1st Person · Mine Record · Silver Cliff, Colorado · 1879
Still Tapping
Owen Treloar was a Cornish hard-rock miner working the St. Piran silver vein above Silver Cliff when the east drift collapsed on October 14th, 1879. What follows are fragments recovered from the sealed shaft when it was reopened in 1884. The last legible entry is dated October 19th. Rescue was abandoned on October 17th.
St. Piran Mine · Silver Cliff, Custer County, Colorado · October 1879
A man who has worked underground long enough develops a particular relationship with silence. Not the silence of open country, which has wind and birds and the sound of distance. The silence below ground is material — it has weight and texture and direction, and an experienced miner reads it the way a sailor reads water. There are silences that mean the rock is settled and content. There are silences that mean the opposite. Twelve years in Cornish tin, three years in Colorado silver. I know the difference. I knew it on the morning of October 14th, 1879, when the east drift of the St. Piran went quiet in a way that made the hair on my arms stand.
I was writing this on the back of an assay bag when the first timber cracked. What I am setting down now I am writing by feel, in the dark, in the space that remained after the roof came in. I cannot see what I am writing. I am keeping the lines as straight as I can by feel. If someone reads this I hope the writing is legible. If no one reads it I have still kept my hand working, which is what a man does when the alternative is to stop.
Fragment A — Recovered from secondary pocket, east wall — Pencil on assay bag
The candle went first. That is how you know the air has turned — not from smell, not from feeling it, but because the flame simply stops. I had perhaps thirty seconds of warning in the behavior of the flame before it went out, which is enough time to understand what is coming but not enough time to do much about it. I pressed myself into the alcove where the ore cart rests between loads. The noise was not what I expected. It was less a roar than a settling — a long, low compression of sound, as if the mountain were exhaling a breath it had been holding for a thousand years.
Then the timbers. Then the dark.
I am in a space approximately six feet long, four feet wide, and perhaps five feet high at the tallest point. The east wall has held. The fall came from above and to the west — I can feel the changed air pressure and the direction of the dust, which settled from the west. There is a crack at the base of the east wall from which cold air seeps. This is important. Cold air means a connection to something larger. A connected space means I am not in a sealed pocket.
I am going to begin tapping. Three beats, pause, three beats. Every miner knows this signal. If anyone is above I want them to know where I am before they start pulling stone and bring the rest of it down.
Above Ground — Day One and Two
Rescue Record — Compiled from Custer County Miner's Collective Log, October 1879
The collapse was reported at approximately half past seven in the morning. Twenty-two men were working the St. Piran at the time of the event. Twenty were accounted for within the hour. Two were not: Davy Polkinghorne, whose body was recovered from the upper fall on the second day, and Owen Treloar, whose position in the east drift placed him beyond the primary collapse zone. No body was found.
Rescue teams began clearing the upper fall by mid-morning. Progress was slow. The timber framing had failed across a span of forty feet and the ceiling rock was fractured in a manner that made additional collapse probable. The captain of the rescue team, Eustace Carthew, ordered work halted twice on the first day when the overhead stone began shifting audibly. Both times the men argued. Both times Carthew prevailed.
At approximately three in the afternoon of the first day, a miner lying flat with his ear against the stone face reported hearing a faint, rhythmic knocking from below. Three beats. A pause. Three beats. The rescue team redoubled their work.
Fragment B — Recovered from floor near east wall — Pencil on board timber, split surface
I can hear them. The sound comes through the stone faintly — a vibration more than a sound, felt in the jaw when I press my face to the rock. They are digging above me and to the west of the collapse. This is the correct direction. I have been tapping every quarter hour as best I can judge time. My candle is gone but I have the stub of a second one in my coat, which I am saving. I will not light it until I have to.
The cold seep at the base of the east wall has increased slightly. I have been collecting it in my tin cup. Slow but steady. I am not thirsty yet but I am going to be and I would rather address that before I must.
The air is acceptable. Bad air sinks and I am in the upper portion of my pocket. There is a metallic quality to it but the candle stub I lit briefly to check the space burned normally for the twenty seconds I allowed it. Oxygen is present. Not generous, but present.
I am thinking about and the children and I am writing this instead because thinking clearly is more useful than feeling clearly and a man who lets the feeling take over will not be writing anything by morning.
The Argument
On the morning of the second day, a section of the upper clearing operation brought down a secondary fall that injured two men and closed the progress made the previous afternoon. The rescue team retreated to the surface. The argument that followed lasted, by surviving accounts, most of the day.
Eustace Carthew maintained that further digging in the current state of the shaft would trigger a third collapse that would kill rescuers and seal whatever space Treloar might occupy more completely than it was already sealed. His position was technical and correct. The other miners, most of whom had worked with Treloar for three years, disagreed in the way that men disagree when the technical argument is sound but the human one is louder.
Treloar's wife, Maren, had come up from town on the afternoon of the first day and was still there. She did not participate in the argument. She sat near the shaft entrance with her hands folded and did not speak to anyone who spoke to her. Other families came and went. She remained.
The tapping had not stopped.
