ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Mishap at the Champion

The Musick, Helena and Champion polymetallic mines were part of the Bohemia mining district in the Cascade Mountains of south-Central Oregon.

In the summer of 1947, Bill Caldwell, my chemistry professor at Oregon State University, and Ken Watkins, a miner and logger, had leased the 1050 level of the Champion in order to mine the motherlode that was supposedly left by the previous operators. The ore was a dog’s breakfast of copper, zinc, a little lead and some gold and silver.

Caldwell told me to go up to the Champion and see Watkins about a job. It was raining hard that day and, as my only transportation was my Harley Davidson, I wore a suit made of two layers of canvas with oilcloth in between. The pants were held up by red suspenders, and it turned out that Watkins never hired a man who didn’t wear suspenders.

I was put to work with Bob Tonneson, a mining engineering student from Oregon State, and 16-year-old Fred Watkins, the son of Ken, rehabilitating the 1200-level adit by replacing sections of track and compressed air pipe and cleaning the drainage ditch alongside the track.

The Champion was a wet mine, and highly acidic water containing copper and iron dripped from every crack, eating holes into the air line and tracks. The ditch beside the tracks was full of ferric hydroxide in the form of a gelatinous guck with the color and consistency of you-know-what.

We would shovel this guck, with a No. 2 barn scoop, into greased-up, 1-Ton side-dump cars. When the cars were full, we would give them a push, jump onto the coupling, ride them out to the dump and push them back for another load.

One day, when both cars were loaded with muck from 1,000 ft. of ditch, Fred pushed off toward the portal. Since my car rolled easier than his, I gave him a head start, pushing off a couple of minutes later.

About 300 ft. down the track, I rounded a sharp corner at about 15 miles per hour only to see Fred standing in the middle of the rails looking helplessly at his car, which had derailed.

Even if he’d leapt from a springboard, he couldn’t have made a prettier jack-knife dive into that guck. He went under at the instant of the collision, and, to this day, I’m not sure whether he or the car made the bigger splash. Fred wasn’t cut out to be a miner, and he worked on the survey crew for several days following the accident.

— The author, a semi-retired metallurgical consultant, resides in Grass Valley, Calif.