The Sunshine Mine: Ninety-One Men Who Did Not Come Home

On the morning of May second, nineteen seventy-two, one hundred seventy-three miners descended into the Sunshine Mine, America's largest silver producer, in the mountains above Kellogg, Idaho. By noon, ninety-one of them were dead.

At about eleven-forty in the morning, smoke began filtering through the mine's ventilation system. The source, investigators later concluded, was probably spontaneous combustion of scrap timber in a remote section of the workings roughly thirty-six hundred feet below the surface. The smoke carried carbon monoxide, invisible and odorless, and it moved faster than the men could respond. The hoistman at one of the main shafts collapsed from carbon monoxide poisoning before he could bring all the men out. Eighty men were evacuated safely. Ninety-one were not.

Two miners, Tom Wilkinson and Ronald Flory, survived by retreating deep into a section of the mine where the air remained breathable. They sheltered in place for about a week before rescuers found them alive. When they emerged, they were in good condition. The search for other survivors found none.

The Sunshine disaster was the deadliest hardrock mining accident in the United States since nineteen seventeen. It exposed a critical gap in mine safety regulation: miners in that era were not required to carry personal breathing apparatus or know how to use them. Many of the men who died could have survived a short exposure if they had been equipped with self-rescuers.

Congress responded. Within two years, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act was strengthened, and mandatory self-rescuer training and equipment became requirements across the industry. The Mine Safety and Health Administration, created in its modern form in nineteen seventy-seven, traces part of its mandate directly to the lessons of this day.

At the mine entrance today, a memorial carries ninety-one small plaques, one for each man who never came up. The Silver Valley remembers them every May second.