Fragment C — Recovered folded inside coat pocket — Pencil on paper, partially water-damaged
Second day I believe. The digging above stopped for a long period and then there was a sound of something falling that was different from the ordinary rock — heavier, and followed by voices I could not make out. I tapped for twenty minutes without stopping after that. I do not know if they heard me.
I have been thinking about the geometry of where I am. In twelve years underground I have developed a reasonable sense of the shape of rock. The fall above me came from the west and the debris slope runs down to the east, which means I am in a depression behind the fall rather than under it. This is good. It means the weight is distributed away from me rather than onto the pocket. Cornish tin taught me this: a man under a fall is in more danger than a man behind one.
The water seep has slowed. I have perhaps a cup and a half in the tin. I am rationing it in portions I have decided on in advance so that I do not have to decide under pressure later. Three swallows now. The rest when I calculate I need it.
I am tapping every minutes. Three and three and three. If they are listening they will hear me. If they have stopped listening I am making the sound for myself, which is also worth doing. A man who stops making sound starts to believe the silence is his own.
She did not leave the shaft entrance. Not when they called the rescue. Not when the night came down cold over the Wet Mountains and the other families went back to town. She stayed until there was nothing left to stay for, and then she stayed another day.
— Custer County Miner's Collective Log, October 1879
Day Three — Rescue Abandoned
On the morning of October 17th — the third day — Eustace Carthew called the rescue. The tapping had not been heard since the previous afternoon, a silence of approximately eighteen hours. The water seep below the collapse point had increased, suggesting the pocket, if it had existed, was filling. Carthew noted in the log that no man could be expected to survive sixty hours in a sealed space with failing air and rising water, and that further digging in the current condition of the shaft would cost lives above ground without credible prospect of saving the one below it.
The log records that four men refused to stop and were removed from the site by the others. It records that Maren Treloar was told of the decision by Carthew personally, and that she said nothing in response. It records the time the rescue was formally ended: 9:14 in the morning.
At 9:41 in the morning, a miner who had remained near the shaft to gather tools reported hearing the tapping resume.
Three beats. A pause. Three beats.
Carthew returned to the shaft. The tapping continued intermittently through the afternoon. A second consultation was held. The conclusion did not change: the shaft was too unstable, and whatever the source of the sound, the probability of a living man producing it at this depth, in these conditions, after this duration, was judged too low to risk additional lives against.
The shaft was sealed on October 18th. Maren Treloar watched them do it and then walked back down to Silver Cliff. The log records no further entries relating to the St. Piran east drift rescue operation.
Fragment D — Final recoverable fragment — Pencil on assay bag, reverse side of Fragment A — Date notation partially legible: Oct. 19
The digging has stopped again and this time I think it has stopped for longer. I tapped for a full hour this morning by my best count and heard nothing in return through the stone. The quality of the silence above has changed. There is no vibration of tools, no shift of loosened rock, none of the small sounds that attend men at work. The mountain has gone back to its own sounds, which are old and slow and have nothing to do with me.
I am not . The air is still acceptable at the high point of the pocket. The water has stopped seeping but I have enough. I do not know how long I have been here. I have counted what I believe to be four sleeps but underground the sleeps run together and a man cannot trust his counting past the second day.
I am going to continue tapping. Not because I am certain anyone is listening. Because the alternative is to stop, and stopping is a decision I am not prepared to make on behalf of the men above who may still be working and simply out of range of what the stone will carry. A man taps until he knows. I do not yet know.
Tell Maren the east wall held. Tell her I was warm enough. Tell her
Archive Note — Post-Closure
The St. Piran east drift was reopened in the spring of 1884 as part of a broader effort to recover the silver vein, which surveys suggested continued beyond the collapse zone. The sealed pocket was breached on March 9th. Owen Treloar's remains were recovered. The fragments reproduced above were found with them, along with the tin cup, a pick handle worn smooth at one end, and a tallow candle stub that had been used and carefully extinguished. The pocket showed evidence consistent with survival well beyond the three days after which rescue was called — the water line indicated repeated drinking across multiple days, and the floor of the pocket had been organized in a manner suggesting deliberate habitation rather than a last position. The mine's chief assayer estimated, from the condition of the remains, that Treloar had survived between six and nine days after the collapse.
Obscura Classification — 1st Person Desk — Mine Record — Open File
The St. Piran Mine resumed partial operation after 1884 and worked the east vein intermittently through the late 1880s. Three separate accounts — collected by the Custer County Miner's Collective and reproduced in their 1891 annual report — describe workers in the reopened drifts hearing a rhythmic knocking from deeper in the rock than any active working reached. The sound was described consistently as three beats, a pause, and three beats again. It was heard on at least six separate occasions across a period of four years, always from below and to the east of the 1879 collapse zone.
The Collective's report notes the accounts without comment or classification beyond the phrase matters of a peculiar nature, reported by reliable men.
The St. Piran Mine closed permanently in 1893. The east drift was sealed for the last time and has not been reopened. Whether the sound was caused by natural settling, water movement through fractured rock, or something the archive is not currently positioned to classify is a question the record does not answer.
What the record does answer is this: Owen Treloar tapped for at least five days after the rescue was called. He was still tapping on October 19th. No one was listening.
