Volume 035-4 - October 1981 (8 pages)

below that depth and the lower levels will be allowed to fill with water. In case the water should rise faster than anticipated, the steam pumps will be put into use.” Mary Foote wrote about this incident also to her friend Helena Gilder, in a letter, dated February 7, 1897: “We have had a catastrophe at the North Star. The great spur wheel that drives the pump broke, three days ago, with a sound like the explosion of a magazine. The pump is old and the iron had crystallized. The pump rod is one half mile long! descending the incline shaft (main shaft) and driving six or seven pumpsat different stations, down to the 2000 foot level. All these pumps are stopped now, and the wateris rising in the lower levels. Arthur (her husband) is in San Francisco, attending to the casting of a new wheel.” A “spur wheel” is nowadays called a gear wheel, it was probably very much like the one, illustrated on page 15 of the Bulletin for April 1979. The cause of the failure was, what is now called metal fatigue, which is indeed caused by recrystallization in the metal. Metal with small crystals is the strongest. Under the influence of stresses, especially alternating stresses, some crystals grow at the expense of others, weakening the metal to the breaking point when they become large enough. In her story, Mary Foote fused these two events into one. She suggests a union of some kind between the pump man and the pump he took care of and, at the moment of the pump man’s death, the pump refuses to operate any longer. The reader will notice several differences in detail between the reports of the actual events and the story. —Editor The Superindendent’s residence at the North Star Mine. HOW THE PUMP STOPPED AT THE MORNING WATCH by Mary Hallock Foote The main shaft of the Morning Watch is an incline, sunk on the veintoa depth below daylight of eighteen hundred feet; there are lower workings still, in the twenty-one hundred, for the mine is one of the patriarchs of the golden age in northern California and its famous vein, though small, has been richly persistent. The shaft is a specimen of good early construction in deep mining; it has two compartments, answering to the two vital functions of pumping and hoisting. A man walking up the hoist may step into the pump shaft between timbers to avoid a car, but he must then be wary of the pump rod. The pump rod at the Morning Watch is half a mile long; with a measured movement, mighty, conclusive, slow, it crawls a little way up the shaft, waitsa breath, then plunges down, and you hear subterranean sobs and gulpings where the twelve pumps at their stations are sucking water from the mine. These are the water guard which is never relieved. Nights and Sundays, frost or flood or dry, the pumps never rest. Each lifts its load to the brother above him, sweating cold sweat and smeared with grease and slime, fighting the climbing waters. The stroke of the pumprod is the pulse of the mine. If the pulse should stop and the waters rise, the pumps as they go under are ‘‘drowned’’. In their bitter costliness, in the depths from which they rise, though born in sunlight, the waters of the “sump” might typify the encroaching power of evil in man’s nature—a power that springs from good, that yet may be turned to good, but over which conscience, like the pumps, must keep unsleeping watch and ward. Between the Cornish miner and the Cornish pump there is a constitutional affinity and an ancient hereditary understanding. Both are governed and driven by the power on 27

below that depth and the lower levels will be allowed to fill with water. In case the water should rise faster than anticipated, the steam pumps will be put into use.” Mary Foote wrote about this incident also to her friend Helena Gilder, in a letter, dated February 7, 1897: “We have had a catastrophe at the North Star. The great spur wheel that drives the pump broke, three days ago, with a sound like the explosion of a magazine. The pump is old and the iron had crystallized. The pump rod is one half mile long! descending the incline shaft (main shaft) and driving six or seven pumpsat different stations, down to the 2000 foot level. All these pumps are stopped now, and the wateris rising in the lower levels. Arthur (her husband) is in San Francisco, attending to the casting of a new wheel.” A “spur wheel” is nowadays called a gear wheel, it was probably very much like the one, illustrated on page 15 of the Bulletin for April 1979. The cause of the failure was, what is now called metal fatigue, which is indeed caused by recrystallization in the metal. Metal with small crystals is the strongest. Under the influence of stresses, especially alternating stresses, some crystals grow at the expense of others, weakening the metal to the breaking point when they become large enough. In her story, Mary Foote fused these two events into one. She suggests a union of some kind between the pump man and the pump he took care of and, at the moment of the pump man’s death, the pump refuses to operate any longer. The reader will notice several differences in detail between the reports of the actual events and the story. —Editor The Superindendent’s residence at the North Star Mine. HOW THE PUMP STOPPED AT THE MORNING WATCH by Mary Hallock Foote The main shaft of the Morning

Watch is an incline, sunk on the veintoa depth below daylight of eighteen hundred feet; there are lower workings still, in the twenty-one hundred, for the mine is one of the patriarchs of the golden age in northern California and its famous vein, though small, has been richly persistent. The shaft is a specimen of good early construction in deep mining; it has two compartments, answering to the two vital functions of pumping and hoisting. A man walking up the hoist may step into the pump shaft between timbers to avoid a car, but he must then be wary of the pump rod. The pump rod at the Morning Watch is half a mile long; with a measured movement, mighty, conclusive, slow, it crawls a little way up the shaft, waitsa breath, then plunges down, and you hear subterranean sobs and gulpings where the twelve pumps at their stations are sucking water from the mine. These are the water guard which is never relieved. Nights and Sundays, frost or flood or dry, the pumps never rest. Each lifts its load to the brother above him, sweating cold sweat and smeared with grease and slime, fighting the climbing waters. The stroke of the pumprod is the pulse of the mine. If the pulse should stop and the waters rise, the pumps as they go under are ‘‘drowned’’. In their bitter costliness, in the depths from which they rise, though born in sunlight, the waters of the “sump” might typify the encroaching power of evil in man’s nature—a power that springs from good, that yet may be turned to good, but over which conscience, like the pumps, must keep unsleeping watch and ward. Between the Cornish miner and the Cornish pump there is a constitutional affinity and an ancient hereditary understanding. Both are governed and driven by the power on 27