Killing for Coal America’s DeapLiest Labor War Thomas G. Andrews HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambs Lond 20082 The Reek of the New Industrialism ‘The odors of the Rocky Mountain Empire tickled the nose wid their eontra- . Ifwe could have followed William Jackson Palmer arouucl Colo- ‘ado int the late 1860s, we might have breathed in smells of dust and dung, blasting powder and sawdust, pine needles and wood stuoke and rotting flesh. On the eve of the great coalfield wars, we would have found many of diction those odors overwhelmed by the acrid aroma of burning coal and such ae- commpanimicnts as sulfurous smelter snioke and ozone, nevsly willed stel and stewing sugar beets. Indeed, the smell of coal became so pervasive between the 1860s and the 1gtos that Coloradans and visitors alike came to take it for granted. The veck of the industralizing West is lost tous, but ample evidence attests to the speed aud pervasiveness with which fossil Js penetrated the very founda tious of economy and society, the physical structure of the region, aud even its culture, Photographs, draw testin i, buildings, and ruins provide eloquent uy to the central ole of eoal in Wester history. Though today we see hese images through a different lens than did Coloradans of dhe late nine- teenth and early qwentieth centuries, their past and our present nonetheless converge around a shared dependence on fossil fuels and a troubling pro- peusity to overlook the hi van suffering and environmental destruction that ‘our appetite for energy afliets on distant hinterlands, But before we can see “The Reck of the New Industrialism these connections, we nnustftst abandon American frontier mythologies tht ake the notion of an industrial West seem like + contradiction in terms. prisingly few photographs of Colorado during this ert betray direct aiature of energy and its evideuce of coal, instead, they a Js runs ay a hilden nany ofthe stock images of the er, whether ofthe moats ved by silver miners, the combines that harvested she fields beyond which barbed-wire fences fell away to the horizon, the generate ing stations dispatching, elecucity to brighten eity streets and department store windows, or the great hard-rock uniners’ strikes pitting members of the Western Federation of Miners Indeed, by the early tweutieth century even pictures of Main Street facadkes sgainst state militiamen and mine operators signaling tciumph and permanence, or domestic seenes depicting respect: ble middle-class families gathered around the hearths of their subuxbas residences, demoustrated the centrality of coal «o Wester life, To uuclet= stand the place of the Colorado coal miners’ struggles int the history of the West, we must learn to disceru the many ways ja sich dis fossil fuel shaped Colorado's landscape socal characterand palitial eo “onoy. Railroad Smoke, Coal Fire Paragous of progress, harbingers of modernity trains seemed to uhuetcenth- century Coloradaus the restless, relentless syanbol of American conquest “The pioneer locomotive has flashed the keen biillimey of its headlight against te window panes in die Capital of Colorado,” declared the G town newspaper Colorado Miner in 1870, signaling a watershed develup ‘Those notable journeys “across the cou «al speed, bottom and beauty, are experiences of the past. The days 182" behind horses of spe- when some of us went sail wg across an ocean of land instead of an ‘ocean of water, have been met and passed and nearly forgotten, Aud ilver-palace sleeping cars," “restaurant now we are to be provided with *s ears? aud all the exquisitely hoxurious rolling salons that have come itwo vogue within the last few days. Farewel to the rocking Concords of7 The Reek of the New Industrialism ickled Jackson Palmer around Colo- rado in the late 1860s, we might have breathed it swells of dust and dung, blasting powder and sawdust, pine needles and wood suioke and rotting flesh, Ou the eve of the great coalfield wars, we would have found many of those odors over "The odors of the Rocky Mountain Empive enose with their contri dictions. If'we could have followed id by the acrid aronta of burning coal and sueh ac- comp stents as Sulfurous stuelter smoke and ozone, newly willed swel and, stewing sugar beets, Indeed, the sutel of eal became so pervasive between the 1860s anid the 110s that Coloradans and visitors alike cane to take it for granted. The veek of the industri