In the spring of 1885, deep beneath the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a crew of six miners swung their picks into a coal seam and struck a spark. Coal does not spark. What stood before them was not coal, not rock, but iron—its surface covered in flat hammer marks the size of a man’s palm. The Shoshone, who had known this land long before the railroad, already had a name for that place: Where the Pounding Stopped.
They dug around the iron for four and a half months. What they uncovered was a hammer. Its head measured 37 feet from face to face. Its handle was 41 feet long, so thick that five men with arms spread could not have reached around it. Three thousand tons. No man could have lifted it, let alone swung it. In the side of its head was a rectangular socket, tall enough for a man to stand inside. The socket was empty.
Then, on September 2, 1885, Rock Springs burned. A riot between white and Chinese miners left 28 dead and 79 homes in ashes. The army came. The digging stopped. The entry was sealed. For twenty-four years, no one went into that chamber.
But a surveyor’s field book, an old man speaking more than a hundred miles to the north, and a borehole drilled twenty-four years later all kept pointing at the same thing. That is where this story begins.
Before we can understand the hammer, we need to understand the coal that closed around it. Rock Springs stands in the southwest of Wyoming on the bank of an alkaline stream called Bitter Creek—a treeless, windy, high desert. When the Union Pacific’s rails reached this place in 1868, what the railroad needed lay just under the ground. Locomotives burned coal, and here the coal came to the surface right beside the track. The Number One mine was opened that same year, and the town was built on top of it.
By 1885, Number One was the oldest and largest of the company’s mines at Rock Springs. About 900 men worked underground, roughly two-thirds of them Chinese, hired through a contractor. The coal they cut lies inside a sequence of rock geologists now call the Rock Springs Formation, dated to the late Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago. In that time, this was the shore of a shallow inland sea. In the swamps behind the beach, plants sank, were buried under sand, and turned to black stone.
The Number One seam was nine to ten feet thick—a man could walk inside it without bending his head. Miners worked by the light of small oil lamps hooked to their caps. The circle one lamp lit was not much wider than a man’s reach. What a miner might find inside that seam was also well known: leaf prints, tree trunks turned to stone, and hard brown lumps miners called ironstone.
That last detail matters, because later someone would say exactly that word.
Before the railroad, this was Shoshone country. The treaty signed at Fort Bridger in 1863 recognized 44 million acres as the country of the Shoshone, from the Snake River down to the crest of the Uinta Mountains. Bitter Creek was inside it. And on July 3, 1868—the same summer the rails arrived—a second treaty cut that country down to a reservation less than a tenth of its size, more than a hundred miles to the north in the valley of the Wind River.
The railroad and the treaty came in the same season. One took the coal; the other moved the people who lived above the coal to the north. But names stay where they are, and the name the Shoshone used for one place on the bank of Bitter Creek had not, in 1885, been written on any map.
The first record is a book. Ellis Maddock was born in March 1846 in Wales. At 22, he came to Pennsylvania, to the anthracite mines at Scranton. In 1877, he moved on to Wyoming, and in 1880 he settled at Rock Springs. In 1885, he was 39 years old and the mine surveyor for the Union Pacific Coal Department. His work was not cutting coal. His work was to measure every entry driven with a chain and a transit and put it on the map of the mine—the one sheet of paper that knew where every man was and which pillar was carrying which load.
Maddock wrote his measurements in numbered field books. Every page of Field Book Number 14 up to April 1885 looks the same: station number, angle, distance. Not one sentence.
On Tuesday, April 14, 1885, for the first time, there is a sentence.
That morning, 3,400 feet down the slope and 290 feet below the surface, the crew driving a new entry called 9 South ran into iron. Iron, not coal. One pick threw a spark, then a second, and the men stopped work and sent one of their number up to the pit boss. There were six men in that crew, and all six were Chinese. Their names are not in the company’s books. Their wages were paid through the contractor, and the contractor reported to the company only a number.
The pit boss called it ironstone. Three weeks earlier, in the next entry, 10 South, a hard mass had come out of the coal as well, and the crew had simply turned the entry around it. They went around. Maddock had put that in his book too, in one line that nobody would give a second look for twenty-four years.
But the thing in 9 South was not something a crew could go around.
Maddock went down with Robert Mure, the nineteen-year-old Scottish boy who carried his chain. The exposed surface ran from the floor of the seam to its roof, nine feet eight inches, and it was wider than the entry itself. Maddock scraped the skin of coal off it with his knife. Underneath were small, flat surfaces side by side, all the same size.
