THE SILVER LINING OF CAPITALISM

 

I have noticed that in all things, drama attracts drama. Forty miles east of Coeur de'Alene, Idaho, there is proof of this. Through fissures opened by dramatic continental collisions over a billion years ago, water percolated up through sedimentary rocks. And where it pooled and cooled it left behind veins of silver, lead, and zinc. 

Then 190 million years ago this shattered wreckage was struck again, theatrically folding forested ridges upward until they broke, then shoving the amputated segments atop their own abandoned limbs, stacking the veins haphazardly through the new mountains. Fifty million years ago erosion found the weak points in the fault lines, opening the land to the human drama of ambition and greed.

Burke Canyon Creek (above), like a hundred other streams in the panhandle of Idaho, divides two of these ridges. To the southeast the 6,000 foot high twin Grouse Peaks are separated by a mile from the 6,000 foot high Tiger Peak to the northwest. Between them, at just 2,500 feet above sea level, snakes the 300 foot wide “Silver Valley”.  

Burke Canyon is so narrow, in the winter the bottom receives only two hours of sunlight. Shopkeepers had to close their awnings when the narrow gauge trains carried  the ore out of the mines and down the center of the canyon. Human dead had to be carried out the same way, since there was no space to bury them in the canyon.

 But by 1891, the 11 mile long, constricted, twisting valley was dotted with one-street towns and the 100 mines they served; The Bunker Hill, The Burke, The Star-Morning, The Standard-Mammoth, the Hercules, The Gem, The Poorman Tiger, The Union, The Sunshine, the Frisco, The Tamarack. and The Hecla were just the biggest of the mines.

In less than a hundred years humans would extract from this dramatic landscape $5.5 billion worth of metal, including 37,00 metric tons of silver – half of all silver mined in the United States - 8 million tons of lead, and 3 million tons of zinc These were no paper profits. This was production,  rare metals pried from the earth. But the handful of owners who risked their capital to exploit this bonanza, and the 3,500 hard-rock miners who risked their lives a mile and more beneath this canyon for $3.50 a day, were all digging their own graves.  And their grandchildren's too.

In the fall of 1891 the railroads which transported the ore once it was out of Burke Canyon, announced they were raising their rates $2 a ton. The Mine Owners Association, which effectively owned the canyon, responded by shutting down production. Three thousand miners were laid off, and untold store clerks, cooks, maids and laundresses lost their incomes as well. 

The standoff continued until the following April of 1892, when a compromise was reached and the mines announced they would reopen. But because of increased overhead the mines would rehire only 2,000 skilled miners, would add six hours to an already six day workweek, and for the 500 hundred unskilled miners, there would be a pay cut of fifty cents a day.

The workers at each mine responded by forming unions, and were unified in their demand - $3.50 a day for all workers, skilled and unskilled. The Owners Association refused, and in June began advertising for replacement workers. Soon, every train which arrived in Wallace, Idaho, at the foot of the canyon, carried miners (“scabs”) from Michigan and Wisconsin, Kentucky and Pennslyvania. Union miners took to greeting the new arrivals with fists and clubs. 

The Owners hired Pinkerton “guards” to protect the replacement workers. Tensions increased, threats increased, violence increased. Two of the mines reopened with union miners, and two, the Gem and the Frisco, reopened with non-union miners.

When the sun rose over the narrow canyon on Monday, 11 July, 1892, the hills overlooking the Gem were covered with armed union men. At first light, the shooting began. After several hours of unproductive gunfire, the miners switched to more familiar weapons. A black powder bomb exploded a building (above) housing one of the great stamps which broke up the ore before shipment. After a little more shooting the company men surrendered. The human cost was three dead. 

The union men marched their prisoners across the narrow street to saloons in the town of Gem, while company men still on mine property began sniping at them. Women and children ran for their lives, fleeing either up or down the canyon. Fifty more company men arrived and surrounded the saloons where their men were being held. Three more men were killed, this time union men, and eventually, the union men surrendered in their turn.

Meanwhile, shooting had also begun at the Frisco mine, and three more company men had been killed. Yet another surrender prevented further loss of life. The sheriff and Federal Marshals escorted these company men down the canyon to Wallace. Pro-union forces now occupied both mines and had captured 2,000 rounds of ammunition, to boot. All of this had isolated the largest mine further up the canyon, the Bunker Hill, in tiny Burke, Idaho.

On day two of the “Burke Canyon War”, Federal troops arrived in Cataldo, twenty miles to the west, but the union men threatened to blow up the mines if they moved any closer. That left the company men in the closed Bunker Hill Mine cut off from support, heavily outnumbered and now out gunned. 

The company men walked out without putting up any further fight.  All non-union mines in the Silver Valley were now shut down. It was only a matter of time before all would be forced to sign union contracts. It looked like the Union had won. And then somebody did something really dramatic, and really stupid.

It happened in Cataldo, where the narrow gauge railroad met the head of navigation for the Cour d'Alene River. There had once been a Mission nearby, and as daylight began to fade that Tuesday evening, 130 company men from the Gem and Frisco mines were gathered on the dock, waiting for a boat to allow them to escape this insanity. 

They had already been shot at and some had even been blasted. Then, out of the shadows, men now appeared on horseback and started shooting into the unarmed crowd. Panicked men began running in every direction, some even jumping into the lake. It does not appear that anyone was actually killed in this shadowed fusillade, but it was claimed that 17 were wounded. It was labeled “The Mission Massacre”, and most public sympathy for the union cause died right there.

On Wednesday, 13 July, 1891, Idaho Governor Wiley placed the entire county under martial law. A thousand state militia appeared, followed by a small but vocal pro-owner army of reporters. Before the week was out 400 union men were under arrest. So backed up had the courts become, that it would be a year before some of prisoners would have their chance to defend themselves. Very few would be found not guilty. Many served years in prison. All union men were forced out of the mines, and the Owners Association reigned triumphant.

Eight years later they all did it again. This time the Bunker Hill mine was blown up. But again the owners won. 

Six years later the two sides went at it again,  and then Governor Frank Steunenburg (above)  called out the National Guard. This time,  he boasted, “We have taken the monster by the throat, and we are going to choke the life out of it.”  

Union men responded by planting a bomb on the gate in front of the Governor's home (above) and 

blowing up the governor . It took the skills of lawyer Clarence Darrow to keep the union man convicted of the Governor's murder, out of the electric chair . But the tit for tat never really ended, which helped ensure that by 1920 the 5,000 non-union miners in Silver Valley were the highest paid workers in the state.  They had to be, to get them to stay given the conditions they were forced to work under.

But almost unnoticed at first, the real cost of all this drama began to surface. Around 1900 farmers downstream began complaining that the spring floods on the Coeur d'Alene River had poisoned their fields and killed their livestock. 

By the 1930's the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene river had become a dead zone. People drinking from the river became sick, even losing their hair. The farmers sued the mine owners, but the courts, already used to crush the unions, now crushed the farmers. Still, there was so much lead in the Burke Canyon Creek, the miners began calling it “Lead Creek”. After the World Wars the price of silver began to fall. The mines began to close. And as they did, their political power began to wane.

In May of 1972,  91 miners died in a fire in the Sunshine Mine. And this time the disaster brought in the new Environmental Protection Agency. And what the EPA scientists found, scared them. They could find no fish in Burke Canyon Creek.  By measurement, the water carried 550 pounds of zinc every day into the Coeur d'Alene River – so much that when the stream pooled, the water was yellow.  

Twenty miles of streams in surrounding areas could support no fish, and 10 miles of tributaries of the Coeur d”Alene River had “virtually no life” in them. In those waters downstream from Silver Canyon, lead and zinc levels were fifty times the federal safe water quality standard. How had it spread so far outside the canyon?  

Every day each mine had been dumping between 40 and 60 tons of lead into the air. Rain settled this poison into the  Coeur d'Alene river, and had contaminated Lake Coeur d'Alene, which had contaminated 160 miles of the Spokane River, which flowed out of the lake. 

