A South Dakota Mine Blast in 1904 Opened a Passage the Timberman Refused to Reenter

On February 9th, 1904, a timberman named Ansel Vreeland was lowered to the 1,250 level of the Ellison shaft beneath Lead, South Dakota. What stopped him was not the void — voids were ordinary at Homestake. It was the candle. The flame did not flicker. It leaned, out of the new opening and against the mine's own ventilation. He walked in fifty feet, came back out, and never went underground again. The shift boss who followed measured it: five feet four inches high, three feet six inches wide, holding both to within half an inch across fifty feet, with a shallow channel down the exact centre of the floor. Then the record closes. Three shifts with no entry. A fill-material cost item carrying the only blank authorisation in a fourteen-month volume. A Geological Survey assistant who sketched every other void that season drew nothing for this one. The second record was never in anybody's ledger. James R. Walker, agency physician at Pine Ridge from 1896, wrote down what the older men told him: that these hills were not entered but come out of, that the place is called Washun Niya, the breathing hole, and that the breathing keeps a schedule — it draws in before the weather turns. That is a barometer, described by a man who had never held one. Who do you think Vreeland was keeping that record for?