How to Get from Here to There? Try Going Straight up the Middle

By Gary Oberbillig

I was to be a roustabout, as my father Ernie described it, doing whatever roll-up-your-sleeves, muscle jobs were needed in the family mining operations in Valley County that summer of 1961.

Part of the job would be to act as a watchman at the old mercury mine at Cinnabar, and to keep busy with preliminary salvage work on the collapsed roof of the main mill building.