Chapter 3: Closing Day at Bonanza, pt 2 |
|||||
|
|||||
Once the railway arrived at the Bonanza lower camp, the old era came to
an abrupt end. The railroad brought with it the modern world of a neatly
laid-out company town of painted frame structures. Everything one could
possibly want could be found either at the new town of Kennecott or at
the nearby community of McCarthy. If the stores did not have a
particular item, the Sears and Roebuck catalog could be counted on to
fill the need or desire.
|
|||||
|
|||||
W.A. chuckled to himself as he worked his way up the interior mill stairwell, headed toward the tram terminal floor on the twelfth level. Because W.A. had made a career out of Kennecott, he had participated in every major event which occurred over the years. |
|||||
|
|||||
W.A. stepped into the tram bucket. | |||||
|
|||||
Many
engineers had come and gone, but W.A. had been a part of Kennecott
almost from the beginning. He arrived fresh from the Colorado School of
Mines in 1915. That was the year that the Jumbo took off with the
discovery of the single richest copper deposit ever found. The
number-crunchers figured it had a value of thirty-five million
dollars--far more than the final cost of building the railroad.
He worked his way up from surveyor to the position of Chief Engineer--a job he held for so many years that other engineers came and left in frustration, waiting for W.A. to move on so they could advance. Now W.A. was the site superintendent. |
|||||
|
|||||
W.A. watched the ground move away from him as the tram bucket he was riding began to lift smoothly toward the first tower. | |||||
|
|||||
At one time
there had been a corporate representative here referred to as the
manager. The very first had been Stephen Birch himself. A long line of
managers had come and gone since then. Mr. Birch himself had retired.
There was no longer a manager here--not since 1932.
Stannard was the manager who had ordered the construction of the Stephen Birch house as a honeymoon cottage for the visiting couple in 1916. Mary Birch was thoroughly and annoyingly unimpressed. The couple ended their Alaska honeymoon early. After that the white house on the hill served as the manager’s residence, though it remained largely unoccupied. |
|||||
|
|||||
It had been an incredibly exciting twenty-two years in some of the most spectacular country in the world. Richelsen had participated in many mineral investigations for Kennecott in the Chitina and Nizina Valleys--and even in the Nabesna area. In the last few years, he had headed several of these prospects, including the promising one at Glacier Creek where they built a sizable, if temporary, camp. The engineers thoroughly investigated one prospect after another only to be disappointed. No extensive copper or other mineral veins were ever found outside of the original Kennecott claims or that of the adjacent Mother Lode properties. It was not for lack of trying. The Kennecott corporate office had sent many consulting engineers into the field. Each one had come in search of one more big find--something which would extend the life of Kennecott and its Copper River and Northwestern Railway |
|||||
|
|||||
He ducked instinctively as his ore bucket passed under the third tower. | |||||
|
|||||
He began to consider the hazardous nature of hard rock mining in the territory. The wilderness was everywhere. It began mere yards from the railroad right-of-way. The land proved rugged enough to challenge even the hardiest of men. Mining was by its nature inherently dangerous. The company, for insurance purposes, routinely predicted the number of mining-related accidents which would occur in any given year. It was usually very close. | |||||
|
|||||
Kennecott had proved to be an unusually safe place for miners to work. The company track record had been very good compared to other big Alaskan operations. The large gold mining operations near Juneau--the Treadwell, the A-J and the Gastineau were notorious killers. Not Kennecott. So far this year there had been no fatal accidents at all. Kennecott would be pulling out of the Wrangells with a record free of fatalities in its last two years of operation. There had been one catastrophe which had long troubled not only W.A., but everyone else who had been at Kennecott at the time. Even though it had been over a decade since the disaster at the Mother Lode camp, the calamity continued to reverberate in its own peculiar way all these years after it should have faded away. Kennecott was on the verge of completely abandoning the area. With the mine shut down there would be no one left to remember the series of events which took the lives of those five unfortunate souls. It was the loss of the junior engineer that W.A. found most troubling. It hit too close to home.
|
|||||
|
|||||
continue with |
|||||