hand signals. Besides, there’s so much noise with the drills running that you don’t talk anyway. And I hauled timbers to set up on, and the steel was all solid and they didn’t have bits or anything, you had to haul all the steel up and haul the doubled steel down, carry it up ladders maybe a couple hundred feet up to where he was working. And it was a load, to get the powders and the primers up, you had to blast every shift. And then tear down and put his machine away, clean up and get ready to blast, then help him blast.

STANSFIELD:  What kind of drilling equipment did they use back then?

BURKE:  Well, in a stope like that they used horizontal liners. They never did drill up, because it made the top too ragged. Like drilling up holes. Because it was in kind of a schist, quartzite schist or quartzy schist. So they’d always drill flat holes, and broke the rock down in a stope. That way they’d keep the back flat. They’d try to keep the back flat – it was dangerous to get a hump in it or a sag in it, more than a hump. They’d take the back flat and they broke the rock down, long like 20-foot-long holes, or whatever they could get, you know, and they’d break the rock down.

STANSFIELD:  What is a stope?

BURKE:  Well, a stope is the – it’s a room that they take the ore out of. And there the ore lays at about a 50-degree angle, and so it has a foot wall which is where your foot’d hit, and a hanging wall. And of course the whole width would vary in different places – this particular place I was working in the ore wasn’t too wide, it was like 20 feet wide. And it ran about 4 or 500 feet long. But I had worked in another stope later, it was 100 feet wide, and 4 or 500 feet long. They get enormous stopes, and – this is what they called a caving system, is what they used in these big ones. They just cut in with a ??? and then they’d block and keep cutting the side of it so it’d cave down in big chunks. And then they drew it out the bottom with what they call a grizzly – well then they have secondary blasting and breaking it up with hammers, hand breaking and so forth.

STANSFIELD:  What do you mean by the term, “grizzly?”

BURKE:  A grizzly would be a – it’s like a grater, only it’s a big scale. They used to use timbers with railroad irons on top of them, or stamp stems, something heavy metal, and this rock would come out of a throat down on this grizzly and then you’d break this rock small enough to get through the grizzly, and that’d be the size that they could take out in the chutes below and out to the cars and down into the hop and hoist up to the surface. All out on the train and down to the mill without being too big to go through the crushers.

STANSFIELD:  How far was the mill from the mine itself?

BURKE:  Well, the mill would be just above where the present bridge is. You can see some of the old foundations there. And the mine was right about at the first switchback going towards Angels Camp from Melones. And the shaft – well, you’d call it a winds in this case because it’s underground, was about a mile in. They said it was about five thousand feet into the winds. Which’d be right about under the present town of Carson Hill, more in that area, where the mine is actually located. The Carson Hill mine.

STANSFIELD:  What was the normal working day like? Like you got to the mine, where did you go from there?

BURKE:  Well, the day shift starts at seven o’clock in the morning and they had a changing room – you always had one set of clothes – if you were a miner you could go to work every day in a suit or a tuxedo because you’d always change your clothes, you’d have your “diggers”, and you’d leave your street clothes there and you put on your diggers, whether you were working in a wet or dry spot. You go out and get on the man trains – So you’d have to go out and get to work about 20 minutes before starting time so you could get your clothes changed. Get your clothes changed, get your carbide for the day and your water for the day, your lunch, your stuff – each man is going to have to take his own in. Then you got on the man train and they hauled you in. The engine didn’t go very fast because it was dangerous to go too fast. It might’ve gone five or six miles an hour though, following the locomotive. Pull the man cars in, I think about four man cars. And then they’d start letting the men down the shaft. First they had to clear the shaft with a passage up and down the skips, and then they’d lower the men down – they only put eight men in each skip so it took quite a while to get the crew down, like in the wintertime when there might be up to 200 miners going down. So it might be an hour, hour and a half for everybody to even get down. So consequently you went to work at 7, it probably was never earlier than 9 o’clock before you got to work.

BURKE:  And usually you’d rather have a rest when you got down, before you went to work, after the ride.

STANSFIELD:  Well, how long was your actual working day once you got down to the location where you were going to work?

BURKE:  Well, we had a half hour lunch – really, I don’t think it was legal but we were underground eight and a half hours. But we had a half hour lunch and – on the lower levels the blasting time was 1:30, and the upper levels it was 2:00. So down below – Pardon me, I’m wrong there. It’s 2:00 on the lower levels. 1:30 the mockers and all the people weren’t connected with blasting came out to the station and were counted and the people blasted, they blasted at 2:00, and about 2:30 or a quarter after 2 they’d start hoisting the men back out. And the day was over at 3:30, hoist up the service, get in the train and haul you out to the outside.