Then he took the small hammer from his instrument bag and struck the surface once. Robert Mure would describe that moment forty-two years later in the company’s employee magazine. According to Mure, the iron did not sound dull the way stone does. It rang long and low, and the sound walked away down the entry. Mure wrote that the mules on the level below all lifted their heads at the same instant.
Maddock did not strike it a second time. In the field book he wrote: “Not ironstone. Surface is wrought. I have run the chain 19 ft each way and have not found an edge.”
Omaha’s answer was two words. Determine extent.
For the company, the matter was simple. Iron inside a coal mine was property. Summer was coming, when coal orders fell and half the men stood idle. Ninety men were put on the digging. From that day on, the work had one name in the field book: the iron prospect.
Maddock forbade powder anywhere near the iron. Everything was taken down with picks, wedges, and bars. As the room grew, the men left benches in its walls, and on every bench they set pine props, and the iron grew every week. Every Saturday evening, Maddock measured the exposed surface again—figures on the left-hand page, drawing on the right.
At the end of April, the shape on the right-hand page was a flat wall. At the end of May, it looked like the corner of a tower. The figures changed every week, and in no week did they get smaller.
In May, a flat band standing out from the surface came into view above it. The coal seam was already far below them. The men were now breaking the sandstone of the roof.
In the first week of June, forty feet away, they struck a second body of iron. This one was round and ran off into the rock at a slant, and Maddock believed they had found two separate objects. He drew them on two separate pages.
On June 23, he ran a survey line between the two. They were one piece.
That night, he put the two pages together and drew it again. Under the drawing, he wrote the name of a tool he knew. And under that, one more sentence: This cannot be what it appears to be.
The word he wrote under the drawing was the name of something that lay in his own tool bag: a sledge.
The last page of measurements is dated August 29, 1885, and it gives the object from end to end. The hammer was not standing upright. Its striking face was down. Its head leaned a little to one side, and its handle reached up and away at an angle of twenty-three degrees from the level—the way a man sets down a tool when the work is finished.
The head was thirty-seven feet from face to face. In section, it was square, sixteen and a half feet on a side, with the corners beveled off. Two flat bands stood out around the head in two places. Each band was two feet eight inches high and stood out fourteen inches, and together they divided the head into three tiers. A man standing on the lower band with his arm raised could not touch the upper one.
The handle was round and forty-one feet long. Where it entered the head it was eleven feet four inches through, and thirty-five feet seven inches around. Toward its end it narrowed a little and finished in a blunt rounded butt nine feet across. There was not one collar on it, not one rivet, not one joint. The handle went into the head the way a pick handle goes into the eye of a pick.
By the end of August, the room cut to uncover it was 104 feet long, 61 feet wide, and 66 feet high. No building in Rock Springs above ground stood as tall.
But the measurements were only the beginning. The surface was a mid-gray iron, and every part of it was covered with flat hammer faces four inches across. Maddock counted nine of them in one square foot. On a single side of the head, that came to more than five thousand separate blows. There was a thin skin of scale on it, and no deep rust. Iron that had come out of rock eighty million years old was about as rusted as an anvil a blacksmith had left outdoors over one winter.
Where the coal had lain against the iron, Maddock found something else. He pried a slab of coal the size of a door off the iron and turned it over. On the inner face of the slab were the same flat surfaces, reversed, standing out in relief. The coal had taken a cast of the hammer marks. Coal only takes a cast while it is soft.
The rock above said the same thing. The beds of sandstone came up to the iron and ended there cleanly, the way they end against a buried log. There was no shaft sunk from above. No ground filled in afterwards. Not one bed that had been broken and had closed again.
What Maddock made of this is a single line in the field book: The iron was not lowered into this place. The rock formed around it.
Maddock wanted to be certain it was iron. The mine blacksmith drilled into the side of the handle with a five-eighths bit to a depth of two inches. It took him three hours and ruined two bits. No dust came out. What came out of the hole were bright curled turnings, and a magnet picked them up.
Maddock put six ounces of those turnings in an envelope and sent them to the company’s assay office in Omaha. The answer was three lines: Metallic iron, no slag, no nickel. That last line matters. Every piece of iron known to have fallen from the sky carries nickel. This one carried none.
Then he worked out the weight. He could not weigh it, so he took the volume—12,550 cubic feet—and multiplied it by the known weight of iron. A little more than three thousand tons. Fifty of the heaviest locomotives the Union Pacific owned that year.
