The Tommyknockers of the Colorado Rockies

The original “things that go bump in the night”…

Entrance to an abandoned mineshaft in the Colorado Sangre de Cristos (Upper Huerfano Valley).

They used to say, in the old mines of the Colorado Rockies, that you’d sometimes hear strange sounds and “knocking” in the darkness.

These sounds were always mysterious, and eerie, and sometimes even sinister, portending an imminent collapse or other disaster in the claustrophobic shafts of the underground mines. And just about every old-time miner of the nineteenth century knew exactly what it was that caused them—an especially troublesome species of ghost or “Little People” whom the Cornish called “knackers” or “knockers.”

In the parlance of the American West, this became corrupted into “Tommyknockers.”

Now Tommyknockers weren’t just confined to the Colorado Rockies—they appeared in the mines of the High Sierras in California, in Nevada, Utah, Montana, and even Oregon. In fact, they appeared wherever Cousins Jack and Jenny (an initially derogatory, but afterwards affectionate nickname for Cornish men and women) made their way among the burgeoning mines and mining towns of the western frontier.

The Tommyknocker, you could say, is a spirit of the Old Country, and one that eagerly followed the Cornish miners—loaded with the experience and lore of thousands of years of mining the tin and copper veins of Cornwall—into the broad expanses of the New World. The inexperienced placer mining that took place in the initial “gold rushes” in California, Nevada, and Colorado was all well and good for the amateur; but once that had played out, and deeper deposits and veins were discovered, it was time for the Cornish miners to demonstrate their greater familiarity with and expertise in hard rock, deep underground mining.

So the Cousins Jack and Jenny came in droves to the newly-opened mines of the American West, and few places required their talents more than the bonanzas and mother lodes of the Colorado Rockies—places like Central City, Nevadaville, Idaho Springs, Alma, Telluride, Pandora, Ophir, Leadville, Ouray, Silverton, and many more. Nowadays these places are home to hipsters, multi-millionaires (or multi-billionaires), and outdoor enthusiasts; but in the old days they were frequented by grizzled prospectors and Cornish miners, and with the latter came the knockers or knackers, the buccas or Tommyknockers.

View above the Smuggler-Union Hydroelectric Power Plant (Bridal Veil Powerhouse), overlooking the old mining town (now resort) of Telluride.

Writing in Western Folklore, a publication of the scholarly Western States Folklore Society, Ronald M. James gives us a good overview of the Tommyknockers and their folkloric congeners elsewhere in the world:

“Perhaps wherever miners went underground during pre-industrial times, they populated the eerie environment with supernatural beings. The creatures usually took the form of diminutive old men who played pranks and either warned miners of danger and led them to treasure or punished transgressions. Among the Germans they were known as Kobolde or Wichtlein; among the Welsh, Coblynau; in Bohemia as Haus-Schmiedlein; in Malaya Chong Fus; and in the Andes as Muquis. For the English the mine spirits were goblins or dwarfs…and the Cornish called them Tommyknockers. Occasionally they shortened it to Knockers or Knackers or replaced it with names such as Bucca, Bogle, Spriggan, or the ‘Pick and Gad Men’…Although the name Knocker may in fact have been more widespread, it quickly became associated with the Cornish who were prominent in the mining industry.”¹

The Tommyknockers were generally believed by the Cornish to be a species of Little People, like fairies or dwarfs or elves, and some traditions even maintained that they were the ghosts of the Jews who were present at Christ’s Crucifixion, and who were dispatched to the Britannias by the Roman emperors to work the tin and copper mines as punishment.²

Of course, there’s no evidence that there were ever Jewish miners in Roman-era Cornwall, but it was the story the Cornish liked to tell:

“In general, the Cornish belief in the Tommyknocker included the idea that they were the spirits of Jews who had worked in the mine, most likely as a form of punishment for their role in the Crucifixion. The Knockers were diminutive and elf-like and observed the Jewish sabbath and several Christian holidays by abstaining from work. They punished curiosity and greed and rewarded people who treated them kindly. The Knockers could be mischievous and were easily offended. They did not like whistling or being watched. Their knocking could lead miners to wealth or warn them of danger.”³

The Tommyknockers of the Colorado Rockies, and other western states, were very little different from the Knockers of the Old Country; they were, perhaps, a little less inclined to punish greed and reward moderation, which is, after all, only to be expected in a young country like America, where excess of any kind was never frowned upon. Their incessant tappings were taken as a warning of an imminent cave-in, and it was a common superstition that whoever heard them was likely to soon die.

