Trapped by Karen Tintori

Author:Karen Tintori
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Monday, November 15,1909

As Cherry’s mining families grew agitated over the nightlong delay in the rescue attempts, and rumors of retaliation against Cowley, Rosenjack, Deans and mine officials continued to circulate, Cherry officials feared that keeping the saloons open would only fuel a fury just beginning to simmer. Mayor Connelly ordered every one of Cherry’s seventeen saloons closed. Accompanied by two aldermen, Frank E Buck and Joseph Neidetcher, he advised each saloonkeeper in town, one by one. Without exception, the saloonkeepers promised to keep their establishments closed until the mayor decreed the crisis had passed.

Although Connelly was offered peacekeeping assistance from his counterparts in neighboring towns, he was confident that by deputizing extra marshals in Cherry he could maintain order. He accepted help only from Mendota and from Princeton sheriff Alfred Skoglund, who sent some of his deputies.

With the hotels and boardinghouses bursting to capacity with rescuers and the curious, housing for the additional rescue workers and relief aides was critical. In addition to the nurses and doctors and Roman Catholic sisters who had rushed to Cherry, three Salvation Army officers, two deaconesses of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a deaconess and a nurse from the Congregational church, one Methodist minister and three employees from the United Charities of Chicago had come to minister to the stricken families. Railroad president A. J. Earling ordered special trains to bring dining and sleeping cars to Cherry to house this additional help.

* * *

An early morning train brought Professor George S. Rice and his assistant, J. W. Paul, with their Draeger oxygen helmets and other rescue equipment from the Pittsburgh mine rescue operation. Like thirty-two-year-old R Y. Williams, Rice, forty-five, and Paul, forty, both fathers of small children, graduated from the School of Mines of Columbia College in New York. Paul served previously as chief of the West Virginia Department of Mines, and all three were considered prominent in their field.

Workers had begun unsealing the main shaft at 5:30 A.M. and officials decided to try sending the rescue team down on the cage. Shortly before 9:00 A.M., as workers removed the last of the coverings and started a steam jet in the air shaft to circulate air, the crowd now reassembled around the shaft saw a burst of smoke belch from the mine. Then the air was clear. Officials took this as proof that the fire was smothered and that the initial smoke that belched out was just two-day-old residue that had been trapped right beneath the sealings. They decided to go in to begin pulling out bodies and any living men, and prepared for the hysteria they were certain would come.

As Sheriff Skoglund swore in dozens more deputies to help maintain order, R. Y. Williams and Thomas Moses donned their oxygen tanks. Once more, the rescue team reviewed the hoisting signals while the restraining rope strung around the shaft area was moved back five hundred feet and reinforced with deputies. They stationed themselves both at the shaft and along the ropeline to hold back the crowd now estimated at more than two thousand.

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