A Year in a Coal-Mine
NOVEMBER, 1910
BY JOSEPH HUSBAND
TEN days after my graduation from Harvard I took my place as an unskilled workman in one of the largest of the great soft-coal mines that lie in the Middle West. It was with no thought of writing my experiences that I chose my occupation, but with the intention of learning by actual work the ’operating end’ of the great industry, in the hope that such practical knowledge as I should acquire would fit me to follow the business successfully. That this mine was operated in direct opposition to the local organization of union labor and had won considerable notoriety by successfully mining coal in spite of the most active hostility, gave an added interest to the work. The physical conditions of the mine were the most perfect that modern engineering has devised: the ‘workings’ were entirely electrified; the latest inventions in coalmining machinery were everywhere employed, and every precaution for the safety of the men was followed beyond the letter of the law.
I
It was half-past six on a July morning when the day-shift began streaming out of the wash-house: some four hundred men,—white, black, and of perhaps twenty-eight nationalities, — dressed in their tattered, black, and greasy mineclothes. The long stream wound out of the wash-house door, past the powerhouse where the two big generators that feed the arteries of the great mine all day long with its motive power were screaming in a high, shrill rhythm of sound, — past the tall skeleton structure of the tipple-tower, from which the light morning breeze blew black clouds of coal-dust as it eddied around the skeleton of structural iron-work, — to a small house at the mine-mouth, sheathed in corrugated iron, where the broken line formed a column, and the men, one by one, passed through a gate by a small window and gave their numbers to a red-faced man who checked down in a great book the men who were entering the mine.
From the window we passed along to a little inclosure directly above the mouth of the main hoisting-shaft.. Sheer above it the black tower of the tipple pointed up into the hot, blue morning sky; and the dull, dry heat of the flat Illinois country seemed to sink down around it. But from the square, black mouth of the shaft a strong, steady blast of cool air struck the faces of the men who stood at the head of the little column waiting for the next hoist.
On the one side of the shaft-mouth, long lines of empty railroad cars stretched out beyond into the flat country, each waiting its turn to be filled some time during the day with coal that would come pouring down over the great screens in the tipple; and on the other side of the shaft-mouth, under the seamed roof of the building where the checker wrote down the numbers of the day-shift, sat the hoisting engineer — a scrawny, hard-faced man with a minecap pushed back from his forehead.
Beside him was the great drum on which the long steel cables that lifted and lowered the hoisting-cage were rapidly unwinding, and in his hand he held a lever by which he controlled the ascent or descent of the ’cage.' The first cage had been lowered, and as I watched him and the dial before him, I saw his hand follow his eye, and as the white arrow passed the 300-foot level, the hand drew back a notch and the long, lithe wire began to uncoil more slowly. Three hundred and fifty feet — and another notch — and as the arrow reached near the 400-foot mark, his foot came down hard on the brake, and a minute later a bell at his elbow sounded the signal of the safe arrival of the hoist. A minute, and another signal; and then, releasing his foot from the brake, and pulling another lever toward him, the drums, reversed, began to re-wind; and as the arrow flew backwards, I realized that the cage was nearing the top,— the cage on which a minute later I was to make my descent as a ’loader’ into one of the largest, and perhaps most famous, of the vast soft-coal mines that lie in our Middle States.
As the thin cables streamed upward and over the sheave-wheels above the shaft and down to the reeling-drums, I looked at the men about me and felt a sudden mortification at the clean blue of my overalls, and the bright polish on my pick and shovel. A roar at the shaft-mouth, the grind of the drums as the brakes shot in, and the cage lifted itself suddenly from the shaft.
The cage, or elevator, on which the men were lowered into the mine, was a great steel box divided into four superimposed compartments, each holding ten men, and I stood, with nine others, crowded on the first or lowest deck. As the last man pushed into his place and we stood shoulder to shoulder, the hoisting engineer slowly slipped his lever again toward him, and as slowly the cage sank. Then, in an instant, the white-blue of the sky was gone, except for a thin crack below the deck above us, through which a sheet of white light sliced in and hung heavily in the dusty air of our compartment. The high song of the generators in the power-house, the choking puffs of the switch-engine in the yards, and the noise of men and work which I had not noticed before, I now suddenly missed in the absence of sound. There was a shuffling of feet on the deck above, and again we sank, and this time all was darkness, while we paused for the third deck to fill. Once more — and again for the fourth. Then, as the cage started and the roar of the shoes on the guide-rails struck my ears, I looked at the men about me. They were talking in a whirr of foreign words; and in the greasy yellow light of their pit-lamps, which hung like miniature coffee-pots in the brims of their caps, the strong, hard lines of their faces deepened. The working day was begun.
As the cage shot down, the wall of the shaft seemed to slip up, and from its wet, slimy surface an occasional spatter of mud shot in on the faces of the miners. Strong smells of garlic, of sweat, and of burning oil filled the compartment, and the air, which sucked up through the cracks beneath our feet as though under the force of a piston, fanned and pulled the yellow flames in the men’s caps into smoking streaks. Then I felt the speed of the ‘ hoist ’ diminish. A pressure came in my ears and I swallowed hard; and a second later, a soft yet abrupt pause in our descent brought me down on my heels. The black wall of the shaft before me suddenly gave away and we came to a stop on the bottom of the mine.
