Desperate Drama : Mining Life Played Out in the West

More than a century ago, it was the miners who settled the West. They came for silver and gold and copper, but they brought with them railroads, agriculture, commerce and people.

Today, the mining industry that virtually created and once controlled much of the West is on the brink of collapse.

From Idaho’s Silver Valley near Canada to Arizona’s copper pits along the Mexican border, ever-increasing numbers of mines have been abandoned, their mills and smelters shuttered and endless rows of company houses left to the elements.

Braggadocio Gone

Many of them, officially closed indefinitely, will not reopen for years, if ever. Others function at sharply reduced levels. So the brassy braggadocio that gave rise to such claims as “The Richest Hill on Earth” and “Uranium Capital of the World” has given way to desperate drama as communities search for new reasons to exist.

The mines’ unemployed wander the West in a futile search for work. From Idaho they go to Colorado, from Colorado they come to Idaho, only to find conditions as bleak as in their depressed hometowns. Proud men who once worked in one of the West’s high-paying industries now wear second-hand clothing and live on food stamps, church charity and the pocket change they earn from gleaning discarded aluminum cans.

Between 1981 and 1983, nearly four of every 10 jobs disappeared from the West’s mines, mills and smelters--a staggering 46,160 jobs, according to a Los Angeles Times survey of state employment data. The number dropped from 118,053 to 71,893 in the period, the most recent for which statistics are available, while the annual payroll for such jobs fell 33%, from $3.09 billion to $2.06 billion.

More Jobs Vanish

The losses did not stop there. This January, major uranium, molybdenum and silver mines in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, respectively, all closed indefinitely, claiming 757 jobs. Then, in the last week of March, Kennecott Corp. closed its huge copper mine near Salt Lake City indefinitely. Two days later, Phelps Dodge Corp. announced the closing of its copper smelter in Ajo, Ariz.

In three days, 2,400 more mining jobs had vanished.

Foreign imports, the strong dollar, low prices, high costs and low-quality American ore are among the principal causes of mining’s decline. And few in the industry believe that today’s hard times are merely another turn of the boom-and-bust cycle of Western mining.

Richard Graeme is a fourth-generation copper worker who until recently was general manager of the now-closed Sharon Steel Corp. copper mine in Bayard, N.M. “I remember stories from my grandfather about the depressed times of ’86 and my father’s stories about depressed times of the ‘20s,” he said. “But they don’t seem to be of the severity of the depression we’re having today.”

“The future of the mining industry is going to be determined within the next six months, at least for copper,” said Robert C. Reiley, a non-ferrous metals expert with the U.S. Department of Commerce and a key player in a congressionally mandated assessment of possible copper import restrictions. “Decisions need to be made soon. . . . The political debate is building very rapidly: What does the government do, if anything? And if they do nothing, what are the consequences?”

So far, the Reagan Administration has refused to restrain copper imports despite the urgings of the International Trade Commission.

But whatever the outcome in Washington, the life and ways of the West are undergoing a profound and permanent shift, according to Richard C. Carlson, vice president with QED Research in Palo Alto, Calif. “A historic restructuring of the Western economy is under way,” he wrote in Sunset magazine’s Western Market Almanac. “New, broad-based light industry and high-tech manufacturing have made the West less dependent on such wildly fluctuating industries as mining, lumber and defense contracting.”

“It’s a developing Western trend,” Carlson added in an interview. Seeking a word to describe the state of mining, he said: “Death is a little too strong, but what’s the next worst thing? It is the near-death of non-ferrous mining in the West for a very long time . . . The transition for the communities is extremely difficult.”

Leadville, Colo. is an example of one mining community attempting the transition. Leadville--the wellspring of such mining fact and fantasy as the unsinkable Molly Brown, the Tabors and Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine--is hoping to build a new economy on tourism after losing hundreds of jobs in molybdenum mining.

“It’s been very painful,” said Elaine Kochevar, executive director of Leadville’s Chamber of Commerce. “But maybe all of us in the West have learned a great deal about diversifying so you’re not dependent on one industry. . . . Hopefully, we can leave something for the next generation so they won’t have to go through this.”

To assess this historic shift, a Times reporter visited a dozen mining communities from Ajo, Ariz., to Kellogg, Ida., from Creede, Colo., to Tonopah, Nev., where only a few years ago construction workers camped on the desert for lack of housing but where, today, the Anaconda Minerals Co. is trying to sell large numbers of vacant homes.

Here is a sampling.