Water fowl were dying each year in thousands, 21 bird species were at risk of local local extinction. And human children living in the valley had the highest levels of lead in their blood ever seen - in the world.

The result was the 21 square mile Bunker Hill Superfund Site. When this cleanup is finally finished (if ever), it could cost taxpayers $1.4 billion – or just about 20% of the value of the ore removed from the “silver canyon” over the previous century, all to enrich a few mine owners. In 1996, after twenty years of cleanup effort, EPA scientists put healthy trout in water from the Burke Canyon Creek. All were dead in four hours. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality estimates their costs alone will be $2 million a year for the foreseeable future. 

Today, if you take a drive up Silver Canyon, you will pass a stream with no fish in it and abandoned stores and  mine buildings, all surrounded by chain link fences. Those fences were erected by the EPA, to protect curious tourists from dying of curiosity.  So much drama produces so much damage, it makes you wonder if capitalism is worth it. 

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GOING TO SEE THE ELEPHANT

 

I want to tell you something about fame and fortune. They beat the heck out of obscurity and poverty. As proof I give you the life of the “fearless frogman”, Paul Boyton, the Victorian era’s Esther Williams and a newspaper editor’s dream. He lived on adrenaline and publicity. One commentator described him as having a  “…gift for gab, lust for life, and the pluck to take great calculated risks.” And his life reads like that of a comic book hero.

At the age of 15, during the  American Civil War,  Paul Boyaton (above)  joined the U.S. Navy. After the war he formed a life guard service on the New Jersey coast, and pulled 71 swimmers back from the brink of death. Fifty years before the first swimmer made it, Paul paddled across the English Channel while floating in an inflatable rubber survival suit. He met Queen Victoria and floated down most of the rivers of Europe. The Italians labeled him “L’uomo pesce” – the fish man. The government of Chile charged him with espionage. He wrote two autobiographies. He was a star in P.T. Barnum’s traveling circus. His image was used to sell cigars, calendars, music and playing cards – so many items that a new word had to be invented to describe his popularity; “Boyton-mania”. For some thirty years the “Captain”, as his friends called him, was the most famous man in the world. And ultimately, like all the other great forces of nature, Paul Boyton came to Coney Island.

In 1895, when Paul Boyton stepped off the train from Chicago, his sly but unapologetic mustache was still brown. But at 48, he was getting too old to risk his life four times a day for ten cents a ticket. But Paul had arrived in Coney Island with a new idea, something he had developed at the Chicago Colombian Exposition, in 1893. It was to be called an “Amusement Park”.

It is human nature to be attracted to novelty. And after the Civil War, as the population of New York City approached 3 ½ million, the occupants began to look for a way to escape, at least for a few hours.

Steam powered rail lines spread out from the city, carrying the wealthy to summer mansions and genteel racing tracks on the Long Island sea shore.

Luxury hotels sprang up in Brighton and Manhattan Beaches to house their middle class pretenders. The imitative working masses followed, and were transported at 35 cents a head by excursion boats from the Manhattan docks or the newly electrified rail lines from Brooklyn, (or “Breukelen” in the original Dutch).

In the spring of 1884, James Lafferty spent $65,000 to build a hotel on the empty stretch of sand known as Coney Island, just across Surf Avenue from the boat pier and the railroad terminals. When finished, four months later, the wooden and tin inn stood seven stories tall and was constructed in the shape of an elephant.

To enter you climbed a stairwell in a rear leg to reach the reception desk in the abdomen. Visitors could get an elevated elephant’s eye-view of the ocean for a penny. For the price of a full night's stay, a guest could sleep in the Shoulder Room, the Throat Room, the Stomach Room, or any of the other 27 bedrooms. The unusual structure quickly became an icon on Coney Island, a landmark, and people traveled all the way from Manhattan to be able to say they had “gone to see the elephant”.

But financially the hotel was a disaster. Within a few years Lafferty was forced to sell his poisonous white pachyderm of a public house to a Philadelphia syndicate. And the new owners were willing to switch to a more iconic business model.