It was cool, and after the heat of a July morning, the damp freshness of the air chilled me. With dinner-pails banging against our knees we pushed out of the hoist; and as the men crowded past me, I stood with my back against a great timber and looked around me. Behind, the hoist had already sunk into the ‘sump’ or pit, at the bottom of the shaft, in order that the men on the second compartment might pass out into the mine; and a second later they swarmed by me — and still I stood, halfdazed by the roar of unknown sounds, my eyes blanketed by the absence of light, and my whole mind smothered and crushed. I was standing just off the main entry or tunnel of the mine, which began on my left hand out of blackness and passed again, on my right, into a seeming wall of darkness. The low, black roof, closely beamed with great timbers, was held by long lines of great whitewashed tree-trunks. A few electric lights shone dimly through their dust-coated globes, and the yellow flames from the men’s pit-lamps, which had flared so bright in the compartment of the hoisting-cage, seemed now but thin tongues of flame that marked rather than disclosed the men.
Out of the blackness on the left, two tracks passed over a great pit and stretched on into the blackness on the right, as though into the wall of the coal itself. Then, far off, a red signallight winked out and made distance visible; and beyond it came the sound of grinding wheels; there was the gleam of a headlight on the steel rails. The ray grew larger and two yellow sparks above it flamed out into pit-lights. A train was coming out of the entry and I waited until it should pass. With a grind of brakes it suddenly loomed out of the blackness and into the dull haze of light at the shaft-bottom. With a a roar it passed by. The locomotive, a great iron box, was built like a battering-ram, the headlight set in its armorplated bow, and behind, on two low seats, as in a racing automobile, sat the motorman and the ‘trip-rider ’ or he! per, the motorman with one hand on the great iron brake-wheel, the other on his controller, and the trip-rider swinging on his low seat, half on the motor and half over the coupling of the rocking car behind, clinging to the pole of the trolley. Their faces were black with the coal-dust, — black as the motor and their clothing, — and from their pit-lamps the flames bent back in the wind and streamed out straight along their cap-tops. Low above the head of the trip-rider the wheel on the trolley streaked out sudden bursts of greenish-white sparks along the wire; and as the train passed by, the roar of the locomotive gave place to the clattering of the couplings of the long string of stocky cars, each heaped high with its black load of coal. Some one seized me by the elbow.
‘What’s ver number,’ he asked.
‘419.'
‘ Loader ? New man ? ’
I nodded.
‘Then come along with me.’
He was a tall, thin man, who walked with his head thrown forward and his chin against his chest as though in constant fear of striking the low beams overhead. I followed him, stumbling rather clumsily over the broken coal beside the track. The train had come to a stop over the pit between the rails, and men with iron bars were beating loose the frogs and releasing the hopper-bottoms of the cars. Heavy clouds of fine coal-dust poured up from the cars as the coal roared down into the bins; and the clanking of metal, the crash of falling coal, and the unintelligible shouting of the foreigners, filled the entry with a dull tumult of sounds. Dodging the low trolley-wire which hung about five feet above the rails, we crawled across the coupling between two of the cars to the other side of the entry and walked to the left, past the locomotive where the motorman was still sitting in his low seat, waiting to pull out his train of empty cars into the sudden darkness of the tunnel beyond. Then, for the first time, I learned that mines are echoless, and that sound — like light — is absorbed by the blotterlike walls of the tunnels.
We walked down the entry between the rails, and after a hundred yards turned with the switch in the track sharply to the right, and again on. Sense of direction or angles was lost, and, like the faces in a foreign race of people, where one can see little or no individuality, so here, each corner seemed the same, and in a hundred yards I was utterly lost. Above was the smooth, black roof; below, the ties and the rails; and on either side, behind the two long rows of props, the face of the coal-seam, which glittered and sparkled in the light from our pit-lamps like a dull diamond. We talked a little. My companion asked me where I had worked before, how much I knew of mines, and a few other questions; and still we walked on, dodging the low wire that comes level with one’s ear, and stumbling over the layer of broken coal that lay strewn here and there between the rails.
The silence was like the darkness — a total absence of sound, rather than stillness, as my first impression of the mine had been that of an absence of light, rather than of darkness. The smoking lights in our caps seemed to press out through the blackness twenty feet around us, where the light disappeared and was gone. And always in front of us, out of the black darkness, the two long lines of props on either side of the track stepped one by one into the yellow haze of light and sank again into darkness behind us as we walked.
The air was cool and damp, but as we turned the last corner the dampness seemed suddenly gone from it. It was warmer and closer. Here the track swerved up from one of the main tunnels into a ‘ room,’ and at the end, or ‘heading’ of this room, which we reached a few minutes later, empty and waiting for its first load, stood one of the square cars which I had seen before at the mine-bottom and which we passed several times on sidings by the track. The car was pushed up to the end of the track and its wheels ‘spragged’ by two blocks of coal. Here the tunnel suddenly ended, and from the blank, back ‘face’ a rough, broken pile of coal streamed down on both sides of the car and reared up before it against the roof.
‘Just shovel ’er full, then wait till the motor takes her out and sends in an empty, and fill that one. I ’ll look in on you once in a while and see how you ’re getting along.’
Then he turned and walked down the track and left me in the dim light of my single pit-lamp.
II
In the first days of coal-mining — as in many mines to-day where modern methods have not superseded those of old-time miners — a man did all the work. With his hand-drill he bored into the face of the coal at the head of his room, or entry, and from his keg of powder he made long cart ridges and inserted them into his drill-holes. Then, when the coal was blasted down, and he had broken it with a pick, he loaded it with his shovel into a car; and trimming square the face of the tunnel, propping when necessary, he pushed on and on until he broke through and joined the next tunnel or completed the required length of that single entry.
But to-day these conditions are, in most instances, changed. The work begins with the ‘machine-men,’ who operate the ‘ chain-machines.’ In order that the blast may dislodge by gravity an even block of coal the dimensions of the cross-section of the tunnel, these men cut with their machines a ‘sumpcut,’ or, in other words, carve out an opening level with the floor, about six inches high and six feet deep at the end of the tunnel. The machines — which are propelled by electricity — consist of a motor and a large oblong disk, about which travels an endless chain containing sharp steel ‘ bits ’ or picks. The machine is braced, the current turned on, and the disk advanced against the coal, automatically advancing as the bits grind out the coal. As soon as the machine has entered to the full six feet, the disk is withdrawn and the cut continued until it extends across the entire face.
In the evening the drillers, with their powerful air-drills, bore a series of five or six six-foot ‘shot-holes,’ four along the roof, and two on each side for the ‘ribshots.’ Then a third crew of men, the ‘shot-firers,’ fill the deep drill-hole with long cartridges of coarse black powder, and blast down the coal, which falls broken and crumbled into the cut prepared by the machine-men. In the morning, when the ever-moving current of air, forced into the mine by the fan at the mouth of the air-shaft, has cleared away the dust and smoke, the loaders enter the mine and all day long load into the ever-ready cars the coal that has been blasted down, until the ‘place’ is cleaned up, and their work is done. Then they move on to another ‘place,’ and so the work goes on in a perfect system of rotation.
My companion had told me, as we walked from the mine-bottom, that his name was Billy Wild. ‘Call me Billy,’ he said; and as we walked down the track to the main entry, he turned and called over his shoulder, ‘You’re in Room 27, third west-south. That’s where you are, if you want to know.’ The light in my lamp was burning low, and I sat dowrn on a pile of coal beside the track, lifted it out of the socket in my cap, and pried up the wick with a nail which one of the men ‘ on top ’ had given me for the purpose. Then I stripped to the waist and began to load, shovelful after shovelful, each lifted four feet and turned over into the waiting car, for two long hours, sometimes stopping to break with my pick great blocks of coal that were too large to lift, even with my hands. Then finally, lumps of coal began to show above the edge of the car, and I ‘trimmed’ it, lifting some of the larger pieces to my knees, then against my chest, and then throwing them up on the top of the pile.
The noise of the shovel scraping against the floor and the clatter of the coal as the great pile slid down and filled each hole that I dug out at its foot, filled the tunnel with friendly sounds; but when the car was loaded and I slipped on my coat and sat down on a pile of fine coal-dust beside the track to wait, silence suddenly submerged me. I could hear my heart beat, and curious noises sang in my ears. Up in the roof, under the stratum of slate above the coal, came a trickling sound like running water — the sound of gas seeping out through the crevices in the coal. I was wet with sweat, and my face, hands, and body were black where the great cloud of dust which my shovel had created, had smeared my wet skin. Dull pains in the small of my back caught me when I moved, and every muscle in my body ached. (In a week my hands had blistered, the blisters had broken, and then over the cracked flesh ingrained with coal-dust healing callouses had begun to form.)
Then, far off in the distance, came a muffled, grinding sound that grew louder and louder, — a sound that almost terrified. A dull, yellow light, far down in the mouth of the room, outlined the square of the tunnel, and then, around the corner came the headlight of the electric ‘gathering’ or switching locomotive, and above it, the bobbing yellow flames of two pit-lamps. With a grinding roar, the motor struck the upgrade and came looming up the tunnel, filling it with its bulk. There was sound and the silence was gone. The coupling of the locomotive locked with the coupling of the waiting car, and they rumbled away. Once more the locomotive came, this time with an ‘empty’ to be filled. In the old days, mules were used to ‘gather’ the loaded cars, and, in fact, are still employed in most mines to-day; but electricity permits bigger loads, and the dozen or two of mules that lived in the mine were used only where it was impossible to run the locomotives.
At the end of the week I was given a companion, or ‘buddy.’ Our lockers in the wash-house were near toget her, and we usually went down on the same hoist; but some mornings I would find Jim ahead of me, waiting by the scalehouse. Jim rarely took the full benefit of the wash-house privileges, and morning found him with the dirt and grime of the work of the previous day still on his face. He was a Greek, short, with a thin, black moustache, which drooped down into two ‘rat-tail’ points. Around each eye a heavy black line of coal-dust was penciled, as though by an actor’s crayon. His torn black working clot hes, greasy with oil dripped from his pitlamp, hung on him like rags on a scarecrow. From the scale-house we walked up the now familiar entries in ‘third west-south’ to the room where we worked, and dug out our picks and shovels from under a pile of coal where we had hidden them the night before. Then in the still close air of the silent room we began each morning to fill the first car.
