Bruce Gillen spent several life-changing months mining for gold in the Bessie G mine back in 1979. Nearly 50 years later, he’s still talking about it.
Gillen has been sharing his experiences as a miner in the form of storytelling, poems and songs since the early 2000s. He has performed at festivals, events, the Animas Museum and libraries – including the Fort Lewis Mesa Library in Hesperus on Thursday.
About 15 attendees listened, enraptured, to Gillen’s colorful tales about the hard labor he endured, the nights he spent around the fire with his fellow miners, his wild weekends in Durango during breaks from the mine and his young infatuation with the Diamond Belle Saloon girls.
“We all found great satisfaction in working hard and earning our pay,” he said. “We always got the job done, and more. Ore cars were pushed out and dumped by hand, rock was shoveled, and track was laid. Timber was carried in on our backs, and practically every day we blasted.”
Gillen said he shares his stories because they interest people, and because they help keep that era alive in the minds of residents – which feels especially prominent this year, as Colorado approaches its 150th birthday on Aug. 1.
“My time at the Bessie G was a long time ago, but I think about it almost every day, because it was a time that changed me,” he said. “A spell was cast on me that I have never been able to shake, and it will be with me to the end.”
The poems he recites – many of them by Robert W. Service – and the songs he sings help convey the rich experience of that time in his life in a way stories alone cannot, he said.
“Poetry conveys emotion, and Robert Service does that better than I could,” he said.
The Bessie G mine, located about 30 miles southwest of Durango and about 12,000 feet in elevation in the La Plata Mountains, gained a formidable reputation during its years of operation.
It first opened around 1880 under a different name – “Egyptian Queen” – before being renamed Bessie G in 1891. Operations continued until about 1987. When Gillen worked the mine, it was owned by Don DeLuche. It was later owned by Sierra Resources and Exxon Corp. before ending up under the purview of its current owner.
The mine is mentioned close to 400 times in The Durango Herald archives – most famously for an avalanche rescue effort in 1985 involving two miners, only one of whom survived the ordeal.
“Miner saved from ‘ice coffin,’” read a Nov. 20, 1985, Herald headline.
The miner was Lester Jay Morlang, a 31-year-old mechanical consultant who survived 22 hours trapped in the gold mine under 50 feet of snow. Fellow miner Jack Ritten, who was 58 at the time, died from the incident, which involved a series of three avalanches on Nov. 17 and 18, one of which was man-made amid rescue efforts.
Morlang was eventually able to dig himself out of the nearly 50 feet of snow from the first avalanche before being hit by another 2 to 3 feet of snow. He dug himself out once more and was rescued Nov. 19, nearly 48 hours after the first wave buried him, when a helicopter spotted him.
“I thought the ice coffin was going to be it,” he told the Herald as he sat in a wheelchair at Mercy Medical Center just days after the incident.
Morlang suffered frostbite to his ears and fingers, and had to undergo therapy to regain his dexterity.
Gillen no longer worked at Bessie G when the avalanche occurred, but he remembers the moment he heard about the incident.
He was in California at the time, and caught wind of the Herald’s coverage, which later informed a Reader’s Digest piece titled, “Miracle Man on Snowstorm Peak.”
He was reminded of some of his own run-ins with heavy snow near the mine, including one instance in which a small avalanche buried his tent while he was not inside of it, causing him to have to dig it out over the course of several hours.
Just last week, Gillen – completely by chance – met a man who appeared to be the best friend of Ritten, the miner who did not survive the 1985 incident.
Gillen was driving near Silverton when he passed a rickety shack with a sign on it that read, “miner.”
Something told him he needed to turn around, he said.
“When I went back, there was a gentleman in his mid-80s – you know, he obviously was a man who had worked manual labor hard his whole life. He was a miner,” he said. “... And I told him that I had worked at the Bessie G mine, and he said, ‘What mine did you say?’ I said, ‘Well, the Bessie G,’ and he put his hand to his heart. He says, ‘Oh my gosh, my best friend died in a snow avalanche at the Bessie G. He was the nicest man I ever knew, and he taught me everything I knew about mining.’ Isn’t that something amazing?”
Gillen closed his storytelling session with a poem of his own, recounting a moment in 2006 at the Notch – the overlook above the Bessie G Mine – when he overheard a man telling his family stories about the miners of old, unaware that one of those miners was listening.
“Little did the storyteller know that the one sitting nearby in the rocky cleft was one of those Bessie G miners, one of the miners from long ago,” he recited. “I stayed silent as the story was told, and remembered my days of old, my days as a Bessie G miner, a miner from long ago.”
epond@durangoherald.com
