The Scofield Disaster: 'The deadly damp' In a disaster of this magnitude, the stories of life and death are especially poignant. Very few of the miners survived. One was 15-year-old Thomas Pugh, working in the No. 1 mine, connected to No. 4 by a tunnel, who grabbed his hat in his teeth and ran for the entrance a mile and a half away. He fainted at the entrance. His father, William, died at the place Thomas Pugh started running. The explosion carried James Naylor 200 feet, but he was uninjured and able to help with rescue work. Not so, John Wilson. The force of the blast carried him 800 feet across the canyon and left him with a crushed skull. He was one of four men put on a train to the hospital in Salt Lake City that night. No one thought he would survive, but he did and lived to his 70s. Young Walter Clark had been working outside when the explosion occurred and rushed to the tunnel, fearful for his father and brother, who were inside. The "lurking damp enveloped him as in a winding sheet." He was dead by the time the others reached him. If that wasn't bad enough, his 16-year-old sister, Lizzie, dropped dead at her mother's feet of the shock when she heard about Walter's death. The Luoma family lost nine members: six sons, one son-in-law, two nephews. The 70-year-old parents had been in this country only three months, brought over to a better life after their sons had found work. In their grief, they returned to Finland. Some 61 to 63 of the men who died were Finns.   Many families were left without fathers The Hunter family lost 11 members, including sons, sons-in-law and nephews. They're all buried in Ogden. John James and his son were trying to escape when "the deadly damp overtook them, and a moment later they were dead. When found by the rescuers, their arms were tightly clasped about each other in an embrace that death could not loosen." Most of the miners in No. 1 were killed by a combination of lack of oxygen and deadly gases. "One man had filled his pipe and sat down to light it. The damp struck him and he died then and there with the filled pipe in his outstretched hand," the Deseret News reported. "On a box where a dead Finlander was they picked up his watch. It had stopped when the explosion had occurred and the hands marked 10:28 o'clock." In No. 4, many of the bodies were burned or mutilated beyond recognition, making identification in those pre-DNA days difficult. In at least one case, the wrong body was buried in a grave and had to be dug up and re-identified. But mixed among the stories of heart-wrenching grief are a few on the other side. John Donaldson and his dad worked together in the mine, but that morning his mother, who said later she had a premonition, did not wake them in time. When they got to the mine, the superintendent refused to let them enter, thinking he would deprive them of a day's pay. Instead, he saved their lives. One of the Evans brothers complained so much about the conditions of the mine, his supervisor gave him a choice: shut up or leave. He left. Two days later, he was playing in a band for May Day festivities in Price when word came that his two brothers had been killed. One man always took his dog to work with him, but that day the dog wouldn't go, so the man didn't either. Within two weeks, all the bodies had been recovered, or so they thought. But a 10-year-old boy came to the house of T.J. Parmley and told him that the boy's father had not been brought out yet. He comes to me every night in a dream, said the boy; he wants his body removed, so he can rest in peace. He's in parish No. 12. It was August before crews got into that area of the mine. They found the man's body right where the boy said it would be. Continue                 About the Program || Joe Hill Home || PBS Home