Down in the scale-house, where the cars were hauled over the scales set in the track, before being dumped into the bins between the rails, Old Man Davis took the weights; and when the loader’s number — a small brass tag with his number stamped upon it — was given to him, he marked down opposite it the pounds of coal to the loader’s credit; and so each day on the great sheet, smootched with his dusty hands, stood a record of each man’s strength measured in tons of coal.
When Jim and I worked together, we took turns hanging our numbers inside the car, and each night we remembered to whose credit the last car had been, and the next morning, if my number had been hung in the last car of the day before, Jim would pull one of his tags out of his pocket, and hang it on the hook just inside the edge of the empty car. Then, he on one side and I on the other, we worked, shovelful after shovelful, until the coal showed above the edge. And then came the ‘trimming’ with the great blocks that had to be lifted and pushed with our chests and arms up on the top of the filled car.
Time went slowly then, for we could load a car together in less than an hour; and sometimes it took an hour and a half before the ‘gathering’ motor would come grinding up into the room to give us an ‘empty.’ In those long half-hours we would sit together on a pile of coal-dust beside the track and try to talk to each other.
Jim was a Greek, and from what I was able to gather, he came from somewhere in the southern part of the peninsula. I remembered a little Homer, and I often tried stray words on him; but my pronunciation of the Greek of ancient Athens was not the Greek of Jim Bardas; and although he recognized attempts at his own tongue and oftentimes the meaning of the words, it was not until we discovered a system of writing that we began to get along. Mixed in with the coal that had been blasted down by the shot-firers the night before, we occasionally found strips of white paper from the cartridges. We always saved these and laid them beside our dinner-pails; and when the car was filled and we had sat down again in the quiet beside the track, we would take our pit-lamps out of our caps and, rubbing our fingers in the greasy gum of oil and coal-dust that formed under the lamp-spout, we would write words with our fingers on the white strips of paper: áѵθρωπος íππος ȄηνΕς
Jim knew some English, the word for coal, car, loader —and he learned that my name was Joe, and called me ‘My friend,’ and ‘buddie.’ Then sometimes, after the fascination of writing words had worn away, we would sit still and listen to the gas or for the approach of the motor; and sometimes when the wicks in our lamps had burned low, I would take out of my pocket the round ball of lamp-wick and, like old women with a skein of yarn, we would wind back and forth, from his fingers to my own, sixteen strands of lamp-wick; and then, tying the end in a rude knot and breaking it off, stick the skein of wick down the spout of the lamp until only the end remained in sight. Next, lifting the little lid on the top, we would fill the body with oil, shaking it until the wick was thoroughly soaked so that it would burn.
III
There was comparatively little gas in the mine. Each morning, as we entered our room, we made a rough test for gas, for occasionally during the night some door down in the entry was accidentally left open and the air-current, shortcircuited, might fail to reach up into the room and clean out the ever-generating gas. And so, as we left the entry, we would take our lamps from our caps and, walking one before the other, holding them out before us and slowly lifting them above our heads, watch to see if a sudden spurt of blue flame from the pit-lamps would disclose the presence of ‘fire-damp,’ the most feared of all mine-gases.
There is always some gas up under the roof at the head of a room or an entry, and when the cars were loaded we would sometimes burn it out, holding our lamps high up against the roof until the gas up in the end of a drill-hole, or in a hollow of a rock, burst suddenly into a soft blue and yellow flame that puffed out against the roof and down toward our hands. There was never much of it, but once in a while where the drill bored through into a pocket, there was more gas than the men anticipated; and twice I have seen men come staggering down the entry, holding their faces in their hands, when the flame had swerved suddenly down and caught them. We could always hear it — the trickling, like water running over pebbles; and sometimes, too, as we sat and waited, we could hear far up in the strata above a sudden crackling as the pressure of four hundred feet of solid stone bent beneath its weight the supporting timbers and pillars of coal that held up the roof of the mine. Old miners call these noises the ‘working’ of a mine; and often, where the rooms were close together and the walls of coal between them were thin, there was a constant splintering sound and louder noises that would bring us suddenly to our feet in a little panic of fear.
It is not the loading, nor the long hours with the shovel and pick, that grind into the brain; but it is the silence and the waiting, the silence and then the sounds, and then the silence again.
A coal-mine is a vast city in an underground world. Beside the hoistingshaft, down which the men are lowered into the mine and from which the coal is lifted in great ‘skips,’ or more often in the mine-cars themselves, there is the air-shaft. These are usually the only two connections between the mine and the outer world. Shaft one, where we worked, was about four hundred feet below the surface, and comprised over seventy-five miles of tunnels laid out by the engineers’ transit according to a perfect system for the hauling of the coal and the ultimate mining of the maximum quantity. From the airshaft to the hoisting-shaft ran the main tunnel, or entry; and parallel and at right angles with this tunnel ran other entries, dividing the mine into great sections.
