Good morning, fuzzies :3 I hope that you are doing well and that your weekend has been reasonably relaxing! If not, may I introduce an extremely good way to relax in the form of: sort-of-controlled demolitions?
For example, you might choose to drill some horizontal shafts, and then fill them with TNT, with the aim of then touching said TNT off and thereby getting yourself a nice big explosion. Congratulations: you have a coyote hole—sometimes but more rarely a coyote shaft, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Acme corporation.
This seems to have been a largely (though not exclusively) western term, and to have largely (though not exclusively) been popular around the turn of the century and a few decades thereafter (the header image is from the Longview Daily News, out of Washington, on February 26th, 1953).
It makes for some interesting reading, particularly alongside early papers having absolutely zero subtlety, for example the Oregon Daily Journal in 1916:
SIX BLOWN TO DEATH ON ROAD AT DEER ISLAND
Workmen Were Tamping Powder in “Coyote Hole” for Big Blast when Explosion Kills Them All.
HAD NO OPPORTUNITY TO SAVE THEMSELVES
Physician Hurries to Scene From St. Helens, But His Services Not Required.
St. Helens, Or., July 31—Boxed in a powder tunnel, or “coyote hole,” as it is called, six men, workmen on the stretch of new road between St. Helens and Deer Island, were blown to eternity, without a chance for their lives, when a large quantity of powder exploded just after noon today.
[…]
What caused today’s premature explosion can only be a matter of conjecture. A spark may have been struck when a ramrod struck a rock. The tamper may himself have been driving the charge home with too heavy blows, or one of the workmen, confident to the point of insanity, may have been smoking.
And really, “confident to the point of insanity” is such a mood for Coyotes, let’s be honest. Anyhow, Adolph Sutro, who worked on the Comstock Lode, came up with a plan for draining the water in the mine. Wikipedia refers to this as the Sutro Tunnel. The local papers, on the other hand…
(Yes, San Franciscans, he is also that Sutro)
Anyway! Don’t let them laugh at you about your coyote hole, is what I’m saying.