STANSFIELD:  You were paid for all the time that you spent in the hall, right?

BURKE:  Well, eight hours – The pay there is based on the day.

STANSFIELD:  Mm-hmm. How deep was the Carson Hill mine? At its deepest point?

BURKE:  Well, the years I worked there, they mined from the 3,500 foot level up. But the previous company – I don’t know what years, maybe in the 20s or the teens got the mine to 4,500 feet on there. But probably if they had kept operating they would have gotten down that deep eventually. But they had – what they were operating on was low-grade rock, and the old previous companies that had worked on high-grade rock, so they had plenty of it in these upper levels and there wasn’t any necessity yet to get down that deep.

STANSFIELD:  At what level was sea level, in the mine?

BURKE:  Sea level, they tell me was right around the 2,100 foot level.

STANSFIELD:  You mentioned down there in the 3,500 foot level – it’s pretty hot down there?

BURKE:  Yeah, it’s hot if you have to work very much. It’s very hard. The humidity’s high, and the rock temperature is fairly high, I imagine maybe it’s 90 degrees or so, the air temperature down there, or maybe 85  or 90 but the humidity’s real high. And if you did any very hard work all you – you’d drink water like a fish, cause you’d perspire.

STANSFIELD:  Would it be sort of comparable to chopping wood on a hot summer day?

BURKE:  Well, it’s humid. It’s all the ??? ??? ??? big thick legs and they couldn’t even wear pants. They’d wear like a dress because their legs would chafe. And it’s humid, you’ll perspire so much that it just runs off you by bucketfuls. It’d be more like the tropics, you know, be humid like the tropics.

STANSFIELD:  What was the average age for a man working in the mine?

BURKE:  Well, we had men of all ages from 18, but those days, social security had started, but they weren’t paying any pensions yet so we had men as old as – I’d say at least 75 years old working in the mine. And very old men, young men, men of all ages. But this mine for some reason had a lot of real elderly men. They’d worked in this particular mine a good portion of their lives. And they were old-timers. They – most of them had jobs that weren’t connected with the production of ore – you know, the men were repairers, cleanup, track cleanup or track repair – jobs that they could be trusted to do correctly and nobody – you know, they knew how to handle themselves in a mine and weren’t gonna be exposed to any danger or anything like that.

STANSFIELD:  Were there any interesting characters in the mine that you can recall – I mean, really strange people?

BURKE:  The whole thing, the whole mine seemed to be full of interesting characters. We have one fellow who – of course, the most famous one down there, his name was Crazy Joe. He was in all kinds of stories about someone that he had been training for the priesthood in Italy and had been robbed and hit on the head and destroyed his brain and several other things – I don’t know exactly what his problem was but he used to work on a 13-50 level and he was so – he would squeal like a pig and crow like a rooster and jump around and – so nobody ever wanted to work with old Crazy Joe. So he had all this work by himself. So there’s some old stopes there caving in and he used to load rock there. He worked there for many years. And he was quite a character. He couldn’t speak in English anyway – he spoke some language, even the Italians couldn’t understand him.

STANSFIELD:  He spoke more ???

BURKE:  I don’t know. Nobody could speak to Crazy Joe. And sometimes he’d board in Angels Camp, and sometimes Melones, there was a boardinghouse in Melones, and sometimes he’d board in Sonora or in Jamestown. But everybody knew him because year round he wore one of these rain hats, southwesters, probably they call them, and that was his official street costume. So you could always tell Crazy Joe. But once in a while somebody’d give him a cigarette and he’d chew it – eat it right down just like a horse would or something.

STANSFIELD:  Like it was a stick of candy or something?

BURKE:  Yeah, he just – they give him a chew of tobacco and he’d eat – he wouldn’t chew it, customary, he’d just eat it right down like it was good. Smack his lips and down it went.

STANSFIELD:  Did he do this seriously or did he do it as a joke?

BURKE:  Oh no, the man  - I don’t know how to explain it. I suppose now he’d be in an institution, no doubt about it. But those days we had a lot of ‘em running around. Now we’d have to put him behind bars, I’m afraid. But once in a while Crazy Joe would get too much wine in him, and one thing they did, everything he ate – he had a prodigious appetite – they always charged him double board. And when I first started working my board was 21 dollars a month, down at Bazortes where the gunhouse is now. I used to stay with my mother in Sonora but once in a while I’d decide I’d better strike out alone and I’d move into Bazortes or Europa across the street had a boarding house. In those days, it was 21 dollars – 1936 it was 21 dollars for room and board. And that included wine with your meals. And then later it went to 30, and maybe 40, 45 dollars a month. But Crazy Joe also had to pay double board and then they took all his money away anyway, because he didn’t have all his marbles. He just was kind of a grubber, whoever was boarding him just took care of him until they couldn’t stand him anymore and then they threw him out. He used to keep the people awake with his rooster crowing and his pig squealing all night long, once in a while when he’d get tanked up on wine.

