Taylor's Crew - Bullion Mine

 

“S.M. Taylor is a man of about forty years of age and a conservative, intelligent fellow thoroughly able to handle men, and a prospector in this region for many years. He had charge of the Bullion fire along the Montana-Idaho line east of Wallace. When Mr. Taylor discovered that he was surrounded by fires he took his crew, consisting of about sixty men, to the tunnel of the Bullion mine, which seemed to Mr. Taylor to offer absolute protection. One of the men, Mr. Ryson, who was with the crew, knew the tunnel thoroughly, owing to the fact that he had made it. Most of the crew who went tunnel passed an overhead air shaft. Eight of the men, however, did not do this and the smoke rushed in to where these eight men were located and suffocated them. The remaining crew came out a few hours afterward without any injury; neither had they experienced any inconvenience during the time they were in the tunnel. Mr. Taylor immediately notified me of the conditions and although this was within about four miles of the Northern Pacific Railway, several large trestles along the mountain had burned out; therefore I could not depend wholly upon the railroad to bring these dead men to Wallace, so I sent a crew of men the next day to bury the dead bodies. About ten days later, when the railroad was sufficiently repaired on both sides of the mountain to make it more convenient for handling these bodies, I sent a crew of men to the place with pack horses to disinter the bodies and bring them to the railroad, where through the kindness of the Northern Pacific Railway Company, a special car brought them across the mountain to Dorsey. At this point a trestle was still not replaced and the dead bodies were transferred to another special train sent out from Wallace. The bodies were delivered at the morgue at Wallace and prepared for burial and a few days later they were given Christian burial in the Wallace cemetery.”

 

 List of Taylor's crew,  their pay and specific details.

 Excerpt from the collection of “When The Mountains Roared”, (page 20 - 21) USDA Forest Service