Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 July 1879 — A Frightful Fall [ARTICLE]

A Frightful Fall

Three miners in the Savage mine at Virginia City Nev, started up the shaft just as the 6 o’clock morning whistle blew. They were Nicholas Dickmon, John Champion and T. K. Johnson. They had worked all night. When 50 feet from the surface and 1.300 feet from the bottom of the shaft they raug for the cage to stop so that several articles might be thrown into a compartment. Dickmon and Champion were leaning with their backs against the wall plates and their feet on the cage. Suddenly without warning the cage began to go up. The feet of the two men were thrown upwards in an instant, and botli slipped backward between the cage and the timbers. Champion caught one edge of the cage and saved himself, but Dickmon fell the 13JO feet to the bottom of the shaft. Johnson says that when Dickmon was falling he uttered not a word, but gave him a look that he will never forget till his dying day. When his body was recovered by the men working below it was mangled beyond the possibility of recognition. The left arm and right leg were severed from the trunk, the abdomen was shockingly lacerated and the head was utterly annihilated. The body was gathered up piece by piece and placed in a sack, in which it was earned to the surface. The accident was brought about by a blunder on the part of the engineer at the mouth of the shaft.