STANSFIELD:
Could you
close in on some of the historical aspects of the Carson Hill mine? Like how
long it was in operation and what the older parts of the mine are like?
BURKE:
Well, it
was one of the original discoveries up there – the old Morgan mine, up the
hill, up by Carson Hill was a real early discovery. Maybe in the early fifties,
I don’t know. I think they started quartz mining there in the fifties, I’m
almost certain. Then by the time I went to work there, there must just have
been literally thousands of miles of tunnels and drifts. You could go up into
the upper levels and you could walk all here and there and go all ways, and
maybe you’d walk way back half a mile, and there’d be an old drilling machine
that belonged in a museum sitting there, where they stopped and just left all
their equipment sitting right there. It really – it operated maybe 80 years, 90
years, something like that. Well, almost continuously, off and on.
STANSFIELD:
Did it shut
down during the Depression? Do you know that? The early Depression?
BURKE:
I think
about 19- it started shutting down from about 1928 to 1931 or 2, along in
there. And there there was different people got a hold of it – they’d drill a
new mill, modernize the mill, build a new mill, and – well, modernize the mill
is what I guess they did. And then they started this low-grade mining there.
STANSFIELD:
I
just said that’s why
– across your patio here
BURKE:
??? ??? maul.
STANSFIELD:
Did they have
much of a problem with bats in the mine shafts?
BURKE:
No, they
– one boss told me in the old days they had – one time they had a lot of rats,
and so they kept feeding them and feeding them until they got all over a big
old stope up on the 1100 level, which was the main level then, and then they
started putting the feed out on boards over a hole over the stope, all these
rats, he said there was a couple thousand came every day then. And then one day
– and they got them so they’d come at the same time, it took a couple months
and they got them so that they’d all come there at the same time and they fed
them every day, and then one day they gave them feed with strychnine in. And
all the rats were poisoned and they all fell off down in the stope and that was
the end of ‘em. They never had rats after that.
BURKE:
But in
the upper levels a fellow said that when they worked in the Morgan that once in
a while they’d find a skunk way inside the mine. I – I think the blasting
probably would upset the bats. I never saw a bat inside of a mine. Flies – you
got flies down there, fruit flies, all kinds of flies. And I don’t – of course
there are lights on all the stations, they never shut those off. They got big
lights on the stations. But nothing else – your timber molds. Sometimes you’d
go and the whole section where the circulation isn’t too good, and the old
timber’ll have big molds hanging on them, hanging down two or three feet.
Really eerie-looking, you know, waving in the wind. Of course the timber
doesn’t last too long in those conditions.
STANSFIELD:
Besides the
interior tunnels and caverns and stopes and whatever, was there any activity
outside the mine, like open-pit operation?
BURKE:
Yeah,
they had a – they had two big open pits over by Carson Hill, and they used to
run into, they’d call it the potato dirt, that red dirt, but they ran out in
summer after it got dry so they could mill it or haul it or the like. And they
used to have power shovels and some small trucks and they used to load with the
shovels and they had ore passages where they’d drop it down in and pull it out
down on 1100 level. And if you go up the highway from Melones to Carson Hill
you’ll see some cuts right out at the left of the road at about the third
switchback up from the hill and those – that’s under Calaveras Vein, and they
did a little open-pit mining on that vein. Because the vein was too narrow they
couldn’t really make much of an open pit. But the ones up at Carson Hill, they
ran for – oh, they dug in those open pits for ten years. Usually just seasonal.
They couldn’t operate there in the winter. And they used to send the men down
in the mine in the winter, if they wanted to work then.
STANSFIELD:
How deep were
these pits, or are these pits?
BURKE:
I really
don’t know. I imagine they’re probably 600 feet deep. I think they mined as
deep as they could with shovels and they started what they call a glory hole,
just drilling and pushing it into this main, dropping to this main ore pass,
and they would drop down this ore pass, drop it through a grizzly and on down.
I didn’t work in that part of the mine, just once I worked up in the Morgan and
only for a short time. But they had a crew there that worked at the Morgan and
they had a shaft there where they let the men down from the surface. I think
about the 200 foot level, and they had the changing room and they had the whole
thing right there. And I never did work, it was almost like a separate company,
but we could go there – you could go down and ring their skip and they’d pick
you up and take you out that way. But the men who worked in the Melones all
came in from Melones.