But it was not the weight that stopped Maddock. A pick handle is four and a half inches around, and a man’s hand closes on it easily. This handle was thirty-five feet seven inches around. Maddock did the division and wrote the answer in the margin of the page. 95. He did not write what it was the number of.
And there was the socket. In the middle tier of the head, on the face beside the one the handle entered, there was a rectangular opening seven feet three inches high, three feet one inch wide, nine feet deep. Around it ran a flat raised frame nine inches wide, and its corners were square. Maddock knew what it was the moment he looked at it, because he had seen smaller ones all his life. The rod of a steam engine is locked in its place by a tapered key driven through it. The slot the key goes through is called a cotter way. Every engine in Wyoming had one. It was the length of a finger. This one was taller than a man.
On July 2, he set a ladder against the head, climbed into the socket, and stood up inside it with his lamp. The sidewalls were dull, but the roof and the floor of the socket shone in two broad bands. Robert Mure, looking up from below, would write years later that Maddock in the mouth of that socket looked like a child standing in a doorway.
Maddock ran his hand along the bright bands. This was the wear left by something that had been driven in and drawn out—not once, but a great many times.
The key itself was not there. A key locks the head to the handle. Take hold of a hammer whose key has been drawn, and lift, and the head stays on the ground.
At the foot of that page, Maddock wrote one line: Cotter way. No cotter to be looked for.
One place was left. The digging went down as far as the edge of the striking face, and there it stopped. Nobody touched the rock under the face. Maddock knew what it meant to undercut three thousand tons. Instead, he asked Omaha for permission to sink a narrow shaft right beside the face. While he waited for the answer, the summer ended.
Maddock was not the only trained eye that saw this iron. On June 9, 1885, Samuel Aughey, the official geologist of Wyoming Territory, was going through the mines at Rock Springs for the annual report he owed the governor. Aughey, who had taught the natural sciences at the University of Nebraska for more than ten years, went down Number One. According to the field book, he stood in front of the iron by lamplight for less than an hour. What lay open on that day was the top of the head and the upper band. The round body forty feet away had not yet been recognized as a handle, and the socket was still inside the rock.
His report was printed in January 1886, and one paragraph in it is given to this subject. Aughey writes that at the Number One mine, in the roof of the main seam, a mass of clay ironstone of unusual dimensions has been uncovered. Clay ironstone. Then he adds that such nodules are familiar to every geologist who knows the coal measures, and that they need excite no surprise.
This account may be correct in everything it describes. Ironstone nodules are real. They grow in coal swamps, layer upon layer, around a core. They can be the size of a barrel, and sometimes the size of a room. When their insides dry and crack, their surfaces break up into regular, many-sided plates. Geologists call these septaria and compare them to the shell of a turtle. For a man with one hour by lamplight who saw only the top of it, a gray mass covered in flat faces already had a name.
Aughey did not hide anything. He described what he was shown. But this account does not explain the turnings. Ironstone is a carbonate. Under a drill, it goes to powder. It does not curl, and it does not come to a magnet. It does not explain two bands parallel to each other, as true as if they had been drawn with a rule. It does not explain a handle forty-one feet long. And it does not explain the socket—a socket seven feet three inches high with square corners, a raised frame, and wear that shines only on its roof and on its floor.
Aughey’s account did not stand because it was wrong. It stood because it was the last word. By the time the report was printed, the chamber had already been closed, and no one went down to set the paragraph and the iron side by side.
And yet someone who had never seen the iron had described a great deal more of it.
On July 18, 1885—the ninety-sixth day of the digging—an old man came to the mouth of the mine and had one question put to Maddock. The question was about the socket.
The third record is not a field book. It is not a report. It is not three lines from an assay office. The third record is a voice, and that voice is far older than the mine.
The treaty of 1868 had placed the Shoshone on the Wind River, but the old country was still where it had always been, and in the summers, families still traveled through it—south from the Wind River, along the Green River to Fort Bridger and the Uinta Mountains. The road ran by way of Bitter Creek. They would stop at Rock Springs, trade at the company store, and camp for a few nights below the town.
Chief Washakie was still living in that year, and his people knew by heart the country they had signed away on paper. Every creek, every pass, every camping place had a name. In July 1885, there were eleven lodges below the town.
On the eighteenth, a Saturday, an old man came to the mouth of the mine. Maddock did not write down his name—perhaps he did not ask it. With the old man was a young relative who had learned English at the agency school on the Wind River. Two pages of the field book are given to those two days, and both are sentences, not figures.
