On July 16, 1966, seven-year-old Ruth Ann Miller, climbed through a hole under the concrete cap covering the Tamarack Mining Company Number 4 Shaft, just 10 days before her eighth birthday. The accident occurred sometime around Noon.

Ruth Ann’s brother and another friend were present that day. When Ruth Ann climbed through the hole, her brother immediately ran for help. The Hecla Fire Department arrived at the shaft a few minutes later, and by 1 p.m. rescue efforts had already begun.

It was not a simple matter of lowering men down the vertical shaft to find Ruth. The shaft was 12 feet wide by 18 feet, and the concrete cap was larger. In order for rescue crews to be lowered into the shaft in steel cages, a section of the cap had to be cut and removed.

Underneath, the shaft was cluttered with old junk: Rotted support timbers that had broken loose and fallen, clogging the vertical passage, along with iron air and water pipes, timber cribbing and other debris. The Tamarack would prove to be a nightmare as far as trying to rescue someone who had fallen into it.

The Numbers 4 and 3 shafts were started simultaneously in 1889. But, of the five Tamarack company shafts, the No. 4 was the worst.

From the beginning, the No. 4 was problematic in that it was sunk in a swamp. The shaft was not 60 feet deep before it began flooding.

The sinking of the No. 4 began in 1889, at the same time the No. 3 shaft was started, in Section 11, in what the company called North Tamarack. In 1895, the No.4 was sunk an additional 482 feet, reaching a depth of 4,450 feet, where it finally contacted the Conglomerate Lode it was intended to strike. It struck it in poor ground, the shaft was not extended deeper. Eventually, it would be used occasionally as a haulage shaft, but it was not regularly maintained or kept in repair.

In a turn of unfriendly events, the Calumet and Hecla company took over the Tamarack in 1917 and dissolved the company. C&H continued operating the mine, but closed the No. 4 shaft, according to records, in 1924, placing a concrete plug in it at the 1,100 foot mark in 1926, probably to stop water from flowing into it and into the mine after the pumps in that shaft were shut off and removed. Other sources state the plug as having been installed at the 500 foot mark, which makes more sense, if stopping inflow was the reason. There is no doubt that it was water seeping into the mine that caused the hole to open that the children discovered on that July 16th morning. There is no record of the shaft having been entered for 62 years before Ruth Ann fell into it.

The rescue workers searching for her were veteran miners; they knew what they were doing. They were not working in the shaft long before they realized that there was no way that a little girl could have possibly survived a fall down that hole. It was no longer a rescue mission, but now one of recovery.

On July 18h, the Daily Mining Gazette reported that workers had removed the cap to allow men in a specially built cage, lowered and raised by a boom crane. From the beginning, they encountered debris.

The next day, the Gazette reported, that work had continued around the clock without stop. But as crews worked their way deeper into the shaft, the debris became thicker.

Slowly, it was removed and hoisted to the surface. At around 400 feet, they were stopped.

Just below that depth, the Gazette reported, the shaft was choked with old and rotted timbers, old pipes, mud and chunks of concrete. The workers, though, could not determine how much of it had gone down the shaft after Ruth Ann had fallen – and that was the thing: had that concrete fallen while crews were breaking the cap in half to remove it? If so, it would have, of course, fallen after she had, and would almost certainly have buried her.

C&H rescue workers, and company officials were not going to give up without a fight. They, too, had kids. They not only understood what Ruth Ann’s parents were going through, they could feel it themselves.

They would try another way to get into the shaft, this time below the clog, regardless of where the concrete plug was located. It was tried. It failed.

“We examined closely the Tamarack No. 3 shaft in the hope of being able to come up under the debris which blocked our way,” Burton C. Peterson, a C&H vice president and Calumet Division general manager told the Gazette on July 20. “But the timbering in that shaft was even worse than that in the No. 4. It was literally impossible to utilize this as a means of entry.”

Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 19th, the decision to call off the rescue efforts was announced by Peterson. The decision, he said, was made after meeting with representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Mines and the Health Department. Essentially, the condition of the shaft threatened the lives of the rescue crews.

“Seepage of water from the swamp area in which the shaft is located,” Peterson told the Gazette, “was undermining the timbers and walls to extent that there was an ever increasing possibility of cave-in and loosening debris.”

Seven year-old Ruth Ann was never recovered. On the afternoon of July 21st, five days after she had fallen into the Tamarack No. 4 shaft, private services were conducted at what was now Ruth Ann’s 4,450-foot deep grave. Bouquets and wreaths of flowers were laid along the edges of the repaired concrete cap.

In 1988, Ruth Ann’s mother passed away. Her remains were interned at the shaft. Her brother, Gary, also rests at the site where he had last seen his little sister in 1966.

Ruth Ann is gone now, yet, she remains. She occupies a very special place in the hearts of not only her family, but in the hearts of Copper Country residents.