During the ’60s, at eighteen, I signed up for the Selective Service. I’d also waited until the required eighteen to work underground in the Anaconda Company copper mines in my hometown of Butte, Montana.
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On my first day at the mines I stood at the head frame in my clean clothes and hardhat, my rubber steel-toed boots. My gloves were clean. If only I’d scratched my hard hat with a rock or screwdriver before presenting myself before the experienced miners with whom I waited for the hoist cage to be lowered into the earth. This first day, I was dropped to the 5,200 hundred level (one mile deep) at the Mt Con Mine. The mine wasn’t named as a prison—Con was the first name of one of Butte’s first mining superintendents. I don’t know what he was famous for.
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Butte, Montana—“The Richest Hill on Earth”—was once famous for being the largest city between St. Louis and Seattle. In 1867, the peak of the placer boom had the city’s population at 500. It halved over the next two years. Then, quartz deposits were discovered. Based first on silver, then copper, mining barons became Montana’s first millionaires. In 1884, there were 300 operating mines, 4,000 posted mining claims, nine quartz mills, and four smelters, all operating 24/7, making Butte the planet’s largest producer of copper. In 1899, Marcus Daly merged with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company to create the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company. By 1910, having bought up the smaller mining companies, Amalgamated changed its name to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, the largest corporate power in Montana.
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Early in my first shift, during some shovel and pick work, one of the older crew tapped my shoulder: “Slow the fuck down, college boy! You’re making us look bad.” I hadn’t yet started college, but I slowed the fuck down and it wasn’t many days until my clothes were as dirty as anyone’s around me. I’d planned to work a few months, to save money for school and, mostly, to buy a car. I worked three months and started attending the Montana School of Mines just after Labor Day. I either walked to school or had my father drop me off on his way to his work at the mines. On and off during the school year, on weekends and holidays, I worked underground for what was the town’s best pay—21 dollars a day.
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I got assigned to clear grizzlies—a greenhorn’s job. The grizzlies lidded a hundred-foot shaft with a grid of spaced iron bars, like railroad rails. There was enough room between the rails to fall through which was why it was a rule to wear a safety belt connected by rope to a rock bolt. Ore had been mucked into a smaller shaft (called a raise) to tumble by gravity from mining above to the grizzlies below. This happened on each level of the mine. If ore didn’t fit between rails, my job was to break it into suitable size with a double jack—a sledge with a head weighing in at 20 or so pounds and forged from heat-treated high carbon steel. The two rounded striking faces minimized chipping and provided blunt force. Sometimes the ore was just too dense to break with a hammer and you would resort to dynamite. All this to reduce the mined ore to a size that would fit between the rails and, thus, into a motor car to be taken to the main shaft to be hoisted to the surface.
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My education in dynamite was (1) pack a stick (or two) onto the block of ore with handfuls of mud; (2) insert an electric blasting cap into one of the sticks; (3) run out your wires until you could find what felt to you to be adequate cover; (4) expose the wires to the terminals of your wet cell battery (that powered your headlamp) and attend the immediate blast. Before touching the wires, shouting: FIRE ON THE GRIZZLIES! If you then couldn’t break the ore, you repeated the process, using additional sticks. I once used six sticks and nearly blew the place up. The blast rattled my teeth and rib cage. It pushed on the air in my lungs. In the time it took for the concussed dust to settle, I worried I’d loosened the grid. I double-checked my safety belt before stepping onto the grizzlies, where, with a steel pry bar, I maneuvered the broken ore to fall betwixt the rails. Thereafter assigned to the grizzlies, I never exceeded four sticks.
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I had no notion then, and none now, as to why the grid of spaced iron bars is called “grizzlies.” I found no explanation online, only confirmation of the term “grizzly.” What I did know is that ore the size of a hay bale can weigh as much as your car and is hard to disassemble with a hammer.
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The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of 12-15,000 tons of TNT, which would terrify if you know what six sticks can do.
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The largest bomb in service in the US nuclear arsenal has a yield of 1.2 megatons. A megaton is a unit of explosive power equivalent to one million tons of TNT.
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I worked in the mines, on and off, during the first years of the war in Vietnam. I was told that the copper being mined was being used mostly as shell casings for that war. I’ve wondered if that were true. It certainly could be.
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Years after my stint in the mines, I managed to buy my first car, a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle two-door two-tone (gold and white), which I purchased, using my Air Force orders as collateral. I drove it from Salt Lake City to Biloxi, Mississippi, where within the month, I took it to Sears to have it retrofitted for air conditioning—hands down the best money I ever spent.
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Butte, Montana still holds the record for the lowest recorded temperature in the contiguous United States: -60°F.
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I showed up in Biloxi Air Force Base on Bastille Day, July 14th, 1971. Immediate first thought: Why had we fought for the South? Have you been to Mississippi? What did you think?
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Castle/Bravo, the largest nuclear weapon detonated by the United States, set off at Bikini on February 28th, 1954, produced twice the energy expected from 8 million tons of TNT—an explosion equivalent to some 15 million tons of TNT.
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It’s common knowledge—isn’t it?—that the prizes Alfred Nobel funded, benefiting science, culture, and peace, were (and are) made possible by his manufacture and sale of TNT?
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The world’s most powerful hydrogen bomb detonated on October 30th, 1961, over Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union. The bomb had an explosive force of 58 megatons, 6,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Dropped by an aircraft and detonated 1,200 feet above the Earth’s surface, the Novaya Zemlya shock wave circled the planet three times, the mushroom cloud extending 38 miles into the atmosphere.
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The Soviets labeled the experiment Tsar Bomba. Tsar can be translated as (1) Russian emperor, (2) tyrant, or (3) somebody in authority.
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Alfred Nobel’s father manufactured land mines.
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Many think a mine, like a cave you might enter in summer, would be cool, but a mine is not cool—it is hot and humid, like Mississippi.
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There were crates of dynamite and blasting caps scattered throughout the mine I worked in. The amounts were restocked constantly, like an armory for munitions training.
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What I think of now is that a blasting cap—never mind a dynamite stick—is enough to blow your hands off. How was I permitted use? I was a teenager in a hard hat. I felt conscripted, ready for deployment.
Donald Anderson’s collection Fire Road won the John Simmons Short Fiction award. His most recent books are Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir and Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet. To learn more, visit donaldanderson.us.