Rock burst

Bert and Marie Russell offer readers grassroots cultural history in this collection of interviews with ordinary people, who often lived extraordinary lives, in the mining district and neighboring areas of north Idaho. Here are stories of miners who worked hand-in-hand with death - an all too frequent visitor summoned by rock bursts, fires, accidents, or the painful, life-shortening disease, silicosis.

Readers will find much of interest, whether the interviewees are personally known to the reader or not, because of the wealth of information about how certain processes were performed: how ice was cut, stored, and sold for refrigeration; how to walk on floating logs and how to roll them (birling) in competitions; how various jobs in the mines were performed; or how logging crews were fed and their food prepared.

Here too are details about working conditions: how early miners were totally unprotected from particulates that damaged their lungs: how they emerged from the hot mines in wet clothes that froze in the winter chill; how lack of safety regulations put their lives in danger; how the prospect of unionization brought turmoil to the community; and how young children performed the work of adults for minimal pay.