Down into the air-shaft, every hour of the day and night, an enormous fan in the fan-house at the top of the shaft pumped air into the mine, and by means of many doors, stoppings, and bridges or ’overcasts,’this strong current of air passed through every mile of tunneling, never crossing its own path and never stopping, until it again reached the main entry, but this time at the foot of the hoisting-shaft, through which — fouled by the gases, the dust, and impurities of the mine — it poured out, a cold blast in summer, and in winter a tower of misty vapor that ascended far into the structure of the tipple-tower above the shaftmouth. To keep this current of air from taking the path of the least resistance and ‘short-circuiting,’ cutting off whole sections of the mine, there was arranged a system of doors which were opened to allow the trains and the mine-cars to pass, and closed again when they had gone through. As an additional precaution to take care of this life-blood circulation, without which work in the mine would be impossible, inspectors — whose duty it was to measure the strength of the current, and to inspect the doors and stoppings to see that no part of the mine escaped the cleansing draft — passed constantly from place to place, testing for the presence of gas with their safetylamps, and ever measuring the volume and flow of the air-current.
And through all this vast system of tunnels ran the great underground electric railway, with its low-hanging wire, its switching-stations, its sidings, and its main belt-line. Small electric locomotives in the various outlying sections of the mine gathered the loaded cars from the rooms where they were filled by the loaders, and made up the trains on sidings near the main beltline. All day long the large 13-ton locomotives gathered these trains and dragged them past the scale-house — where Old Man Davis checked up the weight of the loaded cars to each man’s credit — to the great pit between the rails at the foot of the hoisting-shaft, where half-naked, blackened Greeks beat open the hopper-bottoms and dropped the coal down into the waiting bins below. And from the bins, with automatic regularity, giant buckets or ‘skips’ lifted the coal four hundred and six feet upward to the open air, and then fifty feet more to the top of the tipple-tower, where like a tumbling torrent it poured down over the sortingscreens into the railroad cars beneath.
There were four hundred men on the day-shift; and the loaders were, for the most part, Bulgarians and Greeks. Few spoke English, and few had been many years in America. Some worked and saved in order to return at a future day to the Old Country and purchase with their earnings an acre or two that would give them a position in the little village of their birth. Others plodded on, sending monthly remittances to their families and hoping against hope that they too might some day return. Others, with less strong ties of home and country, spent their earnings prodigally on gay clothes from the Company Store, and much beer in the evening at the long boarding-houses half a mile from the mine.
There was Big John, a huge Bulgarian giant, who had figured that a dollar a day was sufficient to give him all that life offered. His great body was able to earn twice that sum during the working day, for we were paid entirely by piece-work, and a loader, at the rate of twelve and a half cents a ton, might earn as high as $2.25 a day. But he was lazy, and learning that the only excuse for laziness was sickness, each day at two o’clock in the afternoon, Big John presented himself to Pete Christofalus, the ‘cage-boss,’ at the mine-bottom, and rubbing his stomach with one hand, told him, ‘Me sick; thees place no got steam, no can work,’ and demanded that he be allowed to leave the mine. There were others who would work at night, in addition to the day, if they were permitted. An old Russian and his son, who would enter the mine on the earliest shift in the morning, worked all day long, enraged and clamoring for cars if they did not receive empties immediately, and sometimes the track-men on the night-shift would find them loading all the empty cars that they could find and leaving late at night, to retire alone to the corner of the room at the boarding-house in which they lived.
Once or twice on Greek Church days the white starched kilts and braided jackets of Macedonia gave color to the dingy streets, and once came a halfdozen Egyptians who added their copper faces to our medley of nations. The head men were Americans, Scotchmen, and Englishmen. I can remember how ‘ Uncle Jimmy ’ wept on the Fourth of July when the band played ‘Dixie,’ and how quiet steel-eyed Sandy would take his fiddle (Harry Lauder had been in St. Louis that winter), and marching up and down the little parlor of his house, stroke out with no tender touch, but with a wealth of feeling, ‘I Love a Lassie.’
‘Little Dick,’ interpreter, spoke ten tongues, and read Virgil. When he was drunk you might guess that he had been once a gentleman, and that there was a reason for his leaving Austria; dull sobriety vulgarized him.
In every tunnel ran the long, thin pipe along the rail, through which came the compressed air to drive the airdrills of the night-shift. The air in the room-headings was supposed to be good enough for men to work in if it was free from gas, but sometimes when the smoke from the pit-lamps and the smells of sweat and garlic, and the fine clouds of coal-dust that rose against the roof with every shovelfull, made it rank and choking, we would take our picks, and working loose the valve in the airpipe, hold our hands and faces in the strong, cool stream that seemed to come, driven by an unknown power, from a world above.
The temperature in a mine is about the same, year in and year out; cool in summer, and warm in winter, in comparison to the outer air; but when the exertion of labor brought the sweat streaming out from every pore, the water in our dinner-buckets seemed sometimes almost too warm to drink, and it was Jim who taught me to loosen the valve on the air-pipe and, propping my dinner-bucket with a chunk of coal against the vent, chill the water with a blast of compressed air.
Day after day we loaded, and one day when the great pile of coal that had been shot down by the night-men had been shoveled into the cars and dragged away, and we had attacked the loosened blocks at the head of the room with our picks, there was a hollow sound, and a minute later my pick struck through and we found that we had broken into the heading of a room driven from another entry in the opposite direction from ours; and half an hour later we were talking to two Greeks who had climbed through the opening.