The old man did not ask to see the iron, and he did not ask to go down. Through the young man, he asked one thing: “Is there a hole in its side as tall as a man with his arm raised?”
Maddock had measured that socket sixteen days before. Seven feet three inches. A man with his arm raised.
The next day was a Sunday. The mine was not working, and the slope was empty. Maddock took both of them down in a coal car, 3,400 feet in the dark behind a mule. The second lamp was carried by Robert Mure. The old man stood on the topmost bench of the chamber. He did not go down to the floor, and he did not touch the iron. According to Maddock, he looked at the socket in the light of the lamps for a long time, and then he began to speak. The young man translated, and Maddock wrote down as much as he could keep up with.
Forty-two years later, Mure would remember that the old man never once raised his voice. To Mure, he sounded less like a man telling a story than a man reading down a list.
He said he had these things from his mother’s father, who had them from his own elders. They said that before the people, while Wolf and Coyote were still putting the world in order, there were those in this country who pounded. They said they pounded the ground again and again, the way a woman pounds choke cherries on a flat stone. The sound walked through the earth and could be heard on the far side of the Green River.
They said that one day the pounding stopped in the middle of the work. The thing that pounded was set down on its face. The pin was drawn out of it so that it could not be lifted again. They said that the one who drew the pin did not carry it far. He laid it down beside it.
And they said that no lodge is to be raised at that place, and that place is not to be dug, because the ground underneath it is waiting for the next blow.
The old man stopped. Then he asked a question: “Have you gone under it?”
Maddock said that they had not.
“Then leave it.”
They went back up. The eleven lodges set out for the north the next morning.
Maddock’s last line on that page is this: He described the cotter way before he saw it. I did not tell him. I do not know who did.
Skeptics reasonably point out that ninety men were working in that chamber and that the town was small. Word of the socket could have passed from a store counter to a Shoshone camp. That is possible. But then the thing that needs explaining becomes the question itself. The old man did not ask how large the iron was, or what it looked like, or even whether it was a hammer or an object that weighed three thousand tons. He asked only about a hole the height of a man.
And there was one more thing on that page. Before they parted, Maddock asked the young man what the old man called this place. The young man said a word in Shoshone first, and then the English of it. And Maddock was able to write down only the English: Where the Pounding Stopped.
Before the mine was opened, before the railroad, before a pick threw that spark, the place had a name, and the name remembered something stopping there.
The words of one old man on one day may not by themselves amount to a line of record. A second voice makes them one.
In the summer of 1901, a young linguist named Harry Hull St. Clair came to the Wind River Reservation to record the Shoshone language. The texts he gathered are held today in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. Robert Lowie published a part of them in 1909 in the Journal of American Folklore. St. Clair wrote his narratives in Shoshone in his own phonetic hand and set the English under every line.
One of his unpublished pages is a list of place names. At its head is a single note: old man, camp below the agency. The list moves through the old country to the south by creeks, passes, and hunting grounds. On one line, St. Clair’s English reads as follows: “Where the pounding stopped on the bitter water where the whites dig black rock. Not camped at. Under it.”
Beside it is a narrative six lines long. It says four things. Before the people, there were those who pounded. The thing that pounded was set down on its face. Its pin was drawn. The ground under it is waiting.
In the margin of that page, in St. Clair’s own pencil, stand two questions and two answers. He asked what they were pounding. And the answer was the ground. He asked why. The old man’s answer is one line, and St. Clair wrote it inside quotation marks: “It was their work.”
There is no record that St. Clair ever went down the mine at Rock Springs, and no trace that he knew Maddock. Maddock’s field book was lying in a company drawer that year and could not have been read in a Shoshone camp. Between the two pages there are sixteen years, more than a hundred miles of road, and two separate languages.
The mine is real. The treaties are real. St. Clair’s summer on the Wind River in 1901 is real. The unanswered questions begin only after that point.
Nor does this account stand alone inside Shoshone tradition. In one of the narratives Lowie published in 1909, a giant being called Dzoavits is brought into a hole that Badger has dug, and the mouth of the hole is closed over with rocks. That is a different narrative, but something very large shut into the ground is not an image that was made up for a surveyor in 1885. It belongs to this people’s own world of telling.
A name can be lost in a company drawer. It cannot be lost in the mouth of a living person.
Now set the two lines side by side.
The field book says: Cotter way. No cotter to be looked for. The old man says: Its pin was drawn.
The field book says: Striking face down, the head leaning twenty-three degrees. The old man says: It was set down on its face.
