Me and Glen Adams were mining up in northern Nevada, at Boyd Basin in 1933, and we got bored with it, so we decided to head out and go to Rawhide, which was hitting a lot of rich ore.

After a few weeks of it, we found out that there weren’t many young men working out there, and we were having to do much of all the hard work. There wasn’t much to do and we were getting pretty tired of it all. Glen wanted to go back to Boyd Basin, but I thought if we held out, things would change, so I didn’t want to go, and since we were partners, Glen said he’d stick it out a few weeks more.

One night we were coming home from the mine and saw the sheriff in the camp. He said that some old miner had committed suicide. A note was found in his cabin, saying that he was going to kill himself and his body would be found on the bare mountain with a peak on it, and the sheriff needed a posse to help find his body.

Most everyone in Rawhide were old men, and they couldn’t do much hiking and wouldn’t be able to carry out the man’s body. Me and Glen were the youngest men in the camp, so we were ordered to go and help with the search.

It took a few days, but we did finally find the body. He was in pretty bad shape, and because of the heat, the smell was horrible. Glen and another man couldn’t stand it, and they got sick and left the place. I always had a strong stomach, so it didn’t bother me much.

The sheriff ordered me to help wrap up the body in a cloth, and carry it down to where we could put it in a makeshift wooden box. Well, I tried not to look much, but I was young, and somehow, my eyes, just kept going back to his body. He’d blown the top of his head off, and his fingers were all black and had flies crawling on them. That was it for me. I dropped him and went and got sick in the sagebrush.

But by now everyone but me and the sheriff had left. The sheriff put the body in the wooden box, and ordered me to help carry it down. He found a handle of an old shovel, and he ran it through the box until it came out on my side, and he told me to pick it up and we’d carry the box back down into camp, and then we’d bury him.

Well, the shovel handle had run right through what was left of his head, and on my end of the handle, there was blood and brains. I just looked the other way and reached down and picked up the handle.

We carried him all the way back down the mountain into Rawhide. When we finally dropped the body off, I ran to the creek and washed my hand for about twenty-five minutes, and I still couldn’t get the smell off. I went back to my camp and went to bed.

The next morning I told Glen we were going back to Boyd Basin just as soon as we could get going. Glen laughed and said, “Well, I wondered what it was going to take to get you out of this place!”

A.J. Olds grew up at Pyramid Lake and now lives in Quincy, Calif. He is 89 years old , a retired miner, logger, and bull rider.