He was born here, and he grew up here. He went to school here, and for 12 years, since he was graduated, Kurt Hosselkus worked at the Bulldog Mountain mine with the friends and family who had always been part of his life.

But on Jan. 29, the Homestake Mining Co. closed the mine--the largest silver operation in the state--indefinitely. The company blamed the depressed price of silver.

“Everybody’s going to feel the impact,” Hosselkus said, “the loss of friendship if nothing else.”

Without warning--the swing shift even took lunch to work, only to be turned away--nearly 100 jobs were gone in a town of 600. Almost immediately, the fabric of a tiny community began to unravel. Its unemployed began searching the West for work.

“We’re all looking to finally have to (move),” said Hosselkus, a 31-year-old assayer who is married and has two sons, ages 6 and 4. “All of us have always been right together.

“I can see it’s finally going to separate all of us, which is 30 years together. It’s going to be kind of tough.”

Tough because this is the kind of small community where the miners provided 4,300 volunteer man-hours to blast a 139-foot-long tunnel into a mountain of rock for a fire station. And tough because high mine wages supported a good life in a scenic corner of southwestern Colorado rich in outdoor recreation.

“We’re all close,” said Tom Walters, 40, who has lived here since 1980. “And we’re all in the same boat. I don’t want to move. I like it here, the mountains and my friends.”

Walters worked for “a day’s pay” at $10.90 an hour and production incentives. He made $40,000 last year. Best he ever did was $52,000, when he was among the top-10 producing miners.

With the drop in silver prices, he knew it couldn’t go on forever. “The price of metal has been going down, and anybody this was a real shock to was asleep,” he said. “But we never expected a total shutdown--partial, yeah--but not a complete shutdown. That was a shock.”

Others have weathered previous closures well, but this time there is a greater sense of finality, even if the mine eventually reopens.

“They say it might open in a year,” Hosselkus said, “but a man can’t sit around a year waiting. And I don’t think it’s going to open in a year. I’ve made several calls to people who always said to give them a call if I needed something.

“There’s nothing.”

Jim Basham, the 48-year-old mayor of Creede who still works on a mineral exploration crew here for Homestake, said: “This isn’t the first time it’s happened. It may be the first time for some people, but we always survived it. I went through three layoffs here.

“But always in the past if silver, lead and zinc were down, uranium was booming. Many of us left for a couple years to uranium and then came back. Now uranium is dead. So is oil shale and coal’s not booming, copper’s not doing well, gold’s in the same situation silver is and lead and zinc are.

“I don’t know of anything around that’s doing good.”

Morenci, Ariz.: ‘Grateful to have a job’

It was free cheese day at the old high school. Daniel F. Diaz, 40, once middle class and now living on handouts--”It’s kind of hard to say, but it’s true,” he said--had a grocery sack filled with government surplus commodities: cheese, butter, honey, flour, rice and nonfat dry milk.

On July 1, 1983, Diaz and 1,200 other union workers struck the Phelps Dodge copper mine and smelter here after refusing to give up cost-of-living raises and to allow lower wages for new hires, as the company demanded. Five weeks later, Phelps Dodge--plagued by losses that had forced it to close temporarily in 1982 for the first time since the Depression--replaced the strikers with new workers at lower wages.

Violence, the marshaling of state police and the use of tear gas followed in what has become a prolonged and classic Western battle between organized labor and the mines. Once strong in the mining West, organized labor is on the defensive, pressured for concessions as mining companies seek to reduce costs.

In Ajo, Phelps Dodge closed its mine last August and announced the smelter’s closing in March. There, even the lower-paid replacement workers have lost their jobs.

When current labor contracts in the great open-pit copper mines expire next year, many in the industry see “more Morencis.” Morenci has thus become both a symbol and struggle along the rich ore bodies of the intermountain West.

The strike here is 22 months old, the 1,000 replacement workers have voted to do away with unions and the towns of Morenci and neighboring Clifton have divided against themselves: worker vs. striker.

“I’m very grateful to have a job,” said Bob Walmer, a 37-year-old, $80-a-day dump man at the mine. He spent two years on layoff from another copper job before coming to Morenci a year ago. He pays the company $48 a month for a kitchenette apartment. With a wife and child at his home in Tucson, he said, “I have to work. (The strikers) didn’t think of their families. . . . I’ve got bills to pay and we’ve got to eat.

“I’m down $5,000 a year (in pay). I made $22,000 my last year at Duval (Corp.). In 12 months here, I’ve made $17,000. We live paycheck to paycheck. As times get better, the company will raise us. . . . But times are tough and money is tight.