The field book says that on the roof and the floor of the socket there is the wear of something driven in and drawn out a great many times. The old man says they pounded not once—again and again, the way a woman pounds choke cherries.
Robert Mure says the iron was struck one time and the sound walked away down the entry. The old man says the sound walked through the earth.
The field book names that place with a number: 9 South. The Shoshone name it with a verb: Where the Pounding Stopped. The numbering is as old as the mine. The verb was there before that. One of them gives measurements, and the other gives a reason. Both of them are standing in front of the same socket.
And there is one line more. The old man had said the pin was not carried far—that it was laid down beside it. That night, next to the words to be looked for that he had written seventeen days before, Maddock added three more. Nearby, he says.
He did not remember the hard mass in 10 South that a crew had gone around in March. Or if he did remember it, he was not given the time to write it down. The last note in the field book from that day belongs to the time after the old man had gone up. Maddock went back down into the chamber by himself. He walked across the floor to the place where the striking face met the rock. He knelt, set his lamp on the ground, and saw something he had not looked at until that day.
In the sandstone of the floor, there were fine cracks coming out from under the iron and running outward. They ran like the spokes of a wheel, all of them from the same center, and that center was underneath the face. Spokes is the word in the field book.
He laid his palm on one of the cracks, then on the iron itself. He did not write down what he felt—only what he did. He got up and went back to the surface.
Six weeks later, when the digging reached the edge of the face, he would write that letter to Omaha. A shaft right beside the face. The old man had said not to go under it. Maddock wanted to go exactly there. Both of them were looking at the same place: down.
The fourth pillar is a second file opened twenty-four years later. But first it has to be said why the first one closed. What closed that chamber was not a decision. It was not a secret. It was a catastrophe.
On the morning of Wednesday, September 2, 1885, in the Number Six mine at Rock Springs, a fight broke out between white and Chinese miners over a room. In the afternoon, armed white miners marched on the Chinese quarter of the town. By evening, twenty-eight Chinese miners had been killed, fifteen had been wounded, and seventy-nine homes had been burned.
Seventy-nine homes. Hundreds of people fled along the tracks into the hills. Governor Francis Warren asked for troops, and the first of them arrived on September 5. On the ninth, about six hundred Chinese miners were brought back to the town under the guard of the Seventh Infantry. And when a grand jury met to consider the killings, it heard its witnesses and returned no indictment at all. Not one.
No record says where the six men who opened 9 South were on that day. Even if they lived, nobody asked them what they had seen. The first six people who ever touched the iron left behind not one sentence.
The company now had its dead, an army camp in the middle of the town, and a crisis with the government of China. An iron prospect that had never sold a single car of coal was not on that list.
On September 24, an order came from Omaha. On Saturday the twenty-sixth, Maddock wrote his last line in Field Book Number 14: Iron prospect suspended by order of the department. Nine South stopped off. Men to coal.
A stopping of plank and clay was built across the mouth of the entry. The letter Maddock had written about the shaft was not refused. It was not answered.
Twenty-four years went by.
Frank Dunmore was born in 1874 in Braidwood, a coal town in Illinois. In 1909, he was thirty-five, a mining engineer for what was by then called the Union Pacific Coal Company. That autumn, he was handed an ordinary job. The deepest workings of Number One were going to be abandoned, and before the pumps were pulled, every entry had to be surveyed one last time.
On the old map, Dunmore noticed something. 8 South was there, and 10 South was there. Between them, there was nothing.
On Tuesday, October 5, 1909, he had the stopping taken down, and he worked inside for twenty-three days. His report is dated November 12, 1909, and it is addressed to the general manager’s office in Omaha.
For the first two days, he could measure nothing. The air in the entry was dead, and the lamps went out until he had fresh air driven in behind canvas curtains. On the third day, he walked into the chamber.
The chamber was there. The pine props on the benches were coated in a white mold, and some of them had leaned over. Maddock’s ladder was still standing against the socket, and on the floor there was water. The seepage of twenty-four years had risen fourteen feet, and it covered the lowest tier of the head and the striking face.
Dunmore measured again everything that stood above the water, with Field Book Number 14 taken out of the company drawer beside him. The handle around: thirty-five feet seven inches. The socket in height: seven feet three inches. The distance between the two bands, the depth of the socket, the length of the handle. Twenty-four years had not put the two men’s figures more than one inch apart.
He noted one thing more. On the iron above the water there was no new rust, and none just under the water line either.
But the thing Dunmore was really looking for was not in the chamber. In the field book, in the margin of the socket page, there were a few words: to be looked for. Nearby, he says.
Dunmore read the book from the beginning and came to the line Maddock had not remembered. March 24, 1885. 10 South. A hard mass in the coal. The entry turned around it. On the map, 10 South lay 212 feet from the socket, and the entry did at one point bend to the left for no reason at all.
In the inner wall of that bend, between the layers of coal, a flat gray surface was showing. For six days, Dunmore had the coal taken down along it. It was a bar of iron lying on its side inside the seam, in the middle of the coal, and it was nineteen feet four inches long. Iron, all of it.
At its thick end, it measured seven feet two inches by three feet. Toward the other end, it narrowed on an even slope, one inch in every twenty-four. All four of its sides were the same gray iron, covered in the same hammer faces the size of a palm.
The socket was seven feet three inches by three feet one inch. The bar would fit that socket with one inch to spare each way. On its upper and lower faces, from end to end, ran two bright bands. They were the same width as the bands on the roof and the floor of the socket.
Dunmore worked out its weight: ninety-four tons. Then he wrote into his report the driest sentence an engineer is able to write: “This piece is the cotter of the object in 9 South. It has been withdrawn and laid flat 212 feet from the cotter way.”
The old man had said that twenty-four years earlier in a handful of words. He laid it down beside it.
The coal ran over the top of the key as well. According to Dunmore’s note, the key, like the hammer, had been there before the coal went hard.
That left the one place Maddock had never reached. The striking face was now under fourteen feet of water, and there was no way to see the cracks in the floor. Dunmore found another way. On the lowest dry bench, six feet out from the edge of the face, he had a diamond drill set up at a slant, and he bored down under the edge of the face into the rock.
The body of the report speaks of that borehole in exactly one sentence: For result, see Appendix C.
The fifth pillar is not at Rock Springs. It is not evidence either. It is an echo, and it comes from three separate places.
The first is in Wyoming itself, more than two hundred miles north of Rock Springs, in the Big Horn Mountains, on a ridge called Medicine Mountain, above 9,600 feet, on a flat that lies under snow for most of the year. There is a wheel of stones on the ground, eighty feet across. At its center is a cairn, and from the cairn twenty-eight lines of stone run out to the rim.
In 1902, S. C. Simms of the Field Museum in Chicago climbed to it, and the next year he published a short paper in American Anthropologist. Simms asked the peoples of that region who had made the wheel. The answer of the Crow was put on record: “It was there when we came.”
That has nothing to do with a hammer. But it shows that in Wyoming there is one more thing whose making no living people lays claim to, and that it is built of spokes running out from a center. Spokes is also the word Maddock used for the cracks in the floor.
The second echo comes from the other side of the ocean, in Iceland, about the year 1220. Snorri Sturluson wrote the book now known as the Prose Edda. In it is the account of how a hammer was made. Brokkr works the bellows, and his brother Sindri stands at the forge. A fly bites Brokkr on the eyelid. The bellows stop for an instant, and the hammer comes out of the fire with one fault. Its handle is short.
To hold it at all, its owner has to put on gloves of iron, and the gloves have a name of their own: Járngreipr.
A poem of the same tradition, the Lay of Thrym, preserved in a manuscript of about 1270, says that the hammer was once stolen and hidden, and says where: eight leagues under the earth.
Another people of that same north, the Finns, tie the act of hammering to a larger work. Still in the Kalevala, which Elias Lönnrot gathered in 1835 and enlarged in 1849, the smith Ilmarinen is remembered as the one who hammered out the vault of the sky itself. The verses praise his skill with a single detail: on the vault, no mark of the hammer can be seen, and no trace of where the tongs held.
The iron at Rock Springs had the mark of the hammer everywhere on it, four inches across, side by side by the thousand, and its handle was short. Forty-one feet. The head was thirty-seven. On a sledge, the handle is four or five times the length of the head.
The third echo is from Ireland. The old text known as The Second Battle of Moytura, which survives in a manuscript of the sixteenth century in language several centuries older, describes the club of a being called the Dagda. The club is so heavy that it is drawn along on wheels, and to move it is the work of eight men, and the track it leaves in the ground, the text says, is deep enough to serve as the boundary ditch of a province. The track has a name as well: the track of the Dagda’s club.
None of these peoples knew of Bitter Creek. The Crow had not heard of Iceland, and the Irish scribe had not heard of Wyoming. Every one of them carries either a mark on the ground that has no answer when its maker is asked for, or a striking tool that was not made to the measure of a human hand.
