My dad and "The Mine"

My dad would be 99 years old if he was still alive. He might have lived that long but he spent too many years underground as a hard-rock miner, and he died from silicosis, "the miner's con", when he was 76 years old.

Got to thinking about Dad and my childhood at the Flathead Mine after a thoughtful man recently sent me a 1968 newspaper clipping wherein a reporter interviewed my father. The Missoulian article was titled "Flathead Silver Mine."

The first 12 years of this column were headed, "Hello Hungry Horse by the Hog Heaven Correspondent." That's because I was raised in the Hog Heaven country, "So far back in the hills they had to pipe in daylight." Started writing the column for Mel Ruder after going to Washington, D.C. on the staff of Senator Lee Metcalf during the Kennedy Administration. The personal anecdotes about our nation's capital and the goings on in "Foggy Bottom" were presented from a mountain boy's point of view.

At one time those diggings southwest of Kila were called, "The Richest Silver Mine on Earth"and just behind the Great Northern Railroad, was the biggest payroll in Flathead County. After World War II the mine shut down and a former hard rock shaft man named Waino Lindbom was allowed to scour the mountain and old dumps for whatever minerals he could find. The 1968 article was done by interviewing Waino and my dad, Logan, at the site:

"Logan Ostrom of Kalispell, Flathead Mine Foreman 1929 through 1946, reckons Lindbom's ore must be grading out at least 14 ounces of silver per ton. At $2.00 per ounce refined and after the company takes its owner's share, 30 to 50 tons of ore per day should leave Mr. Lindbom enough to meet his payroll plus a bit for the pocket."

"One find like the million-dollar pocket that Ostrom and his men tunneled to in the 1930s could make Lindbom rich and the Anaconda Company richer. Ostrom maintains that some of the grass-roots ore discovered graded out to 28,000 ounces per ton, which is as near pure as man is ever apt to lay hands on."

Ostrom recalls ironic details from the early days. "They were paying the boys $5 a day before the depression hit home and before the smelter strike around 1934, he said. "Silver was bringing 25 cents an ounce then. After Roosevelt and the Reconstruction Finance Corp. gave the company incentive by pegging the price at 77.7 cents per ounce, and after the smelter strike, the mine opened up again and the boys were getting $2.25 a day. That, said Ostrom, is the way the company worked."

"Ostrom remembers building the road up to the mine, three miles off the Brown's Meadow Road from Kila (over to Niarada). They trucked ore down to 60-ton railroad cars at Kila, which then traveled the long way to Butte by way of Columbia Falls, West Glacier and Great Falls.

"Ostrom said the company first prospected Hog Heaven as early as 1914, but didn't find much. They began digging in earnest in 1927 and Ostrom himself was sent over from Butte in 1929." (End of quotes from Missoulian story)

Somewhere back in my mind I recall that before the depression when they were paying the boys $5 per day, my dad was a contract miner being paid for how many tons of ore he could blast from the face of a tunnel each shift and he averaged $11 per day. Our family was not living like royalty but eleven dollars a day was a lot of money in the Hoover administration and he bought a touring sedan with pull down side curtains. We had it about two years before the roof fell in on the American economy and the Great Depression hit Montana.

Will the millions of dollars worth of silver still nestled in the Hog Heaven Hills ever be mined? The company that profiled the remaining ore with diamond drilling told me in 1981 that they could not and would not go after that ore until the price of silver went above six dollars an ounce. The world has changed, the price of silver hasn't done much and the restrictions won by well-financed environmental groups tells me that it won't happen in my lifetime, even if I lived to be a hundred.

G. George Ostrom is news director of KOFI Radio and a Flathead Publishing Group columnist.