STANSFIELD:
In some of the
older parts of the mine, were there any activity in there?
BURKE:
You mean
for mining or for caving or prospecting or?
STANSFIELD:
Whatever.
BURKE:
Well,
some of the old works they used for man ways, you know, state man ways. They
had a big flat vein that started about the 800 foot level and came down on an
angle and went down as far as the 1600 foot level and that was the Manway. And
they would – They had great big – Some places they left rock pillars but some
places they put great big clusters of timbers ten feet through, they’d run
spiral cable around them. And you couldn’t see, even with a carbide light you
couldn’t see the roof. And there was always kind of a breeze in there, and it
was just like being outside on a hill on a dark night. You know, you had no
sensation of being in a mine at all. Except for the rock under your feet you’re
walking over. It’s kind of a flat vein, they called it the Flat Vein. It had a
– maybe, it went up about five or six degrees slope. And it had real good rock
in it. But in my time that’d been worked on many years before. But we used to
use that vein, the old works there for escape man way, and I’ve been up it a
time or two just checking. Usually they wanted every man to know the route out.
And sometimes while you worked there they’d have you walk the man ways to get
out. Because they all had signs and they all posted with signs so you’d know
the direction, the speedy way out.
BURKE:
They
were always looking around for more ore, you know, but it was all worked out.
He knew - Toby knew of some good ore ways, and every man had to have a
sample sack. And so he – if you worked for Toby, this old cousin Jack up on the
upper works, this old Cornishman – when you came up with your sample sack, you
were supposed to take a handful out of each car you loaded or pulled it out of
the chute – take a little handful and throw it in the sample sack. So every man
had a sample. That’s one thing we had to have. And then he’d go salt the sample
with some good rock he had, too. Because he didn’t want to have his men laid
off, because otherwise the whole level would shut down. So he worked those
levels for years and years, and everyone knew he was salting the samples,
including the underground superintendent. And this went on for years and years.
At first maybe the ore was better than we thought, but they picked around there
and blasted around there – mostly caving in these old stopes. And they’d pull
rock out of them. I don’t remember if there was any gold in them but they went
up to the mill anyway.
STANSFIELD:
Were there any
special diseases that were associated with working in the mines?
BURKE:
Well, silicosis
was prevalent in quartz mines, you know – Melones didn’t have a lot of quartz,
but quartzite, quartz-type schist. But I worked for people that got silicosis.
I used to have to wear a respirator or I’d wet down where I was working, try to
keep the dust down. But these people I know ignored this and in short order
they had silicosis. And one fellow died of it a few months later. Just a young
fellow. He’d only worked here a few weeks and he developed silicosis. Soon as
he – I think some people are more susceptible to it, apparently.
STANSFIELD:
Was there –
I’ve heard of some, in a book I was reading, “Gold Mines in California”, that
sometimes would get fungus in their lungs.
BURKE:
I didn’t
know anything about that. Maybe where it was wet, you know, hot or wet. I
didn’t know. We had lots of old miners, like I said, some were 75 years old and
had worked before they had wet drilling, you know – in my time what they had to
drill with water, it was illegal to do any dry drilling underground. But some of
these old fellows had been working when drills were dry – of course they would
cough and wheeze and they could hardly, couldn’t do too much but they’d get a
day’s work in every day anyway.
STANSFIELD:
(Garbled)
BURKE:
What
other diseases? Well mainly there was – the mine’s a dangerous place to work.
At Carson Hill they talked safety all the time. Every once a week there’d be a
safety meeting, and everybody had to take a first aid course every year. And I
used to be on a mine rescue team down there. I never had to go on any mine
rescues, but we had compressed air and oxygen regenerating devices, you know,
that we could wear – they wouldn’t let you get too far away, but you could go
in where there was a mine fire or something, you could go in there. But they
stressed safety real strong, they really did. When the men did something it was
usually their fault, because they went somewhere where it was unsafe, where
they weren’t even supposed to be.
STANSFIELD:
Did you ever
have any accidents in the mine?
BURKE:
Well,
one time I took a long fall but I came through all right. Not any injuries but
I had a long slide. But I did – there were a couple fellows that got killed
down there. And maybe about – they had about three fatalities in the five years
I worked there.
