Five Killed by a Premature Blast on the Monte Cristo Road
A construction crew building the mountain railroad into the Monte Cristo mining district was caught in a landslide triggered by an untimely explosion — one body recovered, four carried off by the current.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Getchell, June 9. — [Special.] — The landslide near here yesterday was caused by a premature explosion. Five men were killed and none injured. The dead are: Foreman Archie Williams, Pat Lodner and three Italians, names unknown. The body of one Italian was found, and the others were carried down the river by the strong current.
“The body of one Italian was found, and the others were carried down the river by the strong current.”
Monte Cristo was a roaring 1890s mining boomtown reached only by a tortuous rail line; today it is a forest ghost town whose concrete foundations still poke out of the underbrush near Granite Falls. The premature blast that killed these five workmen is a reminder that the region's mineral wealth was built on the bodies of wage laborers, many of them immigrant Italians, whose names the era's press did not even bother to record.
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