The Shoshone account cannot be explained by likening it to any of these. It has its own words. Choke cherry, flat stone, Wolf and Coyote, bitter water. And it has something the others do not. The name of a place, and under that place, a chamber.
The sixth and last pillar is a sheet of paper that is not there.
Dunmore’s report is kept today among the records of the Union Pacific Coal Company in a college library at Rock Springs. It is a main text of eleven pages and a list of appendices. Appendix A: plan of the chamber at 9 South. Appendix B: drawing of the cotter. Appendix C: one sheet, log of borehole at 9 South.
Appendix A is in the file, and so is Appendix B. Appendix C is not. It has not been torn out or cut out. And on the cover of the report, there is a stamp: Received and filed. November 19, 1909. Under the stamp, there is no reply, no note, and no signature.
What was written on that sheet is known only from Dunmore’s pocketbook. Engineers keep two books—one for the company and one for themselves. Dunmore left the company in 1911 and went to the coal fields of Utah. The pocketbook stayed with his family, and in 1968 his grandson left it with the Sweetwater County Historical Museum at Green River. It is still there.
In that book of his own, nine lines are given to the borehole. The hole was started on October 21, and in six days it went down ninety-seven feet. For the first fourteen of them, the machine brought up clean cylinders of sound sandstone as thick as a wrist. Then nothing. From the fourteenth foot to the seventy-fifth, it brought up no core at all. In Dunmore’s words: crushed sandstone, no core, comes up as sand, rods dropping by their own weight. Below seventy-five feet, the rock was sound again. Sixty-one feet.
Under the face of the hammer, for sixty-one feet, the sandstone had not been broken. It had been crushed.
On the ninth line, Dunmore wrote nothing but a comparison: like the ground under a pile driver.
That is the one result the report does not give, and the sheet that carried it is lost.
It is not the only thing that is lost. Maddock’s field books in the same collection are numbered from one to thirty-one. Number 14 is not among them. What was in it is known only from the extracts that Dunmore had typed into his report and from what Robert Mure wrote in 1927.
Maddock died in 1919 at Ogden, Utah. The official history the company printed in Omaha in 1940, covering its coal mines from 1868 onward, gives whole pages to Number One. The name of 9 South does not appear on them.
The mine map is the same. Before the workings were abandoned, Dunmore recommended that 9 South be put on the map. The final map was copied from the one before it. Between 8 South and 10 South, to this day, nothing is drawn except pillars of coal. A chamber 104 feet long is on no map at all.
St. Clair’s page is not in its place either. Lowie had published the texts together as Shoshone and Comanche Tales, and at some point the list of place names was laid in among the Comanche pages and cataloged that way. The name itself was never written down a second time.
In 1937, the anthropologist Demitri Shimkin came to the Wind River, and working with the elders, gathered the places, the trails, and the names of the old Shoshone country. His study was published by the University of California in 1947. One name is missing. The name on the bank of Bitter Creek does not appear in it. By that date, the old men who had last camped below that stream were long dead, and the page that might have led Shimkin to ask about it was lying in the wrong folder.
None of this is a cover-up. A report was received and filed. A map was copied, and a page went into the wrong folder. In the spring of 1910, the pumps were pulled, and the water, without anyone deciding anything, rose to the roof of 9 South. Nobody hid that chamber. It is only that nobody went back.
There is also a version of this story in which everything settles into comfortable categories, and it deserves to be heard in the strongest form it has.
First, the main source does not exist, and no one today can hold Field Book Number 14. It is known through typed extracts an engineer made twenty-four years later and through what a man of sixty-one wrote for a company magazine forty-two years later. Memory enlarges, and old-timers’ columns exist for exactly that purpose: to tell a good story.
Second, the only trained geologist who saw the iron gave it a name, and the name is an ordinary one. Clay ironstone. Large nodules are real. Their cracked surfaces can, by lamplight, look like beaten iron.
Third, there are the three lines from the assay office, but the assay slip itself does not exist. Not one grain of those turnings has come down to the present.
And there is a harder point than any of those. Fourth, the old man’s question. Ninety men worked in that chamber. The interpreter was a schoolboy, and Maddock, by his own words, wrote down only what he could keep up with. And the name on St. Clair’s page can be read another way. Shoshone women pound choke cherries and seeds on stone. Where the pounding stopped could be the name of an old camping place where people once prepared food and then no longer did. And the words not camped at are no surprise in 1901 for a spot with a mining town standing on top of it.
