By OBBM Network Editorial Staff

Derived from an episode of The Buried Archive.

Deep beneath the streets of Butte, Montana, lies a labyrinth of tunnels and shafts that have been carved out over a century. The richest hill on earth, as it was once called, has yielded countless tons of copper, but at what cost? The story of Emmett Treweller, a cage operator who spent 31 years in the depths of the mine, reveals a world of mystery and wonder that challenges our understanding of the past.

The World of the Deep Mines

The mines of Butte are a marvel of engineering, with over 10,000 miles of tunnels and shafts that stretch for miles beneath the surface. The deepest of these mines reach beyond a mile below the grass, where the rock itself is warm to the touch and the air is thick with the smell of damp earth. It is here that Emmett Treweller spent his working life, operating the cage that carried men and ore up and down the shafts.

As Treweller himself described it, the mine was a world of its own, with its own rhythms and routines. The men who worked there were a tight-knit community, bound together by their shared experiences and the dangers they faced every day. They knew the sound of the hoist and the smell of the drift, and any change in the routine of the hill was felt in the body before the mind could name it.

The Sealed Level

It was on one of these shifts, in a year that Treweller would only ever describe as the year they sealed the low level, that he stumbled upon something that would change his life forever. Taking the cage past the last worked level, past the last string of lights, he stepped off onto ground that no company map had ever admitted existed. What he found there was a passage, not a drift, not a stope, but a passage with a floor worn smooth and slightly dished in the center, the way stone is worn by the passage of many feet over a very long time.

The walls were dressed, Treweller said, dressed, the mason’s word for stone that has been worked flat and true. And the joints between the blocks were so fine that he could not have slid a knife blade into them. There was no mortar, the blocks were fitted the way the old walls in the high mountains of the far south are fitted, stone against stone with a precision that mocks the crude tools we credit the ancients with having.

Uncovering the Truth

As Treweller followed the passage, he began to realize that he was not alone in the mine. The old miners had always spoken of the Tommyknockers, the little men of the deep workings, spirits or souls or something older that the Cornish swore lived in the rock and knocked in the timbers before a cave-in. Treweller had never seen anything, but he had heard the stories, and now he was beginning to wonder if there was truth to them.

According to Treweller, the passage opened into a chamber, and in the chamber, his lamp showed him the missing engineer standing very still, and beyond the engineer, a wall, and set into that wall, a great disk of copper, taller than a man, green with the ages, but worked over its whole surface with lines and figures. Treweller said the figures were not letters as we know letters, but more like the marks on the old maps, the ones that show a tartary that no longer appears in any atlas.

As Treweller looked on, the engineer turned and saw his lamp, and his face, the nephew wrote, was not the face of a man who has made a discovery. It was the face of a man who has been shown something he was never meant to see.

Closing Synthesis

The story of Emmett Treweller and the secrets of the deepest mines is a reminder that there is still so much we do not know about the world around us. The mysteries that lie beneath our feet, the secrets that are hidden in the depths of the earth, are a testament to the ingenuity and curiosity of the human spirit. As we continue to explore and uncover the truths of the past, we are reminded that the greatest discoveries are often the ones that challenge our understanding of the world and our place in it.

The full episode of The Buried Archive is available on OBBM Network TV.