24th – Went to work on the roasters on the big hill North of Keswick & worked there 6 nites & then off Friday.
Jesse is not writing this on the exact day. The next few entries is his recollection of the next week or two. The “6 nites” refers to next week, possibly starting today on the 24th or tomorrow which is a Saturday.
Keswick is 53 miles south of Castella, so the boys would have taken the Southern Pacific Railway to get there. At the turn of the century, Keswick was the biggest town in Shasta County even though it was established as a company site and annex of Redding, California. It was a town so rough that the company built a fence between the company housing and the main road so that the employees’ wives would not see all of the depraved behavior of the men in the many saloons. Keswick’s whole economy was based on the copper mining industry coming out of Iron Mountain, now a superfund site for toxic waste. While “superfund site” is a modern term, even in 1897, people recognized what a poisonous situation that mining company created.
The Bench Boys were not working in the mountains as miners. They worked to process the ore after other people mined it. The Iron Mountain mines’ metals and minerals were so heterogeneous that the Mountain Copper Company had to extensively (and expensively) process the ore to separate the different products. First the crushed up ore is brought by train car on the company railway to the open-air roasters where it is initially cooked. Then the roasted ore is moved to the smelters where it is melted down for hours or days. The fumes and poisons coming off the roasters and smelters are extremely dangerous, exposing workers to lead, arsenic, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, cadmium, and silica. Because this process was a 24-7 operation, that might be why Jesse writes that he worked night shifts. Imagine Jesse, John, and Tom being exposed to toxins worse than the rescuers working at the World Trade Center following 9-11. Silicosis is a known risk factor for tuberculosis. Could a week of working there have impacted Jesse’s health in the future? Knowing what we know now about exposure to those substances and how things worked out for Jesse, one can’t help but wonder if this week-long experience at Iron Mountain was THE week that would affect the rest of his life.
Check out the links below for excellent information regarding Iron Mountain, the Mountain Copper Company, and Keswick:
Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 93, Number 158, 30 July 1897
Travelin’ in Time: Keswick was created as a copper smelter boomtown
SF Gate, Inside a toxic hellhole, Iron Mountain Mine
The production of consumption: addressing the impact of mineral mining on tuberculosis in southern Africa
NIH: U.S. National Library of Medicine, Haz-Map
A brief description of oxidation roasting:
