CHATEAUGAY ORE & IRON CO. DIGS TOO DEEP AND STIRS AN OLD PLAGUE

Reader Advisory — Lyon Mountain Powder & Old Curses
If you scare easy, skip it: the Chateaugay Lake Wendigo wakes where the Progress Shaft drops. Lyon Mountain miners, powder wagons, and a curse pegged under rock. Adirondack horror report inside—enter at yer own risk.

THE STEAMBOAT DISPATCH
Special Edition: March 14th, 1916

BLOOD ORE & BEASTS

CHATEAUGAY ORE & IRON CO. DIGS TOO DEEP AND STIRS AN OLD PLAGUE

By Ebenezer Salt, East Bellmont Reporter & Old Hand at Noting Trouble

LYON MOUNTAIN, N.Y.— Set this down plain in the town book: the Chateaugay Ore and Iron outfit, fat off Delaware & Hudson gold, has been scratchin’ at the mountain like a mink in a henhouse. That new “Progress Shaft” they brag on has roused something older than these hills—a Wendigo curse, told low around Algonquin campfires, now wearin’ meat and teeth.

The Progress Shaft: Door to a Hotter Shop Than Anyone Wants

They call it “Progress,” and say it’s fine engineering. It drops 3,500 feet—deep as the devil’s cellar if you ask me. Not just a mine, neither. Drillers speak of veins “thick as a church door,” and lower still a tangle of old-time tunnels, slick with old slime, wall-scratched by claws wider’n a man’s hand.

“We hit a big hollow last month,” says one shaky miner (name held back), “air stinked like bad eggs and… somethin’ alive. Boss hollered for powder. Next day three boys gone. Lamps still burnin’. No bones.”

Virgil Grange, the Company’s fresh-top man and nephew to the missing Silas, calls it “wild superstition.” Yet folks tell me he’s stacked enough powder to flatten Plattsburgh—“just for shorin’,” he says, dabbin’ sweat with a silk rag that carries his initials.

The Wendigo’s Price

Old folks say the Wendigo—ice-hungry and never filled—was pegged under Lyon Mountain by medicine men long ago. Now the blasting’s cracked its pen.

February 3rd: A night man at Standish Furnace saw “a shadow taller’n the stack, eyes like hot coals.”
February 7th: Stock by the reservoir (over the old shut-down hole) turned up bloodless, hides punched through by “talons like pick teeth.”
February 9th: Men on the 1,685-foot level ran, yelling of “a wind that talked like a man.”

Even that high-grade “pure ore”—sixty-eight percent iron, so the Bessemer boys crow—smells wrong. Geologists talk low of “hot-water veins” laced with quartz and sillimanite, rock born from fire itself. “Ain’t ore,” a stray surveyor hissed. “That’s Wendigo blood.”

Cora’s Dimes and the Company’s Crimes

The reckonin’ grows. At Cora Stark Snyder’s place—a lean-to of a boardin’ house since 1908—hands pay a dime to sleep fitful. “They come back different,” Cora says, workin’ dough for her meat pies. “Eyes hollow. Talkin’ under their breath ’bout tunnels that move.”

But the Company’s books shine like a new horseshoe. D&H rails haul the cursed rock to bridges and war boats, never mind what’s sour at the core. The law don’t squint hard, neither: back in ’88, the High Court blessed the Company’s claim, eight to none.

A Call to Action

This paper puts it to ’em straight:

Who said that shaft could chase depth where depth don’t want chasin’?
Where’s Silas Grange, last seen ridin’ a private car for Montreal with “samples” not of this world?
When do the Adirondacks say, “enough”, to this high-handed desecration?

We sent proper questions to the Company office. What came back? A crate of “best iron pellets” and a paper order to hold our tongues.

EPILOGUE: THE RESERVOIR’S LOW MURMUR
Come sundown, the reservoir makes rings—not trout, but shapes too big, too square. Virgil Grange eats easy at the Lyon Mountain Hotel while powder wagons rattle the street.

The Wendigo is stirrin’.

Tick.
Tick.
Tick.

CHATEAUGAY LAKE STEAMBOAT GAZETTE CO.

CHATEAUGAY ORE & IRON CO. DIGS TOO DEEP AND STIRS AN OLD PLAGUE