My older brother, Clayton, paid his way through college by working summers in the mines of the Couer d’Alene district of northern Idaho. This would have been in the early 1950’s. I remember visiting one of these mines with a couple of older kids. In the mine office a few dented helmets were displayed on the wall above the foreman’s desk. One of my friends pointed to a particularly bashed-in one and asked, “Whose helmet was that?”
“That belonged to a guy named Clayton Harmsworth.”
“That was my brother!” I exclaimed.
“Then you probably know that he survived with nothing more than a bad headache.”
Clay not only survived, but spent more than fifty years after that working as a metallurgist at Wright-Patterson Airbase in Dayton, Ohio. He passed away a few years ago at the age of 92. Now I sometimes wonder, was he ever asked to examine materials from a crashed UFO, such as from the 1947 Roswell site? Not that he would have told me if he had.
Clay spent at least one summer rooming at the Tiger Hotel in Burke, a mining community a few miles up a side canyon from Wallace. It was a very narrow canyon, so narrow that when the Tiger Hotel was built in 1888, the only way it would fit was to build it right over the railroad tracks. In fact, the street, tracks, plus the South Fork of the Couer d”Alene River, all ran right through the hotel lobby. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, fires and avalanches, to name a couple. Not to mention interrupted sleep, but Clay said the food in the dining room was good, and he soon got used to the sound of trains moving around beneath his bed. However, with the closure of several of the mines, the need for the hotel lessened, and it ceased operation in 1954 and was torn down. Not much remains of Burke today, just a few stores and houses.
If you’re as old as I am, you may possibly remember a tune from your childhood, “The Railroad Runs Through the Middle of the House.” I don’t know whether it was actually about the Tiger Hotel, but it certainly could have been.