Sunshine Miners Memorial

Hard-rock miners did not fear fire. The Sunshine was a wet mine cut through stone more than a mile deep, the largest silver mine in the country, and there was little in it to burn. On May 2, 1972, shortly before noon, smoke began moving through its workings, and nobody could find where it came from. The evacuation order came about twenty minutes later. By then carbon monoxide was spreading through the levels where most of the 173 men underground were working.

Eighty men got out. The hoist lifting miners toward the surface stopped when its operator died at the controls, and the men below were cut off. Rescuers from mines across the region and from Canada worked for a week without knowing whether anyone was still alive. On May 9 they found two, Tom Wilkinson and Ron Flory, who had gone deeper, found a trickle of fresh air from a borehole, and waited in the dark. Ninety-one men died. It remains one of the worst hard-rock mining disasters in American history, and it forced changes to the nation's mine-safety laws.

The memorial stands where Big Creek comes down to the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene, just off the interstate, with the mine a couple of miles up the canyon. Ken Lonn, who worked as a shift boss at the Sunshine after the fire, built the thirteen-foot steel miner in the mine's own plant. He raises a rock drill overhead, the lamp on his hard hat aimed up the canyon toward the mine. The names of the ninety-one are on the base with a poem by Phil Batt, who later served as Idaho's governor, and ninety-one small headstones stand in front of him. Every May 2 the valley gathers here, and a miner's headlamp is switched off for each man.