STANSFIELD:
I know you
didn’t work in the milling operations around there, but could you tell me a
little bit about what kind of mills and presses and things the ore went
through?
BURKE:
Well, at
first they had – I can’t remember if it was a gyratory or a jaw crusher, and
then they had a set of rolls – it was odd, they didn’t have any crushing in the
mine like a lot of mines had. And then they had a battery – I think they used
to have a hundred stamps, and they used these, they only had a quarter-inch
screen on them, and then it went to a big Marsy mill, one big mill, and then I
think it had some kind of classifying and then it would separate some of the
ore, some of the mineral, - and this was a pebble mill, Swedish pebble mills,
pebbles came from Sweden and these were ground down to a thousand mesh. And
then everything was cyanided, both concentrate and the sand was cyanided. It
had a pretty fast cyanide system, big tanks. Then you see where the sand dump
is and the tailings are popped over there behind the sand dam.
STANSFIELD:
They used to
just dump it in the river.
BURKE:
That’s
what they tell me. That’s just above one-fourth of the rock that came out of
that mine behind that sand dam. For many years they just jumped the tailings
down the river and of course high water every spring, it’d wash them away. And
so that’s just – of course, they didn’t have a big tonnage, I don’t think, on
the earlier mills that we had, you know, but it ran for many years and the
tailings just went down the river.
STANSFIELD:
I imagine it
didn’t do too much for the fish in the river.
BURKE:
Well, I
think that’s what caused them to stop doing that, you know, fish and game and
farmers down in the valley didn’t like the sand coming down all the time, down
the river.
STANSFIELD:
The milling
operation still had stamps in the late 30s, isn’t that sort of an archaic way
of crushing rock?
BURKE:
Well, at
one time stamps were used for milling, for fine grinding, and it certainly is.
But in Carson Hill they just used it for reducing the size. Say it came to the
rolls at say, half-inch size and less. And they would get it stamped very
rapidly, Stamps ??? ???
fast if you have a bunch of rock underneath the stamps so it doesn’t pile on
the base. So I imagine the rock went through them very fast. And they, like I
said they only had a quarter-inch screen, where they use the stamps for a mill
to fine grind – they’d probably have like a hundred mesh screen or 200 mesh screen
in front of them, real fine. And so the materials go through much slower. But
these went through real fast and got this big Marsy ball mill, it was a big
enormous mill and when it was milling a couple thousand tons, two to four
thousand tons a day it was coming and going through that mill pretty fast and –
all the years I worked there, I never went in the mill. They had a big cyanide
plant, you know, there were several men working the cyanide plant each shift.
Three or four men, probably. I don’t know, I don’t think too many men in
the mill, probably two men, two or three men. Even a big mill doesn’t really
take many men.
STANSFIELD:
I understand
stamp mills are pretty noisy. Could you hear the stamp mill from quite a
distance?
BURKE:
The mill
there was down in the canyon. But once in a while, like near Parrott’s Ferry in
the summer, you could hear it roaring away in a rumble, just a distant rumble.
And people that lived in Melones, in the town – the mill ran continuously, 365
days a year, 24 hours a day, and they could reroute the material one way or
another if something broke down or they repaired something – and they said when
the mill did shut down like a power failure or something happened, they’d run
out of ore or something – I don’t know what reason they’d stop, but it would
stop, very rarely. It’d wake the people up if it happened in the morning or
night. The sound, all of a sudden the silence of the mill stopping would wake
everybody up.
STANSFIELD:
I guess it’s
sort of like people living near an airport.
BURKE:
I
imagine people get used to the sound, it’s sort of a secondary thing.
STANSFIELD:
What was the
town of Melones or Carson Hill like in those days? I know they were never very
big, but –
BURKE:
Melones
in my time – pretty small, maybe had a store, and had a boarding house, and
about thirty houses along there, there’s a few of them left still out there
along there, but they had a whole row of houses. Most of them got torn down, I
guess half the people moved out in the 40s, they tore ‘em all down. And then
there was, up by the miners, a whole bunch of company houses. They were pretty
nice houses for the time. There were about fifteen of them up around, where the
superintendent and the underground superintendent and the shift bosses had
their houses. And that was included in their wages, they didn’t have very high
wages either, until they got free rent, or almost free rent I suppose.
STANSFIELD:
What was
Carson Hill like?
