This is more from the tape my Dad made in the 1980's . In this segment, he is talking about his Dad, O.D. Robertson, and his brother John's mining expertise."Dad: Then they’d work on their own claims when they weren’t working elsewhere, and they always managed to take some gold out of their claims. The first few years they took quite a little bit out. After that, why they worked out around most of the time on ranches and for the Forest Service and this sort of stuff. When they opened up the Golden Messenger Mine they run into trouble. They couldn’t...there was a lot of cave-ins and these other miners that were around couldn’t take and drift through one of these cave-ins because the rubble would keep comin’ down from above faster than they could muck in out. And they didn’t know how to go through a cave-in and stop it. Dad was able to do that. He knew that kind of mining, and he and John and then a couple of other people around York there went to work for ‘em. And they drifted through all these and opened up the whole Messenger Mine. Got back in to where the ore was and got it open again. And it was running at the time of World War II then. They also worked in the Copper Queen for, oh, about a year and a half. They were trying to find some copper ore in there. They had show of the lead on top, but they were never able to find it below – these mining engineers that decided where to run the tunnel; why…Dad and John worked with (something Millard? Bill? ) and the other fellow. Can’t even think of his name now. In the Copper Queen and run the dirt out. But they never did find the lead there, and finally they quit. They ran out of money, so they had to lay everybody off.
And then, they sank some test holes and drilled all those for the possibility of putting a dredge down Trout Creek below York – towards the River. And they had trouble. There was so much water they had to pump out of that shaft there at York that they got Dad and John to come and sink that shaft because same problems with all the water would bring the loose dirt in, you know, and they could lose the whole shaft if they didn’t know how to operate. So they sank the shaft to bedrock for ‘em. And they run a little drift down there, but they didn’t find much there. And then they worked for the outfit that drilled all that drilling it.
Me: Sounds like they were worth a lot more than they got paid.
Dad: Well, that’s right. Dad was an expert miner. And these other guys couldn’t do that work. They didn’t have the know-how. They’d never done any of that type of drift work. They were hard rock miners, and a lot of them didn’t even put any timbers in the hard rock mines, you know. But they (O.D. and John) were able to timber and drift in any kind of soil and make it safe. "
I think the proof of my Dad's statement that his brother and father were good at what they did lies in the fact that they were not killed mining.
Just hearing Dad talk about cave-ins and shafts filling with water gives me the creeps.
