Brooks' Book

The thought came to me the other day that a person could walk a lot of miles beneath the surface of Baker County.

A brave person could anyway, by which I mean a stupid one.

That the county has an abundance of subterranean travel routes occurred to me while I was standing, snowshoes strapped to my boots, near where the north fork of Pine Creek spills into the mainstem of that stream.

(To clarify: This particular Pine Creek is the one that tumbles out of the Elkhorns, not the one in the Wallowas. Baker County, for all its considerable attributes, is lousy with places whose names are the geographic equivalent of a baby's bowl of rice cereal — nutritious but abysmally bland. We ought to have more Conundrum Creeks and Sufferin' Smith Springs, and fewer Rock Creeks and Bald Mountains.)

Once I got to pondering the maze of tunnels, shafts and drifts that miners gouged so many decades ago through Baker County's bedrock, the reality of the thing snagged in my mind, like a fishhook that hangs up on the bottom because you reeled in too slowly. This distracted me to such a degree that I forgot to peer into the woods to see what strangely beautiful sculptures the wind had conjured since the last heavy fall of snow.

I blame Howard Brooks.

He wrote the book, is the thing, and it was his words that I was remembering as I stood there and watched the water ripple past on its sedimentary bed.

Brooks, who lives in Baker City, is a retired geologist but I've always figured the man had a lot of the prospector in him. I can at any rate easily imagine Brooks with a pickaxe slung over his shoulder, leading a mule by a hank of frayed rope.

His book, published in 2007 by the Baker County Historical Society, is titled "A Pictorial History of Gold Mining in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon."

Brooks' book is a fine piece of work. It joins volumes such as Miles F. Potter's "Oregon's Golden Years" on the list of publications that anyone who's fascinated by the region's mining history would relish reading, and should own.

But the problem with Brooks' book, as I mentioned, is that his tales, so easy to read thanks to his straightforward prose, once implanted in the readers' head can resist dislodging as stubbornly as a chunk of old ice on a sidewalk.

The particular story I was recalling as I stood beside the north fork of Pine Creek chronicles the Baisley-Elkhorn mine. That mine, long abandoned like most of its 19th century contemporaries, is just a mile or so up the north fork from where I stood. I have hiked past the Baisley-Elkhorn probably half a dozen times, on my way up the steep rough path that climbs to the pass on the shoulder of Hunt Mountain, between Pine and Rock creeks.

Brooks wrote that the Baisley-Elkhorn consisted of "10,000 feet of underground workings." Think about that. Almost two miles bored into the bowels of Baker County — and the Baisley-Elkhorn was by the standards of local argonauts a modestly sized operation.

Baker County's biggest mine, the Cornucopia, up Pine Creek (the other Pine Creek), boasted 36 miles of diggings.

Brooks didn't calculate a total for the county and I doubt any other author has, either, at least not in a single book. But Brooks did note that miners dug hundreds of tunnels, and so the below-ground mileage in the county must at least exceed 1,000.

This statistic amazes me, and it frightens me a little, too.

What I was thinking there at the stream, on a day cloudy yet bright because of the snow, was how curious it felt to stand on firm ground and to know that, cleaving the infinite blackness underneath, are hundreds of miles of passageways where for perhaps as long as a century no boot has stepped, no lung has processed the thin, clammy air.

I'm sure some of those cramped spaces no longer exist, are choked with the rubble (perhaps valuable rubble) from walls and ceilings that crumbled as the wood beams that held them rotted to pulp.

Some, but certainly not all.

And that is for me the scary part of this story.

Goosebumps bead my forearms at the very idea that a person could perhaps find his way into that labyrinth of lightless corridors but never find his way back out, doomed there in the awful silent dark, entombed by layers of stone that effortlessly smother the fiercest scream.

This is, of course, a predicament that only the foolhardy would ever get into. Entering an abandoned mine, even for a few feet, not only epitomizes idiocy, but it might well be illegal, since some old mines are private property. Private or no, they're all immensely dangerous.

Yet the tunnels exist, as Brooks has shown with his exhaustive research, and I can't help but remember this fact.

These somehow foreign places are, I suppose, the hidden, or at least the obscure, part of Baker County's otherwise well-known legacy of mining.

The miners who hacked those holes and who walked in them helped build Baker County with the wealth they gleaned from the earth. Those miners, with few exceptions, are long in their graves.

But their handiwork, even though unseen, lingers, and likely will after the evidence of their endeavors on the surface have disappeared to all but the trained and inquisitive eye.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.