BURKE:
Well,
not very different than it is right now. They might have been another four or
five houses, very small houses. Not too many more of them. Most of the miners
lived in Angels Camp, and old Vallecito, Murphys, Angels Camp – A few from
Sonora, maybe about ten. And they just kind of came from all over, you know,
Copperopolis a few fellows came from. A big problem in those days you know,
when you’re working for twelve hours a day, was transportation and so everybody
had ride pools. Our ride pools – You’d pay 25 cents a day to be hauled and
everybody would rather ride with somebody for 25 cents a day than drive their
own car. And that was always a big thing, was to find somebody going up to your
shift, because you traded shifts there, you worked two weeks days and then two
weeks nights. Most of the men did, some jobs didn’t change, but. The lower
works, anyway. The upper works only ran on one shift. But lower works ran two
shifts. And so you’d have to scrounge around sometimes to find somebody to ride
with when you’re changing shifts. “I’ll ride with you”, that was a big item.
STANSFIELD:
During the –
you started working there during the late Depression. Were jobs really very
hard to find in Tuolumne County at that time?
BURKE:
Well,
any kind of job – the sawmills weren’t operating, the lime kiln down there was
operating, the town was very small, just a main street, that’s all there was –
one bank, maybe four or five boys in the Bank of America then was all one
street. No urban sprawl, no strip business like they have now. It was all
confined right to downtown Sonora. Any kind of a job like a mining job would be
very hard to find. Very low wages, mines paid more, paid more than the woodsmen
made in the woods, more than the box factory – 1937 the box factory started up
at Pickering, first thing that started up, and then I think they were working a
ten hour day for about 22 or 23 cents an hour. And they started the box
factory. We were making about five hours a day then, four and a half dollars a
day, in 1937. Four and a half in 1937, miners were making.
STANSFIELD:
What was the
beginning wage when you started?
BURKE:
I think,
first mine I worked in I worked the sprinkler mines, the drip mine, the gravel
mine over by Columbia there. And they only paid three dollars then, and that
was about 1934, 35. Was three dollars for muckers and three and a half for
miners.
STANSFIELD:
What’s a
mucker?
BURKE:
Well,
he’s a man that loads a car, does helper work, you know, he helps the miner, he
loads rock, shovels in the car, mine car. Does the tramming, pushes the car out
to the shaft and. There’s two pay scales in the mine. They have a higher pay
scale – the shift boss, like at Carson Hill, the muckers got four dollars, the
miners got four and a half, and the shift boss got five dollars a day. And they
also had a shaft repairman, and a hoistman, they got five dollars a day – these
are higher skill jobs. And that was top pay. But you worked six days a week.
There wasn’t any overtime. But you got by just as well then as you do now. Your
money bought just as much or more, I think. But people didn’t expect as much
either, you know. As far as being a miner and getting a job it was easy because
there were lots of mines running. But there wasn’t any other industry, you
know.
STANSFIELD:
Everybody has
this picture of a mine being like a straight down shaft and it has, you know,
straight shafts going crossway and –
BURKE:
…very
wrong. Once in a while there’d be a main haulage line that went straight for 3
or 4 hundred, 2 or 4 thousand feet. Probably just you know, surveyed straight.
But even the main shaft on Melones had a curve in it, - you went down
about, to about the below 1600, the 13-50 pocket, and it had a turn that came
down about 70 degrees in a turn to about 50 degrees, which is – Mother Lode
slopes almost 50 degrees everywhere. And so some of the stations were big
enormous places where you could sit 100 men, and others were just little places
that just had room for 4 or 5 men to stand, and the tunnels usually followed
the ore, it was all prospecting. They’d use your main hall line in most levels,
follow the ore. And so the ore never runs true, you know, and besides if you’re
prospecting, they’re going into the footwall and they’re going out to the
hanging wall and back to the footwall – so consequently you never had a
straight tunnel to go in on.
STANSFIELD:
Is that the
Mother Lode Road?
BURKE:
Crooked
or not, some of them were. Some of them went up and down. Usually they’d try to
have a – not grade but a man came out with a mine car, he could ride out, you
know, they’d go downhill. They didn’t want it too steep because when he had to
push it back by hand empty it was too hard to push it uphill, you know. Just a
little bit of a grade and it would roll out of there if the cars were in good
shape and were greased and all.
