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Dying
for Gold
by
Cheral Coon
Swimming was the last thing on Bill McFadden's mind as he
set off to work his Goldstream Creek mining claim one cold December morning
in 1906. McFadden, a hearty Irishmen, was heard singing cheerfully as
he scraped muck out of the bottom of his mining shaft some 170 feet underground.
When the ground beneath him began rumbling, McFadden had scarcely a minute
to understand what was happening.. The next thing he knew, he was swimming
on top of a plume of water that lifted him 150 feet up through the shaft.
McFadden’s partner, Chris McPherson, heard his cries for help and
quickly winched down a bucket, striking McFadden in the head and rendering
him unconscious. McFadden was pulled to safety, but the water filled the
hand-shoveled shaft, destroying months of back-breaking work in minutes.
It was all easily explained later A subterranean stream of water had broken
through the bottom of the shaft.
Maybe it was the luck of the Irish that saved McFadden
on that freezing December day, but the fact he survived uninjured makes
his story one of the few mining accidents in Goldstream Valley worth laughing
about. During the first 10 years of mining in the valley area, 83 men
died and more than 400 were seriously injured.
Goldstream Valley did not give up its gold without extracting
a price in
flesh and blood from the men who sought its riches. Unlike the prospectors
who found gold lying on the beaches of Nome, miners in the valley had
to dig 50 to hundreds feet into the permanently frozen ground to reach
the bedrock where gold lay hidden. But it was the ground itself that held
untold dangers. Beneath Goldstream Valley lay pockets of poisonous and
flammable gas, artesian springs and a deep and unrelenting layer of permafrost
that covered the elusive mother lode.
Word of Felix Pedro's 1902 discovery of gold in the valley had spread
widely among miners by 1904 and led to a stampede that would become one
of the last major gold rushes in the United States. Miners seeking a last
chance to strike it rich poured into the Fairbanks region, and in Goldstream
Valley they endured arguably the harshest and most dangerous conditions
What they found on their arrival was an isolated and uncivilized territory.
Winter lasted nine long dark months, with temperatures that dropped to
60 degrees below zero and held for weeks at a time. Supplies were difficult
to get, and miners paid premium prices. Medical care was crude at best,
and for many the 15-mile distance to the nearest hospital was a world
away.
In the first couple of years, the only way miners could sink shafts into
the relentless permafrost was to cut wood and burn fire after fire to
slowly thaw the ground, forcing workers to follow a daily pattern: burn,
thaw, dig; burn, thaw, dig.
A combination of logging and constant fires stripped the valley of its
trees, leaving it a barren wasteland. Once miners were able to penetrate
the frozen ground, the process was slow and dangerous. The pick-and-shovel
men removed the soupy thaw one bucket at a time. To descend into the earth,
miners used a windlass, standing in a looped rope or riding in a bucket
attached by rope to a wheel wound with rope.
The practice of burning fires deep within the shafts to melt the permafrost
became more dangerous the deeper underground the miners dug, as the fire
often sucked out all the oxygen within the shafts, leaving miners gasping
for one more breath.
Fires also produced deadly gases in mine shafts. The miners called one
gas "choke damp," which was actually carbonic oxide. Choke damp
was produced by decomposition of organic matter and, especially, by the
combustion of wood and charcoal. It was highly poisonous, transparent
and odorless. Heavier than air, it settled in the lowest places in the
shafts. Breathing this gas prevented the exhalation of carbon dioxide
and arrested the heartbeat.
Dave McCurdy started a fire in the shaft of his Emma Creek mine to thaw
the permafrost,
and when he realized it had gone out, he asked a neighbor to lower him
the 54 feet to the bottom to re-light the fire. It was the last favor
McCurdy ever asked for. The neighbor became worried when McCurdy quit
answering him from the bottom of the shaft , so he called for help. Dan
Cresap, a fellow miner, rushed to shaft and gave orders to lower him in
to rescue his friend. When he reached the bottom he found McCurdy dead.
Cresap never made it back to the top of the shaft. He died from the deadly
choke damp minutes later as miners cranked furiously on the windlass to
bring him to the top of the shaft.
The other lethal gas that plagued miners deep in the shafts was called
"fire damp," or carbon dioxide. It, too, is a compound of carbon
and oxygen and fatal to life. Fire damp is highly flammable, and miners
often did not know they were just a pick swing away from death or injury.
Jack Darling was at the bottom of a 70-foot shaft on his Ester Creek claim
when his pick struck a pocket of fire damp, and his miner's candle ignited
the gas. The explosion shot flames 80 feet above the top of the shaft
and burned for days. Darling's remains were later found half consumed
by the flames.
Cave-ins were of particular concern to the miners, as mine owners and
 operators
often depended on the frozen ground to hold up the roofs of the shafts,
rather than take proper safety precautions. It was also rare that the
owners of productive mines worked in the shafts themselves. The combination
of the constant fires in the shafts and the exposure tothe warmer summer
months weakened the permafrost that miners counted on holding up the roofs
of their shafts. Many roofs were not reinforced with timbers, and those
that were often were not well-constructed. Pete Pasquale and Stefano Gatti,
Italian laborers working at No. 17 on Goldstream Creek were victims of
a cave-in when a set of weak timbers collapsed and buried them alive.
Pasquale was rescued after an hour of hard digging. Gatti wasn't as lucky.
It took miners 12 hours to recover his body. He was found in a standing
position, and it was later determined that he had no broken bones: He
had died of suffocation. Gatti was 26 and left behind a wife and three
children. A daily newspaper reported that his death was ruled "no
one's fault."
The use of wood fires to melt shafts became obsolete in the early 1920s
when F.H. Brown developed an easier method to melt the permafrost. A small
wood-fired boiler produced steam that passed through pipes to a 5-foot
metal point with a nozzle at the end. The metal points, called steam points,
were then driven into the permafrost, turning the frozen ground into a
boiling muck. This new method made the removal of frozen paystreaks more
efficient and created millionaires at a faster rate, but the working man
paid the price with severe burns, scalding flesh wounds and even death.
In Goldstream Valley, Tom Overland, a Norwegian worker, pulled a steam
point from the ground on Fairbanks Creek, and it exploded in his face.
He died several pain-filled hours later. Frank Windquist, a Swedish worker,
was standing near a boiler below Dome Creek when it exploded and hurled
him several hundred feet into the air, killing him instantly.
There is no monument erected in the Goldstream Valley to honor the men
that paid the ultimate price for the valley's gold. Only a handful of
their bodies were sent home to their families. Most of the men who died
in mining accidents in Goldstream Valley were buried in the Clay Street
Cemetery in Fairbanks. All but one lie in unmarked graves forever lost
to history. Today, the valley has covered their tracks and reclaimed its
ground, a grave for lost miners and lost visions of instant wealth.
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