The Elephant Hotel was converted into a bordello. And “going to see the elephant” acquired an entirely new meaning. Still, it was a long train ride when you could “see the beast” a lot closer to home and save the 35 cents. So by the time the Captain arrived, although the Elephant hotel was still open, it was on its last legs, so to speak.

Paul Boyton was attracted by the 16 cheap acres directly behind the failing hotel (the above photo was taken from the Elephant's butt). There Paul  erected the greatest innovation so far in entertainment history; a fence - with a ticket booth at one end. By selling general admission tickets to his “Sea Lion Park”, which opened on Thursday, July fourth, 1895.  Boyton kept his customers captive so he could sell them food and drink all day long, pulling in around $1,000 a day during the 90 day long season. And curiosity about the elephant behind the fence kept the customers lined up at the ticket booth.

Several times a day Boyton himself would appear to demonstrate his rubber suit, and to feed four dozen hungry sea lions in the park’s central lagoon. The performance was described by the Lubin film studios, who were selling a 30 second Kinetoscope of the show to nickelodeon operators, as “a decided novelty”. Once the pinnipeds were sated, the “Shoot-the-Chutes” took over the lagoon.

Designed originally by Thomas Polk, for Boyton’s Chicago exhibition, it was a short but exciting ride. A flat bottomed boat was released at the top of a long ramp. Near the bottom, the ramp curved upward. This sent the boat and its passengers skipping across the lagoon. When the boat slowed, the on board operator would then pole the boat to the landing. The passengers would be unloaded, before a cable pulled the boat back to the top of the ramp for the next joy ride.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXqeLGnP6wY
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In addition, inside the fence Boyton had the “Flip Flap Railroad”. This was a two seat two car roller coaster, and the first in the world to feature a complete 360 degree 25 foot tall loop. It was also the first to explore the physics of inverted amusements. Unfortunately the loop contained a minor design flaw. It was perfectly circular. And it turns out that this perfection delivered 12 g’s to the passenger’s necks, equal to the maximum endured by the astronauts during a space launch. The unprepared customers, sitting upright, suffered whiplash, blackouts, headaches, nausea, tunnel vision, and loss of balance for hours afterward, not the mention the joy of losing your lunch at thirty-five miles an hour while upside down. People paid just to watch the more adventuresome ride through the loop of the “Flip Flap”, but because of injuries the amusement did not last into the Park’s second season.

That year, to replace the nausea loop, Boyton added a mill ride and cages of live wolves. But at the end of that second season the park lost its landmark. On the Sunday night of 27 September, 1896, the abandoned Elephant Hotel burned to the sand. Three years later, Boyton bought the property and replaced the elephant with a large ballroom. But he simply could not afford to add new rides year after year. And that was required to keep the curiosity level high enough to draw repeat customers behind the fence.

The breaking point for Paul arrived in 1902. That summer saw 70 days of cold rain out of a season just 92 days long. Business at Sea Lion Park that horrible summer has been described as "macabre". Over the winter Boynton was easily convinced to lease the park for 25 years to competitors, Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy.

They renamed the 16 acres “Luna Park”, built palaces and lit the place with electric lights (still a novelty to most people, even in New York City). And with that, Paul Boyton retired from the limelight.

But his idea was developed by others, and soon Coney Island became crowded with amusement parks, fence touching fence, each competing with its neighbors for the customer’s nickels and dimes. Albert Bigalow Paine described Coney Island as where “the cup of gaiety and diversion overflows.” Thousands still went to the beach to frolic in the surf for free. But the high roller coasters, the parachute rides, the Ferris wheels and the joyful screams of patrons were a constant temptation for those masses to spend the quarter and go to “see the elephant” behind the fence.

Having spent half his life on such a quest, Paul Boyton was no longer curious enough to look. He bought a small home in Brooklyn and died in relative obscurity in 1924. He was 77 years of age. By then his invention had been passed on to future generations, who continued to build fences around elephants. You, see in the entertainment industry, the profit is all in the fence.

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