“Billingsley told the legend, and like most legends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn’t a cave-in that closed the China Shaft, that’s the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn’t happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chinese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four. Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn’t a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine? Two hundred feet deep in hornfels that could have
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