ag, West is lost to us, but ample evidence attests to the speed and pervasiveness with which fossil fuels penetrated the very founda- the phiysieal st ity culture. Photographs, drawings, build tions of economy and socie’ cture of the region, andl even s, and ruins provide eloquent testimony to the central role of coal in Western history. Though toclay we see these images through a dlferent lens than diel Coloradans of the late nine- ceenth and twentieth certuries, their past and our present nonetheless couverge around a shared dependeuce on fossil fuels and a’ woubling pro- pensity © overlook the human sul ing and environmental destruction that ‘our appetite for energy inflicts on distant hinterlands, But before we can see ‘The Reck ofthe New ludustvialism these comnections, we must firstabandou American frontier mythologies that 1nake the notion ofan industrial West seem like « contradiction in eerms Surprisingly fow photographs of Colorade during this ‘evidence of coal, Instead, they attest to the protean nature of energy and its incredible capacity for disguise. The impact of fossil fuels uns aya hidden beway divect er ofthe monstrous yy silver miners, the combines that harvested the ‘bed-wite fences fell away to the horizon, the generat- ty streets and department bers ofthe operators pictures of Main Steet facades ing stations dispatching electricity to bright store windows, othe great hard-rock ininers’ tikes piting mm Westem Federation of Miners against state militiamen and i Indeed, by the early twentieth century, ev signaling triumph and permanence, or domestic scenes depicting respect- able middle-class families gathered around the hearths of their suburban residences, demonstrated the centrality of coal to Western li stand the place of the Colorado coal miners? strugyles in the history of the apes fo under West, we must learn to discern the many way i sil Colorado's landscape, social character, and politcal economy, Railroad Smoke, Coal Fire Paragous of progress, harbingers of modernity trains seemed to ninetcenth- century Coloradans the restless, relentless symbol of American onguest, “The pioneer locomotive has flashed the keen brilliaicy of its headlight again town newspaper Colorado Miner in 1870, signaling a watershed develop- sent: the window panes inthe Capital of Colorado,” declared the George- ‘Those notable journeys “across the continent" behind horses of spe «ial speed, bowom and beauty, are experiences ofthe past. The days when some of us went sailing aeross an ocean of land instead of aut ‘ocean of water, have been met and passed! and neatly forgotten, And snow were to be provided with “slver-palace sleeping cars" “restaurant ‘avs and all the exquisitely luxurious rolling salons that have come into vogue within the last few days. Farewell 0 the rocking C cords ofKILLING FOR COAL the olden time! De eval to che accomplished ane picturesque whips! has conquered her isolation.’ “The uaius chat effecud this conquest marked their passage with inky plumes. For there to be stoke, of course, there had to be fire; and coal fred the engines of the Westem railroads. Railroads and eoal mi < hm cone! Brie origins, advaced werd ss, whieh had tandem, to- gether wansformting landscape and labor alike. “Two lines of descent linked the railroad to the coal mine. The frst led back to the early modena era, when Buropean miners and quar vised wood rails to speed the transport of stone, ore and coal wrse-powered ears tothe outside world, The second common point of or slay i ce steams engines invented by James Watt, Thomas Newconten, fud other eighteenth-century inventors to pump water from British coal ‘mines. Profligate consumers of fuel, hese engines collieries for more than a century: By thie early 1800s, however, improve- [ments in design and machining finally made it possible to free the steam en- «gine from its fuel supply. George Stephenson, a mineworker’s son who Lar bored outside the pits of rortheastern Britain for more than a decade, unived ised to drain mines and {__ these lineages by aig the prime mover frst juating it atop the parallel rails n ‘and rock from pit to warket. Stephenson's first locomotive eons railroad-colliery relationship by towi ucts had used for centuries wy cary coal nated the tugural cargo of thirty tons of coal. His frst railways of any length sealed the union by connecting the coal pits with ports and indusuial centers, first