Digital Bob Archive

Port Wine Charley and Charles G. Johnson had two things in common in addition to their first name. Both were miners and worked for the Treadwell Gold Mining Company. And each of them fell down a deep shaft in the mine, and survived to tell about it.

Johnson was the first to take the plunge. At about 4 p.m. on Monday, April 24, 1899, he was being hoisted to the surface in the main shaft of the Treadwell, along with several other miners when, apparently out of sheer absent mindedness, he stepped off the skip and plunged down the shaft. The skip was stopped at once and a party of the miners went down expecting to gather Johnson's remains and take them to the surface for burial. Instead, they found him standing in two feet of water at the bottom of the shaft. He looked a little dazed and said one leg hurt; so they took him to St. Ann's Hospital in Douglas where he was examined by the company physician, Dr. Treuholtz. The doctor found a bruise on his leg and another on one arm, and some signs of shock. Johnson said he remembered passing the l1O-foot level in the shaft going down, but remembered nothing after that.

The first newspaper report of Johnson's fall gave the distance as 250 feet, but some of the miners got a steel tape and measured it exactly, from the place where the skip was stopped to the bottom of the shaft. It was exactly 256 feet. Johnson continued to work at Treadwell for a time, then he went north to the Tanana Mining District around Fairbanks. Later he worked underground in the copper mines at Kennecott and probably at other mines. Now and then his name appeared in the newspapers, but it was never again just plain Charles Johnson. He was, during his remaining years in Alaska and probably for the rest of his life, known as 256-foot Johnson.

Port Wine Charley made his death-defying descent nearly three years after Johnson's, on Sunday morning, February 9, 1902. Charley was climbing a ladder in the shaft when he missed his footing and went plunging to the bottom. He said later that he caught hold of the ladder several times, somewhat breaking his fall. Charley was unconscious when he was found and rushed to the hospital where the report was that \"there were no broken bones, but his nervous system was badly shattered.\"

Two local newspapers reported that event, but neither of them gave Port Wine Charley's last name, Some 25 years later there was a Port Wine Charley who trolled in the vicinity of Craig with a little boat of dubious seaworthiness. I knew him very slightly and have since wished that I had then known about the Treadwell incident. I might have established that he was the same man and asked whether it was his tumble down the Treadwell shaft that persuaded him to forsake underground work for the perils of the sea.