“I think the strikers should have been thankful to have jobs.”

Said Diaz: “My father was a union man. His father was a union man. How would it look if I were to go in there? I believe in it.”

The father of four, he began working for the company in 1969 at $21 a day. When he struck, he was a railroad track laborer making $88 a day and buying a house. Now the job pays $75 a day.

Diaz swept his arm in the direction of several strikers carrying their free commodities and said, “What have they been fighting for? Their life here, their honor and all the things these men have fought for for so long. The company was trying to go back and we’re looking at the future.

“I know it hurts. I can’t give the kids what I want to give them. My kid says, ‘What am I going to do about my baseball uniform?’ I can’t do anything about it.”

Diaz has lost his house and he survives on $50 a week in strike benefits from the United Steelworkers of America. The union pays his $200-a-month rent and he gets $325 a month in food stamps. The local food bank helps too. His father worked for the company for 27 years, but Diaz reluctantly acknowledged that his own days as a copper worker are most likely over.

“They’re not going to break me,” he said. “They may dissolve the union, but they can’t break me.”

Five years ago, there were 8,000 jobs in the uranium industry here, and Grants was struggling to keep pace with its growth. There were 45 mines in production and plans for 25 more.

Today, there is one mine producing, only about 400 uranium jobs, and Grants is struggling to survive.

In the nation’s brief romance with, and divorce from, nuclear power plants, perhaps no community in America boomed so much or busted so hard as Grants.

“They thought 100,000 people were going to live here by the year 2000,” said Mark A. Lautman, who came here 18 months ago to recruit new industry as executive director of the Greater Grants Industrial Development Foundation. “It was on its way to 30,000, and now there’s 14,000. The uranium game is over, and anyone who thinks it isn’t is kidding himself.

“What you’ve got here now is a community where uranium is finished, and the town’s got to find another reason to exist.”

About 250 houses are empty or for sale, the mobile home parks have been stripped of their life, and businesses continue to decline. Two Circle K convenience stores are boarded up.

Quivera Mining, a subsidiary of Kerr-McGee Corp., shut down its mine and related facilities at Ambrosia Lake near here in January, leaving about 400 persons without jobs.

“Until Kerr-McGee announced its closing, people thought Grants had turned around,” said Lautman, citing 450 recently created jobs at a new state prison, a highway department office and a coal mine. “We had optimism. No one suspected Kerr-McGee would close.”

In nearby Milan, Homestake Mining continues mining and milling uranium into “yellowcake,” which is then enriched for use in nuclear power plants. In its heyday, more than 800 people were employed at five Homestake mines in Ambrosia Lake. Only one mine operates now and the company employs 276.

Homestake’s general manger here, John Parker, gloomily acknowledged that Homestake’s closing is inevitable, given the cancellation of 110 U.S. nuclear power plants in recent years. Yellowcake prices today, at about $15 a pound, are one-third of their 1980 levels. The company’s uranium mill is licensed to process 3,400 tons of ore a day, 365 days a year.

It processes 550 tons a day, four days a week.

The end came for John Larry Terkla in a fleeting few moments of terror: After killing his ex-wife and a policeman responding to their domestic quarrel, Terkla turned his .357 Magnum on himself.

But the events of Feb. 10, according to some family friends, actually began with the hard times that had plagued Terkla since he lost his job in the closing of the Anaconda Minerals Co. smelter here in 1980.

Gary Loshesky, a juvenile probation officer and pallbearer for Ida Terkla, calls it “a classic example” of the individual stress and family decay in this former company town more than four years after the smelter--the town’s major employer--closed.

“He was off unemployment (compensation),” Loshesky said. “The bank was going to repossess his vehicle, he had lost his home--the whole frustration coupled with his booze, and it just fell apart. The smelter (closing) was the beginning. He just reached a point. . . .

“It’s scary. There are other people out there at the same point.”

The town of Anaconda was among the earliest to feel the impact in the current wave of mining shutdowns breaking over the West. That times here should still be so harsh after so long bodes ill for other communities forced to find a future without mining, for perhaps no company has done more to cushion a mining town’s loss than Anaconda Minerals, a division of Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield Co.

Among other things, the firm gave $3 million to a public Local Development Corp. to nurture new industry. The money has produced 175 to 200 jobs so far, but there were still 25% fewer jobs--1,200 fewer--in February of this year than in February of 1980. Last year, welfare replaced unemployment insurance as the fourth-largest source of income here. Unemployment is officially at 12.5%.