Up in the wash-house, by a locker near to my own, I often chatted with another loader at the beginning or at the end of the day. We went down on the same hoist one morning, and an hour later, as my first, car stood halffilled, the section boss came tramping noisily up the track and told us that the shift was called off. As we reached bottom, a motor came grinding down the track, and in the pale light of the pit-lamps and the flashing green of the trolleys, we saw a long, white bundle, wrapped in the coarse canvas that is used to build stoppings for the ventilation system. It was the man whom I had known in the wash-house — the man who, an hour before, had gone with me into the mine. We had parted at the mine-bottom, and he had gone up to his room, a half-mile from the shaft; a room in which the track, turning from the main entry, ran up at a fairly high grade to the heading. There he found an empty car waiting for him — one of the great, heavy, square cars that stood ready each morning to begin the day. Climbing up, perhaps to hang his brass tag inside, he had kicked loose from under the wheel the block of wood that held it, or perhaps the weight of his body had moved the car; at all events, it had become loosened and had started down the track. Catching a piece of wood in his hand, he had followed it, vainly trying to block its wheels. At the foot of the room, where it joined the main entry at right angles, the track ran within a few inches of the solid wall of coal. In the darkness, the man had misjudged his distance and the car had caught him between the coal and its side, and had passed on.
That evening, as we walked home to the boarding-house, we saw a dozen men walk slowly from the Company Hospital carrying on their shoulders a long white-pine box. Perhaps he had hoped some day to return to his village; perhaps he sent monthly remittances to his family in some obscure town in the Croatian highlands; or perhaps he had come alone, seeking a fortune in a new land.
IV
To the ear accustomed to the constant sound of a living world, the stillness of a coal-mine, where the miles of cross-cuts and entries and the unyielding walls swallow up all sounds and echo, is a silence that is complete; but, as one becomes accustomed to the silence through long hours of solitary work, sounds become audible that would escape an ear less trained. The trickling murmur of the gas; the spattering fall of a lump of coal, loosened by some mysterious force from a cranny in the wall; the sudden knocking and breaking of a stratum far up in the rock above; or the scurry of a rat off somewhere in the darkness — strike on the ear loud and startlingly. The eye, too, becomes trained to penetrate the darkness; but the darkness is so complete that there is a limit, the limit of the rays cast by the pit-lamp.
There is a curious thing that I have noticed, and as I have never heard it mentioned by any of the other men, perhaps it is an idea peculiar to myself; but on days when I entered the mine with the strong yellow sunlight and the blue sky as a last memory of the world above, I carried with me a condition of fair weather that seemed to penetrate down into the blackness of the entries and make my pit-lamp burn a little more brightly. On days when we entered the mine with a gray sky above, or with a cold rain beating in our faces, there was a depression of spirits that made the blackness more dense and unyielding, and the lights from the lamps seemed less cheerful.
Sometimes the roof was bad in the rooms, and I soon learned from the older miners to enter my room each morning testing gingerly with my pitlamp for the presence of gas and reaching far up with my pick, tapping on the smooth stone roof to test its strength. If the steel rang clean against the stone, the roof was good; but if it sounded dull and drummy, it might be dangerous. Sometimes, when the roof was weak, we would call for the section boss and prop up the loosened stone; but more often, the men ran their risk. We worked so many days in safety that it seemed strange that death could come; and when it did come, it came so suddenly that there was a surprise, and the next day we began to forget.
I had heard much of the dangers that the miner is exposed to, but little has been said of the risks to which the men through carelessness subject themselves. Death comes frequently to the coal-miners from a ‘blown-out, shot.’ When the blast is inserted in the drill-hole, several dummy cartridges are packed in for tamping. If these are properly made and tamped, the force of the explosion will tear down the coal properly, but if the man has been careless in his work, the tamps will blow out like shot from a gun-barrel, and igniting such gas or coal-dust as may be present, kill or badly burn the shot-firers. The proper tamping is wet clay, but it is impossible to convince the men of it, and nine out of ten will tamp their holes with dummies filled with coal-dust (itself a dangerous explosive) scooped up from the side of the track. Again, powder-kegs are sometimes opened in a manner which seems almost the act of an insane man. Rather than take the trouble to unscrew the cap in the head of the tin powder-keg and pour out the powder through its natural opening, the miner will drive his pick through the head of the keg and pour the powder from the jagged square hole he has punched. And these are but two of the many voluntary dangers which a little care on the part of the men themselves would obviate.
A mine always seems more or less populated when the day-shift is down, for during the hours of the working day, in every far corner, at the head of every entry and room, there are men drilling, loading, and ever pushing forward its boundaries. At five o’clock the long line of blackened miners which is formed at the foot of the hoisting-shaft, begins to leave the mine; and by six o’clock, with the exception of a few inspectors and fire-bosses, the mine is deserted.
The night-shift, began at eight, and it was as though night had suddenly been hastened forward, to step from the soft, evening twilight on the hoist, and, in a brief second, leave behind the world and the day and plunge back into the darkness of the mine.