STANSFIELD:  Were you ever in a boarding house while he was there?

BURKE:  No, I wouldn’t ever stay in one where he was around. Because he was quite a big man, you know, big and raw-boned. He had a real mean look but he never harmed anybody, and he was reputed to be very strong, because they said when his mine car jumped the track, it’d be loaded with rock, he’d just reach down and pick the car right up and put it back on the track. So he must have been a powerful man. But he was very old at that time, maybe in his sixties, but still, still really was some character.

BURKE:  And they had a lot of other characters in ???. We had one fellow that as soon as he saw me, he gave me a name. And that was his official duty. So everybody had a nickname. It’d be quite strange, you know, when you’d got a new hire for the day and they’re all waiting to go down in the skip, and this guy would run over, and grab the new hire’s hand and give him a name right then. And quite often the fellow thought well, he recognized this fellow, you know, maybe, but nevertheless he was the official namer for all the new hires. And of course sometimes it didn’t turn out as good as it did at other times.

STANSFIELD:  What was your name?

BURKE:  My name was Easy Money.

STANSFIELD:  Was it?

BURKE:  Well, I suppose it was just the name he gave me, Easy Money. We had lots of them, you know, all animal names, every, you know, all kinds. Sometimes names would change later on, but the fellow was official namer. He did it for a joke and we always usually stuck with our names.

BURKE:  I’ll tell you something humorous about the hiring practices there. You know there was no unions, and to get a job there you just went down to the mine every day and wrestled the underground superintendent, which he ran in the mine every morning and you’d wrestle him, and he would never hire you the first time you went there and I knew this, because other mines were the same way, and after you went there three or four times, well, if he wanted a man he’d put you to work, or if he liked you. But we got a few old country Italians and this one fellow came to work and his name was Zelaizy. And I remember I was a tool-nipper then and I used to be with the foreman, because I took care of the supplies of the mine. And he just – this Italian, old Italian fellow came and said – he asked him what his name was, and he said “My name’s Zelaizy,” and he says “I don’t want no lazy sons of bitches around here.” And so every morning this old Italian came he’d always be crying, and finally after about two or four days he hired him, you know, he was going to hire him but he just teased him. And so this went on – this fellow worked five, six months and one time he said he came one morning, he came over to the office and he said “Mr. Wagner! Mr. Wagner!” – fellow’s name was Wagner, it was the underground superintendent, he said “I got a brother, he’s a better worker than I!” and he says, “He wants a job!” well he says, “Bring him up!”

BURKE:  So the next morning here is Zelaizy and his brother and he says “Here’s my brother!” and he says “Good!” and he says “You’re fired if he’s a better worker than you, he gets your job.” And you could see this poor Italian almost cry. But anyway he just for a joke, he fired him and then hired him back again. They could work the men any way they wanted just for a joke. There was no unions, no seniority. And nobody took anything too seriously, you know, because a miner could always go somewhere else and get a job, you know. There were lots of mines and they were always looking for miners.

STANSFIELD:  What is a tool-nipper? You’ve mentioned that.

BURKE:  Well, each shift boss had a tool-nipper. And it’d usually be a younger person and he’d go around, somebody who could write, which is pretty unusual in the mines, and you’d go through the mine with the shift boss in the morning, visiting all the men and checking the supplies on the station – they had drill steel, they had caps, all things, timbers and everything else, load pipe, everything they needed. And you’d check, you had supplies with a certain amount of inventory for each station. And each man that was drilling, each miner that was drilling – it was a rule where you had to blast every day. If you drill one hole then you had to blast. And unless you were drilling and for some reason you had a mechanical breakdown. But they expected you to blast every day, and so you’d go around, you’d get the powder order, and this’d be about ten in the morning or so, so you’d be getting a powder order and then maybe the fellow would have mechanical troubles and not get enough holes drilled, and there you’d have this extra dynamite and caps, and lots of times when they, say, you only got two or three holes drilled and he had enough dynamite caps for ten holes in a stope, here he’d have all this extra dynamite and caps so he just put it in a pile down on the dirt and blasted it off just to get rid of it. Because they had no way to return it to the surface, you know, because they had stringent rules on transporting explosives in the mine.

STANSFIELD:  What was the standard blasting technique? How much – How many pounds of explosives would you have to, let’s say go five feet.