More often, they were simply mischievous, stealing or hiding the miners’ tools, playing pranks, or making strange noises in the dark mines just for the fun of it. In her essay “Folklore of the Central City District, Colorado,” folklorist Caroline Bancroft relates that belief in the beings had persisted well into the twentieth century:

“The belief about ‘tommy-knockers,’ the dwarflike creatures who inhabit the mines and who cause any unexplained phenomenon occurring underground, was still active in the camp in the ’30’s. One foreman told me that in 1931 he had two miners throw up their jobs in the Chain-O-Mines workings of Quartz Mill because ‘the tommy-knockers are keeping a cow in there.’ He went in himself and heard a sound exactly like a cow mooing—a very weird occurrence deep in the bowels of the earth, which gave even him something of a turn. Upon investigation, it proved to be water dropping and sliding across a sheet of tin in such a way as to swirl and reverberate into the eerie sound. But the foreman could not get the miners to go back and see for themselves.

“This example is typical of the ‘tommy-knocker’ belief as I found it in the district. They are always in the mine to warn the miner out and their noises forebode nothing but ill. The older tradition may have been, as [historian of Cornish mining A. K.] Hamilton-Jenkin suggests, that generally these little elves were considered friendly in a freakish sort of way, but I found no evidence of this…In the district they are considered troublemakers in their least malevolent form, carrying away tools, causing missed holes, and the like. But generally, if they are believed in at all, they are to be feared as dangerously sinister.”

[…]

“I could not find anyone who would admit to having seen a ‘tommy-knocker,’ himself. I could not even find anyone who would admit believing in them but I suspected that several of my informants were not being entirely truthful.”⁴

As time passed, and belief in the Cornish Tommyknockers spread throughout the mines of the Colorado Rockies and elsewhere in the western United States, the creatures evolved from dwarflike beings into something more congenial to American tastes in the age of Spiritualism—in other words, they were believed to be the spirits of dead miners, or perhaps even the embodiment or personification of natural forces.

As Ronald M. James observes in his essay:

“Belief in the spirits in Cornwall apparently died shortly after the turn of the century, but it seems to have remained in America until at least the 1930s. The Tommyknockers flourished because the accompanying folklore included messages that reinforced and were compatible with American ideals. In America, the Tommyknockers became the ghosts of dead miners—an idea less outrageous to American tastes than was the belief in elves. These spirits also had a practical purpose: the miners believed that they warned of dangers. The adoption of the Tommyknockers by non-Cornish miners illustrates that this was not exclusively immigrant folklore, destined to vanish with the first generation of Cornish in the New World. The belief in Tommyknockers became genuine American folklore, conforming to its new environment.”⁵

Meanwhile, the Tommyknockers have left their considerable mark on the local legends and lore of the Colorado Rockies. For one thing, the name is found in a number of place names, businesses, and even trails. There is, for instance, a Tommyknocker Tavern in Creede, there’s a Tommy Knocker Bike Trail in Telluride, and a Tommyknocker Brewery in Idaho Springs.

Also in Telluride, there is still a (probably tongue-in-cheek) tradition that the Tommyknockers caused a loud explosion in the mines every morning at six o’clock, just to get things started for the day; and every Fourth of July the town’s fire department begins the festivities with just such an explosion, blaming it on the diminutive mining spirits for old time’s sake.

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Remnants of the Present Help Mine—the highest mine claim ever filed in Colorado at an elevation of 14,171 feet—near the summit of Mount Lincoln, in the Mosquito Range.