We were walking up the track from the mine-bottom toward six west-south, — Billy Wild, Pat Davis, two track-repairers, and I. As we turned the corner by the run-around, there came suddenly from far off in the thick stillness a faint tremor and a strong current of air. The ‘shooters’ were at work. For a quarter of a mile we walked on, stopping every once in a while to listen to the far-off ‘ boom ’ of the blasts that came through the long tunnels, faint and distant, as though muffled by many folds of heavy cloth. We pushed open the big trappers’ door just beyond where First and Second Right turn off from the main entry, and came into the faint yellow glow of a single electric lamp that hung from the low beamed roof.
Beside the track in a black niche cut in the wall of coal, two men were working. A safe twenty feet from them their lighted pit-lamps flared where they were hung by the hooks from one of the props. Round, black cans of powder tumbled together in the back of the alcove, a pile of empty paper tubes, and great spools of thick, white fuse lay beside them. We sat down on the edge of the track at a safe distance from the open powder, and watched them as they blew open the long, white tubes and with a battered funnel poured in the coarse grains of powder until the smooth, round cartridge was filled, a yard or two of white fuse hanging from its end. In fifteen minutes they had finished, and one of the men gathered in his arms the pile of completed cartridges and joined us in the main entry.
A few minutes later, as we neared the heading, a sudden singing ‘ boom ’ came down strongly against the air-current and bent back the flames in our pitlamps. Far off in the blackness ahead, a point of light marked the direction of the tunnel; another appeared. Suddenly, from the thick silence, came the shrill whine of the air-drills. A couple of lamps, like yellow tongues of flame, shone dimly in the head of the tunnel and the air grew thick with a flurry of fine coal-dust. Then below the bobbing lights appeared the bodies of two men, stripped to the waist, the black coating of dust that covered them moist with gleaming streaks of sweat.
‘How many holes have you drilled ?' yelled Wild, his voice drowned by the scream of the long air-drill as the writhing bit tore into the coal.
There was a final convulsive grind as the last inch of the six-foot drill sank home, then the sudden familiar absence of sound save for the hiss of escaping air.
‘All done here.’
Slowdy the two men pulled the long screw blade from the black breast of the coal, the air-hose writhing like a wounded snake about their ankles. The driller who had spoken wiped his sweaty face with his hands, his eyes blinking with the dust. He picked up his greasy coat from beside the track and wrapped it around his wet shoulders.
‘Look out for the gas,’ he shouted. ‘There is a bit here, up high.’
He raised his lamp slowly to the jagged roof. A quick blue flame suddenly expanded from the lamp and puffed down at him as he took away his hand.
In the black end of the tunnel six small holes, each an inch and a half in diameter and six feet deep, invisible in the darkness and against the blackness of the coal, marked where the blasts were to be placed. On the level floor, stretching from one wall of the entry to the other, the undercut had been ground out with the chain-machines by the machine-men during the afternoon, and as soon as the blasts were in and the fuses lighted, the sudden wrench of these charges would tear down a solid block of coal six feet deep by the height and depth of the entry, to fall crushed and broken into the sump-cut, ready for the loaders on the following morning.
Selecting and examining each cartridge, the shooters charged the drillholes. Two cartridges of black powder, tamped in with a long copper-headed rod, then dummies of clay for wads, leaving hanging like a great white cord from each charged drill-hole a yard of the long, white fuse.
We turned and tramped down the tunnel and squatted on the track a safe fifty yards away. Down at the end of the tunnel we had just deserted bobbed the tiny flames of the lights in the shooters’ pit-caps. There was a faint glow of sparks. ‘Coming!’ they yelled out through the darkness, and we heard them running as we saw their lights grow larger. For a minute we silently waited. Then from the far end of the tunnel, muffled and booming like the breaking of a great wave in some vast cave, came a singing roar, now like the screech of metal hurled through the air, and the black end of the tunnel flamed suddenly defiant; a solid square of crimson flames, like the window of a burning house; and a roar of flying air drove past us, putting out our lights and throwing us back against the rails.
' It’s a windy one,’yelled Wild. ‘Look out for the rib-shots.'
Like a final curtain in a darkened theatre, a slow pall of heavy smoke sank down from the roof, and as it touched the floor, a second burst of flame tore it suddenly upward, and far down the entry, the trappers’ door banged noisily in the darkness. Then we crept back slowly, breathing hard in an air thick with dust and the smell of the burnt black powder, to the end of the tunnel, where the whole face had been torn loose —a great pile of broken coal against the end of the entry.
Often, bits of paper from the cartridges, lighted by the blast, will start a fire in the piles of coal-dust left by the machine-men; and before the shooters leave a room that has been blasted, an examination must be made in order to prevent the possibility of fire. All night long we moved from one entry to another, blasting down in each six feet more of the tunnel, which would be loaded out on the following day; and it was four in the morning before the work was finished.
It was usually between four and five in the morning when we left the mine. As we stepped from the hoist and left behind us the confining darkness, the smoky air, and the sense of oppression and silence of the mine below, the soft, fresh morning air in the early dawn, or sometimes the cool rain, seemed never more refreshing. One does not notice the silence of a mine so much upon leaving the noise of the outer world and entering the maze of tunnels on the day’s work, as when stepping off the hoist in the early morning hours when the world is almost still: the sudden sense of sound and of living things emphasizes, by contrast, the silence of the underworld. There is a noise of life, and the very motion of the air seems to carry sounds. A dog barking half a mile away in the sleeping town sounds loud and friendly, and there seems to be a sudden clamor that is almost bewildering.