STANSFIELD:
Everybody who
knows anything about the mines knows that the mines closed down during World
War II but I’ve heard several different explanations on why the mines closed
down. When did the mines – when did Carson Hill close down and why?
BURKE:
Well, I
don’t know. We had a – the mill burned down just, oh, about two months before
they closed the mines down, two or three months. The man who was – I think his
name was Brown who owned, the principal owner of the Carson Hill mine, I think
he owned other mining properties too, he was on FDR’s war production board. And
everybody used to think he knew that the mines are going to be closed and so
the mill mysteriously burned and they got all the insurance money. But that was
just speculation. Anyway, the Carson Hill actually did close down about two or
three months before FDR closed all gold mining in the United States. He closed
them all because they needed the men in metal mines and in shipyards and all
other kind of work. So – They were having the last year or so they ran they
were having a hard time getting men, even Carson Hill. Anybody that’d come by
with – they used to call it a bindle on their back, they’d run out and drag
them in, put ‘em to work.
STANSFIELD:
It was like
the early days of firefighting in Tuolumne County, if you’re going up the
highway you were it, right?
BURKE:
Yeah,
that was it, anybody came by wanted a job. It was always fairly easy to get a
job at Carson Hill, but they were good money. Especially if you’d worked there
once, they’d hire you right back. But I know I quit five times and went back
five times, so. I never – when I went to the – I used to come back for what
they call the rock harvest, you know, in the winter. I usually would try to get
there about September, on Labor Day. And if you waited too long, it’d be filled
full. But I never did miss it. I always went right to work that first day I’d
get there, come to work that night or tomorrow morning or something, you know.
Because you know, I was experienced and knew my way around the mine.
STANSFIELD:
Are you a
native of the – native Tuolumne County resident?
BURKE:
No, I
was born in Los Angeles. But my family moved up here in 1934 and I was right,
you know, in the Depression phase and the mines were all operating. I worked in
the mines in other areas – Blooms County, I worked in a mine in Alaska, and I
worked quite a few small mines in this county. I used to – one year I worked in
twelve different mines. That shows you how fast you can move around.
STANSFIELD:
Trying to keep
a steady job, huh?
BURKE:
Well, I
was what you call a ten-day miner, you know? All of them were that way. They
used to move around. They weren’t unionized, and any little thing you didn’t
like you just quit. Like they’d say, no bloody doors in the shop, and another ??? ??? they used to have, “Not in the Army now, not
in the Army now,” meaning if you don’t like it, quit. The strange thing about
Carson Hill – they had a place they used to put you when they didn’t want you
anymore. And they used to have this – you know, you see this rock coming out,
looks like a pile of rock, and they’d say – they used to have an expression,
“Muck out or get out!” and when they blasted the mucker had to muck that whole
round in, and if they couldn’t do it in a day then he was too slow. And so they
used to say “Muck out or get out!” And if he couldn’t muck out then the
miner couldn’t drill and the system lost its continuity, you know? But – So a
lot of places up there, there’s one of the old levels, old stope all caved in,
and the rock came out, and they had a slick sheet to shovel on and a car and a
shovel and everything there. So somebody they really wanted to get rid of, they
never fired anybody. But they’d put you there and so you’d skedaddle all day
long shoveling this car, pushing it out and dumping it, and every time you’d
take a car out another one would slide down in. You couldn’t gain on it. And
the guys would get – They knew what the score was, they quit then. They knew
that they were just harassing them. They weren’t – wasn’t anyone to talk to all
day long, they were all alone. And they – every night the boss would say, “Did
you get that pile mucked out yet? You’d better get it mucked out tomorrow or
else,” you know, and the guy would get the idea after a day or two, would say
“Gimme my time.”
STANSFIELD:
Well,
unfortunately we’re running out of tape here. It’s a good thing this week that
I brought my tape machine instead of one that the school has. The last time I
had it, it ate my tape. So, anyway, I’d like to thank you for being my victim.
END OF TAPE
General Information:
Interviewer: Stansfield, Bob
Interviewee: Burke,
Bill
Name of Tape: The Carson Hill Mine (burke_b_1)
When: 1975
Transcriber: Alden (3/7/08)
Transcriber’s Note: TAPE IS HARD TO
UNDERSTAND – ERRORS MAY BE PRESENT