in County Durham, then cashireand Merseyside! a Lane ‘Both rails and steant engines appeared un the American scene by the early 1800s. Aud though in the summer of 180 anuracite fueled the locomotive “Tom Thumb in its maidea voyage along the Baltimore & Ohio, the nation’s firstrecoguizably modernrailroad, the vast flows of organic energy cout 10 substitute wood for coal, iil War, however, the depletion of Amesica’s eastern ins and coal, When J. Edgar Thorson and other 1°) sansportaton magnates tamed thir energies west following she Union The Rech ofthe New bndustriatism victory, they well understood that their plans to incorporate the isobated. sparsely timbered expanses of the plains and mountains into the nation’s rail networks would h William Palmer, that reader of coal scans, exck sive fg for any railroad that had'no promive oF coal tralfe® Like any wae~ \ge on fossil fuel ned that he “would nut ceva rllroad executive, be recognized that companies depended ou eval niot simply for fuel but also for ficight, So Rocky Mountain railroads —Palin- ers Denver & Rio Grande (D&RG) and itscompetitors—took eate wo Lote their lines to take advantage ofthe Cretaceous and Tertiary legacy. The yet crals engineers tucked the Kansas Pacific tracks along lignite outcrops os the northem edge of the Monument Divide; by the early 18705, the K.P. atid several other companies had also laid Ls connecting the northem cosh fields with Denver, the Clear Creek wining districts, aud agricultural con ‘munities along the base of the mountains. Palmer’s D&ERG was sinwulatc~ ously building out to che Fremont County coalfields, where Palmer opeticd his first collesies in 18 it extended south to Huerfano County in 1876, Las Aninias County in 1878, Crested Butte in 1880, and other westera Colorado coallields thereafter. The Atchison, Tapeka, & Santa Fe (AT&SE) and the Denver, Gulf, & Fort Worth (later renamed the Colorado &: Sout ern) soon built competing lines to the southern fields, and several rallroacls vied with the D&RG in the Western fields chroughout the 1880s. Though the Santa Fe and some other railways withdrew from the coal business—the managers reasoned, “There is coal enough on the line and enterprise enough in the public to develop these mines to our advantage, without our saterial assistance"—the pattern of coal-driven railroad developa continued into the twentieth century: The D&RG’s North Fork Extension reached coalficlds northeast of Delta the so-called Moffat Road penetrated, the invies extended tracks into the coal-rich Puryatoire aud Crystal valleys! ant nonetheless h scams of northwest Colorado, and Colorado Fuel and Iron subsid: ‘These railroads tapped into several distinct deposits, suited by their vary- ing chemical and physical properties for diferentapplications. The uorthert, fields of Boulder, Weld, ancl Jeffersou counties contai | lignite, ideal for heating homes and generating electricity, The more dispersed fields of west- em Colorado held a fall spectrum of coal types, including anthracite, the cleanest- and hottest-buening of all. In the southern fields, nneanvhile, evalKILLING FOR GOA\ deposits ranged from sub-bituminous co bituuninous, Long episodes of vol in building along the New Mexico horder lad subjected Las Animas County's seams to considerable heat and pressure. These forces, Atnough they destroyed sume of the county's coal deposits, elsewhere lei be- 7 ind viel beds of coking coil « peerless indusbial fuel. Just to the north, 3 Huerfanto County straddled a transition zone; its coal displayed what one tator termed “a notiveable variance of composition,” somte varieties being “highly adapted for domestic purposes” and others used mostly “for > Finally, the Fremont County seams lay distant from the ancient forces of voleanisuns though lower in earbon content than its southern coun- terparts, coal fiom the Caitor City area nonetheless surpassed Huerfano and {Las Animas County vatities in ts suitability for household and smithy use." in Colorado, Railroad corporations set up most large-scale coal though wholly owned subsi aries; locomotives constumed much ofthe fuel unearthed during mnining’s formative stagess and railways continued to con- nneet the fossi-fuel-procucing hinterlands with markets throughout the state and region even after railioad managers divested themselves of their coal vvdlustey holdings in the 1890s and 1900s. Without railooads, coal mining / sould have remained a marginal industry. But what of the converse: How + would the railroads of the Mountain West have fared in the absence of such rich aud varied coal deposit? Theres no way to know for sure, but certainly Colorado's rail networks would ultimately have looked muuch different, Rail ies would have buile many fewer miles of track; not ouly would they have had no need to bend aud extend routes to trace the contours of _soal deposits, but higher fuel costs might have rendered some routes un- jprofitable. As for Palntcr, he surely would have set his sights on landscapes ‘more capable of satisfying his dream of coal-fired benevolence.