BURKE:  Oh, they used to load it on earlier – they used to put the, they called them pyramid cuts, these are cut holes, tapered cut holes – and they didn’t use so much for those. But later on they had better results with what they called burn rounds, and that’s just what they did, they burned, they burned this rock right out. And they’d use up to 200 sticks of explosives to advance five feet, which might be about 70 pounds of explosives, 60-70 pounds of explosives. We used to bring in – I had to unload, part of my job when I was a tool-nipper – every other day, we had an underground powder station near the hoist, and every day we’d take in about three tons of dynamite, about every other day. We had to unload it. So it’d be about a ton and a half of dynamite a day that the mine would use for underground blasting.

STANSFIELD:  I remember unloading some dynamite over at the Clavey River with you, and that was about a ton and a half or –

BURKE:  Oh, I think we had four or five tons. Five, maybe six tons.

STANSFIELD:  We had a whole truckload and a trailerload, was that? Or – I’m not quite sure what that was.

BURKE:  They had – Well, we unloaded this powderhouse, was about 300 feet from the hoist room, the hoister was off on a spur track off the main haulage. And they usually had three locomotives running hauling from the underground to the mill, and they’d push this car in and usually during lunchtime, because they knew the tool-nippers would be up eating lunch at the hoist, and they’d let us know and we’d have – they pushed the cars in, quite a string like 15 or 20 ten-ton cars came in with the locomotive, so we’d only have a few minutes to get down there and take three tons of powder off this flatcar into the powder magazine. And so you could – you’d see two kids, really, the upper tool-nipper and I always had this job. And several times we’d hear the train coming and we wouldn’t have all the powder off. And we’d get pretty frantic. We really should have had some kind of a signal system to stop the train, but we’d have to get the explosives off. Of course, it’d make a lot of noise – you’d think that it was really right there when it might be several hundred yards down the track. And we’d get the explosives in the magazine and then push this empty up the spur track there. But it was kind of unusual because we had to unload it on the main track. And we really got a thrill with it a few times. And sometimes we’d just got the last box of explosives off and here’d come the cars, they always had a light on them when they were pushing in so they wouldn’t run over somebody, and here would come the cars around the turn, about fifty yards away, and we’d have to push this here little flatcar on the spur track, throw the switch – sometimes it was just a – once in a while we’d kind of – a couple times we were too late and it banged into our car and the cars jumped the track and so forth, but minor item. We used to really get a thrill once in a while trying to get those explosives off.

STANSFIELD:  Did you ever throw the cases of dynamite?

BURKE:  No, well – you get pretty careless when you handle dynamite. It’s all wood boxes then. And dynamite, you know, is a commercial explosive, it’s – I’ll tell you what I did one time, I was letting four boxes of it down into a stope and there was about five or six men working in there – I was lowering it down into the stope, I had a little tugger, a little air hoist and a slide, like a sled they let it down on. I was letting it down and I guess I didn’t know how to operate it or something, but anyway it came unclutched, or else the cable broke – I think it became unclutched, and down it went. It dropped about a hundred feet down the slide and all I could think of was those men back in that stope working, and four boxes of dynamite going off. And it hit the bulkhead down about a hundred feet – I threw myself back, I think it was going to go off. Nothing happened, I went down there, all the boxes were all broken to pieces and the dynamite was just scattered all over. But nothing happened. So I think ??? pretty good ???

STANSFIELD:  I imagine the guys there that were working that stope had a few words to say to you.

BURKE:  Well, they didn’t know it. They didn’t know it. They were drilling in there and all, you know. Of course if it went off, I don’t think – it might have hurt their ears, but I don’t think it would have done any – they were quite a ways from it, like a hundred feet or two. Two hundred feet – it really would have made an awful racket. I wouldn’t have been working there any longer if it had gone off.

STANSFIELD:  To get a fair idea of how big a stope is – you have a medium-sized house here. Would this house fit in it?

BURKE:  Well, the big stope they had on 300, about 300 level – we had boulders as big as a house that came out of it, so it was a big enormous thing. You almost felt like you could fly an airplane around in there. It was easily a hundred feet wide, a big blank vein – it didn’t surface, this vein. At the 2000 foot level there was a slip, what they called a slip or a fracture, and that was just as flat as could be, and that was the end. It was just cut off right there. And when they got further down on this vein it – what they call “horsed”, it split up into about five veins. And that’s one reason why it wasn’t so profitable when they got down below the 3000 level on this particular ore body. It started to separate and then the veins are smaller and they couldn’t cave-mine it so successfully as they did up above.

STANSFIELD:  We’re going to flip over the tape now.

END OF SIDE A

General Information:

Interviewer: Stansfield, Bob

Interviewee: Burke, Bill

Name of Tape: The Carson Hill Mine (burke_b_0)

When: 1975

Transcriber: Alden (3/5/08)

Transcriber’s Note: TAPE IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND – ERRORS MAY BE PRESENT