TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY JULIA WERTZ
Harry S. Truman once said, “America was built on courage, on imagination, and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” But that’s bullshit: It was built by thieves, drunks, and whores whose job at hand was giving hand jobs. Thanks to Deadwood, we’re all familiar with the follies of the Old West mining towns, but here’s a list of a few of my favorite disaster and whorin’ stories, just to remind you of our rotten roots.
ADORABLE MINING DISASTERS
Around the turn of the century, a mine collapsed in Goldfield, Nevada, trapping 20 men 400 feet below the surface in a small cave. Knowing they were going to be there for a while, the men quickly fashioned crude instruments out of tools such as powder cases, shoelaces, and pipes, forming what must have been the best fucking band you’ve never heard. The band broke up around the third day, when their last candle blew out, so they sat in the darkness, listening to their watches tick. (Said watches were quickly collected and thrown into a pit of water.) To lessen the pain of chattering teeth, they tied bandanas around their jaws and waited. Around the ninth day, one of the guys went bat-shit and began running around the cave, slamming his head on the walls until he’d successfully beaten himself to death while the others just sat in the dark and listened. They were rescued on the 14th day, the only casualty being the self-inflicted one.
When miners were hauled to the surface in buckets, they’d often pass out due to the extreme temperature change, fall out of the bucket, and plummet back down the mineshaft. That doesn’t seem that interesting until you understand the structure of a mineshaft, which has timbers and metal rods sticking out all over like a game of Jenga. Their bodies would ricochet all the way down while being torn to shreds. By the time they reached the bottom, they were reduced to dozens of bloody fragments of skin, bone, and clothes, which landed in a pit of boiling water. This happened so often that a system of grappling tools was constructed to scoop out the pieces and dump them into a candle box for burial. That may be the ugliest way to die, but a candle box is definitely the cutest coffin ever.
In one particularly gruesome case, a miner fell out of his bucket and landed in a pit of water that was 160 degrees. The water only rose to his thighs and he was pulled out alive, but shortly after, all the skin fell off of his legs and he died. That’s like getting pantsed by death.
Because miners drank whiskey like it was water, there were a number of nonfatal and almost humorous accidents caused by intoxication and carelessness. For example, miners used blasting caps full of black power, which was mostly composed of nitroglycerine, a highly sensitive explosive compound. They would frequently carry these caps in their tobacco pouches and accidentally stuff their pipes with them, blowing off the tips of their noses.
Explosions were responsible for many fatalities, but the way the clean-up crew handled them was most unsavory. In 1891, a Colorado newspaper reported that an explosion inside a tunnel had killed four miners and “the men were torn and mangled beyond recognition. Arms and legs were torn from the bodies of all the men, and pieces of flesh were scattered for a hundred feet along the tunnel.” Following such incidents, the miners usually just dusted the tunnel with quicklime and went back to their work.
ROMANCE IN THE OLD WEST
Before miners’ families made the trek out West, the only women in town were whores. When miners weren’t busy drinking or gambling away their spoils, they were spending it on pussy. One of the most famous prostitutes was named Julia Bulette, and she reportedly earned about $1,000 a night. She served her johns good booze and fancy food and once got to lead a Fourth of July parade, riding on a fire truck with her admiring clientele walking alongside. Whoring ain’t what it used to be, considering our current most famous prostitute is busy counting her MySpace friends instead of leading parades. Sigh.
Another difference between today’s prostitutes and the Old West’s? Drugs. Quality drugs. Crackwhores didn’t exist back then because all the prostitutes were doped up to their eyeballs with laudanum—liquid opium. Which would you rather stick your dick in: an emaciated, scabby hooker on speed or a buxom lady who thinks she’s taking a nap in cotton balls?
The early Old West was a lot like prison: All fucked-up, horny men without the company of women. But I’m not talking about any Brokeback Mountain bullshit here, some miners were completely upfront with their homosexual tomfoolery, hosting “fake” dances where men put on skirts and cavorted with other male miners.
Closeted miners had to get their aggression out somehow, though, such as was reported in one incident that should have been an olden-timey showdown but went the way of boners when two drunk miners decided to duel not with pistols, but with water hoses. Apparently they went into the middle of the street and started spraying each other, then ended up wrestling in the mud. That’s gayer than giving a rainbow a rimmer.
Shafted