V
It is natural that a mine should have its superstitions. The darkness of the underworld, the silence, the long hours of solitary work, are all conditions ideal to the birth of superstition; and when the workmen are drawn from many nationalities, it is again but natural that the same should be true of their superstitions.
One night when Carlson, the general manager, was sitting in his office, there was a knock at the door, and two loaders, from the Hartz Mountains, came into the room, talking excitedly, with Little Dick, the interpreter. Their story was disconnected, but Carlson gathered the main facts. They had been working in the northwest corner of the mine, in an older part of the workings, and on their way out that afternoon, as they were passing an abandoned room, they had noticed several lights far up at its heading. Knowing that the room was no longer being worked, and curious as to who should be there, they had walked up quietly toward the lights. Here their story became more confused. There were two men they insisted — and they were certain that they were dwarfs. They had noticed them carefully, and described them as little men, with great picks, who were digging or burying something in the clay floor at the foot of one of the props. A sudden terror had seized them, and they had not delayed to make further investigation; but on the way out they had talked together and had decided that these two strange creatures had been burying some treasure: ‘a pot of gold,’ one of them argued.
Carlson was interested. The questions and answers grew more definite and more startling. The two men whom they had seen were certainly hump-backed. They were wielding enormous picks, and one of the loaders believed that he had seen them put something into the hole. Then came their request that they might be allowed to go back that night into the mine, and with their own tools go to this abandoned room and dig for the buried treasure. It was against precedent to allow any but the night-shift into the mine, but superstitions are demoralizing, and the best remedy seemed to be to allow them to prove themselves mistaken. An hour later they were lowered on the hoist; and all that night, alone in the silence of the mine, they dug steadily in the heading of the abandoned room, but no treasure was discovered. All the next night they dug, and it was not until seven nights’ labor had turned over a foot and a half of the hard clay of the entire heading that they abandoned their search.
It is the custom of the men, when they leave the mine at the close of the shift, to hide their tools; and the imaginations of the loaders, worked upon by eight hours of solitary work, had doubtless seen in the forms of two of their companions who were hiding their shovels the traditional gnomes of their own Hartz Mountains.
In another part of the mine another superstition was given birth that led to a more unfortunate result. This time it happened among the Croatians, and, unfortunately, the story was told throughout the boarding-houses before the bosses learned of it, and one morning a great section of the mine was abandoned by the men. Up in the headings of one of the entries — so the story went — lived the ghost of a white mule. As the men worked with the coal before them, and the black emptiness of the tunnel behind, this phantom mule would materialize silently from the wall of the entry, and with the most diabolical expression upon its face, creep quietly down behind its intended victim, who — all unconscious of its presence — would be occupied in loading his car. If the man turned, and for even a fraction of a second his eyes rested upon the phantom, the shape would suddenly disappear; but if he were less fortunate and that unconscious feeling of a presence behind him did not compel him to turn his eyes, the phantom mule would sink his material teeth deep into the miner’s shoulder; and death would follow. It was fortunate, indeed, that the only two men who had been visited by this unpleasant apparition had turned and observed him.
Perhaps it had been the sudden white glare cast from the headlight of a locomotive far down the entry, or perhaps it had been entirely the imagination, but, at all events, a man had come from his work early one afternoon inspired with this strange vision, and the next day another man also had seen it. The story was noised around, and two days later the men stuck firmly to their determination that they would not enter that part of the mine. Fortunately for the superintendent, a crowd of Bulgarians had just arrived from East St. Louis seeking employment. The Croatians were sent into another part of the mine to work, a mile from the haunted entries, where there were no unpleasant ghosts of white mules to disturb their labors; and so long as the mine remained in operation there is no further record of the unpleasant ramblings of this fantastical animal; at least, none of the Bulgarians ever saw it.
With the mule came the ghost, of a little white dog; but for some curious reason, although the dog was reported by many to have run out from abandoned rooms and barked at the men as they stumbled up the entry, but little attention was paid to it, and it seemed to possess no particularly disturbing influence.
There were many Negroes in the mine and they, too, had t heir ’h’ ants’ and superstitions; but these were of a more ordinary nature. In Room 2, third west-south, a sudden fall of rock from the roof had caught two miners. Tons of stone had followed, and in a second, two men had been crushed, killed and buried. Death must have been instantaneous, and months of labor would have been required to recover the bodies, which were probably crushed out of human resemblance; but even years after this happened, Room 2 was one that was carefully avoided by all the Negroes, and if it ever became necessary for one of them to pass it alone, he would always go by on the run; for back under the tons of white shale that came down straight across the room-mouth the ghosts of Old Man Gleason and another, whose name was forgotten, still remained — immortal.
It was to prevent the establishment of such superstitions that the shift was always called off for the day if a man was killed in the mine; and the next morning when the men returned to their work, the section boss of that section in which the unfortunate miner had met his death took particular care to place several men together at that place in order that no superstition might grow up around it.
[In the next issue, Mr. Husband will describe a long fight against fire in the mine. — THE EDITORS.]