Mining Their Business

Hard-rock mining may no longer sustain Gilpin County, but some people in Central City and Black Hawk refuse to let the glory of their heritage pass away.

Lew Cady, a Central City resident and amateur historian, looks at the pockmarked hills that surround the town and wants to know more — more about what it was like to be a miner in a mining town, more about miners’ slang and culture, their fears and superstitions.

“Folks believed it was bad luck for a woman to go underground, but we have women miners today,” notes Cady.

Thinking that his fellow citizens might also wish to know more about their town’s history, Cady formed a panel discussion titled Hard Rock Mining 101. It will feature three local miners — “two old-timers and one youngun,” explains Cady — who will recall their heydays in the towns before casinos arrived.

One elder statesman is Norm Blake, 83, who first went underground when he was ten. Many workers were dying young of ‘rock in the box,’ or rock dust in their lungs, and Blake’s father, also a miner, threatened him with death if he worked deep in the mines. In an age when money was to be made in the shaft, he took a job on the outside while his friends were getting rich. But his career ran along a similar vein: Blake became the chief mining inspector in Colorado, securing rules for the safety of the miners. He still lives in his grandfather’s house in Black Hawk.

The other octogenerian panelist, 87-year-old Bill Russell, worked the mines since he was a boy, but he’s best known for being a longtime mayor of Central City and the current publisher of the Weekly Register Call, the oldest continuously published newspaper in Colorado. He came to Central City from Denver nearly sixty years ago, in the 1930s. “His home is a museum,” says Cady. “A fabulous collection of old mining equipment — drills, boilers, bells, photos, an old stamp mill.”

The youngster of the group, 49-year-old Jeff Casey, will tell of working in the mines and doing mine rescue work in Gilpin County. According to Cady, when someone falls into a shaft, Casey comes with a truck and lowers himself down with a sling to haul the victim out.

Although there are few working mines in the area, “folks must not forget their heritage is an old mining town,” says Cady. “There are few miners left to tell what it was like.”

And on Saturday, they’ll dig deep for those nuggets of truth.