Fifth, Dunmore’s borehole. The rock under Rock Springs is not level and unbroken. It is the flank of a dome that geologists call the Rock Springs Uplift, and it is cut by faults. A soft, crumbling zone of sandstone very often gave no core to the drilling tools of 1909. A crushed section sixty-one feet long can exist without any need of a hammer.
And sixth, the missing papers in a company archive more than a century old. A lost appendix, a copied map, and a wrong folder are ordinary things. Wyoming had no mine inspector at all until the law that followed the explosion at Almy on January 12, 1886, which killed thirteen. In 1885, nobody outside the company was required to look. And in that autumn, there were reasons far heavier than iron for a piece of work at Rock Springs to be left half done.
In this version, nobody lies. A surveyor takes a large nodule too seriously, and an old man joins a rumor he has heard to a narrative he already knows. An engineer under the influence of an old field book sees a cotter in a bar of ironstone. No institution hides anything.
That is a coherent account. It may even be the true one. But it too has to carry certain things all at the same time. A nodule with a socket seven feet three inches high, square at the corners, with a frame around it. A rumor that travels from the town to the camp in the form of one single question. A second nodule that tapers one inch in twenty-four and fits that socket with an inch to spare each way. And in the flank of a dome, a soft zone sixty-one feet deep that happens to lie exactly under that face.
Both versions rest on the same papers. The paper that could choose between them was one sheet. And that sheet is not in its place.
That is not a weakness in the story. It is the story.
Today, Rock Springs still stands on top of those mines. The Union Pacific closed the last of its mines in the district in 1962. What it left under the town were rooms never filled and pine props that were rotting. As the props rotted, the roofs came down, and houses, shops, and streets settled with them.
In 1988, the ground gave way on B Street in front of City Hall, and a sinkhole opened. Since that time, Wyoming’s Abandoned Mine Lands division has been drilling down into the old voids under the city, one after another, and pumping grout into them, hole after hole. In October 2024, a project costing $10.5 million was finished for one stretch alone beside the interstate.
That work is aimed at the voids that threaten the surface. By the record, those voids go down as far as 150 feet. 9 South is at 290. It has been underwater since 1910. Unless a building falls in above it, there is no reason to drill there. The map in the driller’s hands shows nothing at that point but pillars of coal. A pillar means solid ground, and nobody puts a hole into ground that is solid.
Official geology sees nothing there either. Alfred Schultz’s two bulletins, printed in 1909 and 1910, count every coal bed in the Rock Springs Field one by one and say nothing of iron inside the Number One seam. Schultz went over the field in 1907, when 9 South was behind plank and clay.
There is a monument of stone in the town, and on it are these words: Beneath this monument, coal was first mined in this district. Site of Union Pacific Number One Mine. A.D. 1868. The monument says nothing else.
What is left of the papers lies in three separate places. The company records in a college library at Rock Springs, Dunmore’s pocketbook in the county museum at Green River, St. Clair’s pages near Washington in the archive of the Smithsonian. To this day, no one has laid all three on the same table.
And there is a fourth place. The Eastern Shoshone Tribe lives today on the Wind River around Fort Washakie—not a people of the past, a living nation that teaches its language and listens to its elders. If anyone today knows the name of that place on the bank of Bitter Creek, that person is not in an archive. That person is there.
Go back to the beginning. In the spring of 1885, a pick went into the coal and threw a spark.
That morning, six men had tools in their hands. Each tool was made to the measure of the hand that held it, and the thing standing on the other side of the coal had the shape of a tool as well. Every mark on it was the size of a palm, and its handle was not.
A man did the division, wrote 95 in the margin, and did not write what it was the number of.
An old man asked about its socket without having seen it. He said its pin had been drawn and laid down beside it. Twenty-four years later, an engineer found what was lying in the coal 212 feet away.
Robert Mure died at Rock Springs in 1938. The last sentence of his piece in the magazine was this: “I never heard that sound out of any iron again.”
These records do not give an answer. They only point to the same place.
Why did the pounding stop in the middle of the work? Did the one who drew the key draw it so that the hammer could never be lifted again? Or did he lay it close beside it so that one day he could come back and drive it home? And at the bottom of sixty-one feet of crushed rock, what was that face striking?
The old man said, “Leave it.” Maddock wanted to go down.
Tell us in the comments: if you had been the one standing on the topmost bench of that chamber, which of them would you have stood beside?
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