Miners Plunge 70 Feet in Mine Shaft Accident
A broken signal wire leads to a terrifying fall for two miners working at the Oakdale coal mine near Franklin.
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.
George Wyatt and Frank Larson, employees in the Oakdale mine near Franklin, had a miraculous escape from death Sunday night at 11 o'clock. Wyatt lies at Providence hospital with his right leg broken near the hip. The shaft of the mine is 400 feet down, the last seventy feet running at an angle of eighty degrees. Wyatt and Larson were at the bottom getting ready to come to the surface. In some unknown manner the signal wire broke, and Larson crawled up the shaft, found the break and fixed it. The signal to hoist was given, and the barrel with Wyatt in it came shooting up the shaft. When Wyatt came near Larson he pulled the signal wire so that he might stop and take him in. The wire parted between him and the surface, and the barrel was going by when Larson grabbed for it. He caught the edge, and in the scramble which followed it overturned and sent them tumbling down the vertical shaft. Head over heels, they fell seventy feet to the bottom and lay there stunned and breathless. There was no means of communication with the outer world and they had to lie there until the men on watch at the mouth became alarmed at their silence, came down, and found them.
“Head over heels, now together and again separate, they fell seventy feet to the bottom and lay there stunned and breathless.”
Mining was the engine of 19th-century Washington, but it was a lethal workplace. Today, the ghost towns of the old coal camps around Franklin remind us that the prosperity of the Puget Sound region was often bought with the safety and health of the people who dug the fuel from the ground.
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