Verdict: The knackers, knockers, and Tommyknockers are an old, old story with deep roots in the plentiful mining folklore of Cornwall.

It’s easy to dismiss them as just that—a myth, a legend, a superstitious explanation for the sounds of creaking wooden mine supports, settling rock, dripping water, or distant dynamite explosions in adjacent mines. Ronald M. James expresses this rationalistic and materialistic way of thinking very nicely:

“The Tommyknockers were omens of danger, giving the miners something on which to focus their interpretations of subtle signs of cave-ins. The miners could not necessarily distinguish between the diverse and subtle sounds in the mine and failed to realize consciously that when the timbers of the mine moaned one way, it was safe, but when the mines echoed with another sound, it meant danger. Much of nineteenth-century mining expertise was based on experience, not science.”⁶

Sure, that makes sense.

Doesn’t mean I buy it completely, however. There are plenty of weird and inexplicable things in the dark, subterranean, inaccessible places of the earth, and the Tommyknockers would hardly be the weirdest. After all, the American Indians have their own stories of mysterious Little People in the mountains and forests of the west; so why shouldn’t the Tommyknockers have accompanied the Cornish miners on their journey across the seas, to perhaps shake hands with their Rocky Mountain counterparts—the Its′te-ya-ha, the Ninnimbe, the Nirumbee and Awwakkulé?

All the old mining folklore is dead these days. What mining is still done in these parts is the preserve of gigantic mining conglomerations and highly-credentialed engineers; what use do they have for the services of the Tommyknockers, with all their heavy-duty machinery and sophisticated technology?

I suspect the Tommyknockers scoff at these types, and continue to haunt the old, abandoned mines that they remember from the old days, when they could at least lend a helping hand to an industrious miner or two. Of course, I’ve never encountered anyone who actually claimed to have heard the Tommyknockers, much less seen one; but I suppose that’s not to be wondered at, because if the mere sound of the Tommyknockers tapping in the dark is said to harbinger the hearer’s death, how much worse is it to actually see one of the creatures?

Besides, if you spend enough time in the mountains of the western United States, you’ll see and hear strange things aplenty. I remember camping out one time in the Inner Basin of the San Francisco Mountains near Flagstaff, and seeing a strange light at dusk up on the ridge of that old, shattered volcano, where there ought not to have been any light at all.

A local stunt, or the handiwork of mischievous Tommyknockers?

Then there’s that shot-up old truck I saw abandoned at fourteen thousand feet in the saddle between Mts. Bross and Lincoln, in the DeCaLiBron Loop near Alma, Colorado. Probably just a stunt by some local hell-raisers; still, I can’t help but wonder if the Tommyknockers, grown bored and missing the company of men, decided to steal into town one day and highjack that truck just for old time’s sake, and take it for a joyride up onto the mountain.

In any case, if you do any exploring in the Colorado Rockies, you’re bound to come across an old, forgotten mine shaft, like a lonely doorway in the rock. And you just can’t help but wonder if there’s a Tommyknocker down there, hammering away at the rock like in the old days, and hoping for the return of the human miners so they can start the party anew…

1. Ronald M. James, “Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines,” Western Folklore, vol. 51: no. 2 (Apr., 1992), pg. 154.

2. Cf. the description of folklorist Robert Hunt:

“The Buccas or Knockers.—These are the sprites of the mines, and correspond to the Kobals of the German mines, the Duergars, and the Trolls. They are said to be the souls of the Jews who formerly worked the tin-mines of Cornwall. They are not allowed to rest because of their wicked practices as tinners, and they shared in the general curse which ignorant people believe still hangs on this race” (Popular Romances of the West of England [London: Chatto & Windus, 1908], pg. 82).

3. Ibid., pg. 159.

4. Caroline Bancroft, “Folklore of the Central City District, Colorado,” California Folklore Quarterly, vol. 4: no. 4 (Oct. 1945), pp. 332-3.

5. Op. cit., pp. 170-1.

6. Op. cit., pg. 169.