Don Peters figures he has worked only about 30 weeks since March, 1983, when he lost his job at an Anaconda Minerals facility in nearby Butte. His $166 a week in unemployment benefits ran out six weeks ago. He, his wife and three children living at home now get food stamps. He made $30,000 the last year he worked. Now he picks up aluminum cans.

“I can do almost anything,” he said, “and I’m not afraid to do it. I want a job and I can’t get one. I follow everything anyone has ever told me about somebody hiring. I get there and they tell me they have no intentions of hiring.”

For years, many who finished school here went to work on The Hill, as the smelter is called. “I was planning on it,” said Frank Gress, 19. “Now we’re on welfare, my wife doesn’t work and her dad (a former smelter worker) is on welfare too.”

Loshesky, who grew up here and sees an increasing number of unemployment-related problems in youth crime, said: “I don’t think we’re past the critical point. We’re at the critical point right now. But last year I thought we were at the critical point, and then they closed the railroad. We’re still going down. There are some minor things showing hope and promise, but we’re still going down.”

“It’s a psychologically depressed community,” said Karen Eiblmayr, a clinical psychologist hired as a specialist for the unemployed at the Southwest Montana Mental Health Center here. “There is no hope. They’re trying to do things to make it work, but families are under so much stress and strain that I don’t know what will happen.”

It was the second Saturday of the month, and, as usual, the Rev. Kenneth Peterson had opened the doors to his Osburn Community Baptist Church for the unemployed to receive free clothing, blankets and rice.

Doris Herra, the wife of an unemployed Bunker Hill Co. mine worker, picked over the second-hand clothing with her 15-year-old daughter, Tammy. “We were doing so well,” she said, “and the mine goes down and we have nothing.”

They used to call 52-year-old John Herra “the money-hungry hoist man.” Lowering both men and materials down the mine shaft, he would work overtime, he would work weekends and in the last two years that he worked, he took only two days off. For 14 years he worked for Bunker Hill, but he has not worked since Jan. 15, 1982.

So the Herras have depleted their savings and their unemployment benefits.

They live on food stamps, energy assistance, aluminum can bounties and free commodities.

They eat “lots of soup” and prepare the slow-cooking free rice on a wood stove to conserve bottled gas. A working daughter provides cash for gasoline and a telephone.

Although their home is paid for, they have failed to pay $129 in taxes on it, and the fire insurance will lapse for non-payment of the $109 premium.

Tammy, a freshman, eats free hot lunches at school, skips school activities even though she is a cheerleader, and will miss the prom for lack of a prom dress. “I know that money could be used for paying the light bill,” she said. Most classmates share her plight. “We don’t have locks on our lockers,” she said, “ ‘cause we don’t have anything to steal.”

Beginning in August of 1981, the Bunker Hill Co. began closing its silver, lead and zinc mine and smelter here. Eventually, 2,100 jobs were lost. Today, the mine, under different ownership, is flooding with ground water.

Like so many here, Herra has searched the West for work. He has applied and been turned down for minimum-wage jobs. And, at 52, he realizes the burden of starting over. “I’m not defeated--not by a long shot,” he said. “But I’m frustrated and angry. The whole damn thing, and with my age--they don’t come right out and say it, but just because a guy’s 50 years old. . . .

“I don’t think there will ever be a good, steady job for me again. There’s not going to be any kind of job with retirement in mind. The jobs are going to be temporary, fill-ins, and you’re not going to have any choice.”

Meanwhile, neighboring silver mines have begun their own layoffs because of low prices.

“They’re talking about laying off, not hiring,” said Paul Dunkel, 43, a city councilman and laid-off track worker from the Bulldog Mine in Creede, Colo., who drove his 1979 Ford pickup to Kellogg in search of a job.

What he found instead, he described during a visit to the Kellogg employment office:

“Used to, when I was young, I’d quit my job and go over the hill and get a (mining) job and wouldn’t even miss a shift. You always felt secure as a miner. Grants, N.M.--you could go down there and if you were alive you could get a job.

“This time, it’s kind of frightening. I don’t remember all the places I’ve looked. I went to a gold mine in Washington where they’re supposed to hire 200 men. I thought I’d have a real good chance. They didn’t even talk to me. I just come up here on a hope, and around here I run into a lot of guys out of work. It’s sure discouraging. It doesn’t look too good anyplace. I should have just stayed home. . . . “

Times researcher Dallas Jamison also contributed to this story.