William Clay Barnes

Corporal William Clay Barnes was twenty-six years old and a veteran of the Philippine-American War. He served as a Buffalo Soldier with the United States Ninth Cavalry, enlisting in Texas at just eighteen. Barnes passed safely through that war’s principal engagements, surviving shot and shell, field fighting, and night attacks. Fate, however, is both patient and cruel. Death finally caught up with him not on a battlefield, but deep underground at the 1,050-foot level of the Tonopah Extension Mine on July 14, 1907.

As with most mining accidents, death arrived without warning. Barnes was laying track and talking with coworkers R. Merton and James Pettigrew, who were operating a drill. One moment they were conversing; the next, a violent explosion tore through the tunnel, extinguishing the lights and filling the drift with smoke and dust, plunging the men into complete darkness.

Merton was staggered by the concussion and would have been thrown to the ground had he not been holding the Burleigh drill. He was struck in the face by flying rock and gravel but escaped serious injury. He called to Pettigrew—whose injuries were also slight—for a match. When they managed to light a candle, they called repeatedly for Barnes. There was no answer.

Feeling their way through the choking dust and smoke, they found him about eight feet back. What remained of his face had been torn away. His left hand was missing. Both arms were broken. His body was no longer recognizable as a man, but as wreckage left by the blast.

The men ran for the station and sounded the accident signal. Two minutes after the explosion, the cage dropped with the cage tender and Master Mechanic H. A. Reid aboard. A blanket was fetched, the remains gathered into it, and the bundle was sent to the surface.

A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of accidental death, believed to have occurred when Barnes’s pick struck a stick of dynamite left on the ground by a previous shift, or one that had failed to explode during an earlier blast. Barnes and his companions had gone on duty at 11:00 that morning—only twenty minutes before the explosion.

In one final, bitter twist of fate, Barnes had received a letter the day before his death from his wife, informing him that she had filed for and obtained a divorce.

He was buried on July 16, 1907, with fellow veterans of the Philippine-American War turning out in force to honor him. The service was conducted by Rev. Johnes, and Jack Owens of the union spoke a few words in praise of the dead man. The authorities tried to find Barnes’ mother, who was believed to live in San Antonio, Texas, but it is not known if they were successful.

William Clay Barnes survived war, empire, and empire’s violence—only to be claimed by carelessness and chance beneath the Nevada desert. Today, he rests in the Old Tonopah Cemetery, where a soldier who endured distant battlefields lies among miners who never had a warning when the ground itself decided to kill them.