* Te combined might of railroads and coal mines frst eroded, and den dlestroyed, the isolation that had so vexed inhabitants of frontier Colorado. Incorporating the Mountain West into the nation, traius reoriented the way \ in which the reyiou’s inhabitants experienced time, space, and mniss. ‘Step by step, rail wetworks crsserossed and tamed some of the most recale citsant topography on earth. As they compressed the distance between points, they rendered Colorado a smaller, less isolated place, Even in the late 1860s it took several weeks 20 reach the Rockies fro iver. By the Missouri The Rech of the New Industrialism the early 1880s, steam trains had reduced the journey to one long day: Aud by century's end the Atlantic seaboard lay just wo nights? travel from the Rockies. Places that had fele impossibly far away now seemed stardliugly close. Coal-powered rail travel expedited the tunsport of people and cargo, tus integrating the Mountain West more fully into national and international smatkets for labor, capital, and leisure. As immigration to Colorado inereased the “briny border" ofthe eastern seaboard, which William Palmer lad envi- sioned as an “extensive Castle Garden’ to be entrusted with preserving “Re publican institutions . in pristine purity,” lost whatever power it had for- imerly exerted to “receive and filter the foreign swarms and prepare them by gradual process for coming to che iuner temple of Americanism out iu Colo- ado.” Coal-powered railroads changed the way people experienced their world as the hands of virtually every clock and wateh in Colorado were shortly to demonstrate, hn February 1874, just eight months afer work erews coun pleted! Denver’s firs rail connection to the East, a newspaper reported that Jed to adopta system of time that will approach ago time each day by telegraph and rej the city’s jewelers had “de rity: They will get Ch their timepieces accordingly” Many Coloradans welcomed the eclipse of frontier chaos and the advent of modern standardization, “As itis now” the paper explained, “every man has his own tne and will swear by i.” If he ; new “Chicago time” seemed “a ite fast” the paper announced, “we will used to it Railroads tended to make time move homogesscous in other ways, too, ln the early 1880s, before railroads reached the San Juan silver mines, M. K. Ihlseng explained, “The outdoor working season extends from June to Ja ary the sofiening of the suows render{s] the roads difficully passable wiih July, then the regular rains fora fortnight impede fieighting—the implacable clements thus discourage, if nt entirely suspend, aetive operations until lve in July” Harsh mountain weather made mining impossible for half the yeae: "worse, seasonal shifts in weather, in road conditions, and in dhe availsbiliy of feed shortened the work year still further by hampering the progress of wagons, sledges, and mule uais. Unlike these older wansportation tech: nologies, railroads relied on fuel derived from the fossilized energy that col- liers steadily extracted from distant subterranean chambers. Avalanches andKUL NG FOR COAL floods would continue to pose “a serious expense” to railroad companies, yet wherever locomotives marked the sky, once-seasontl work such as anne ing and logging became practicable for more of the year. lu the process, coal. powered railroads helped reset the rhytluns of labor to industrial time, The ity of jobs and the pace of work now depended more on business he railroad may have proved even more siguificaut than its superhunnan speed or its ability to defy the seasons. Since nentorial, the lack of navigable water in the West had Forced people to move from place to place overland, The region’s rough laud surfaces aud ofien convoluted topography forced people, draft animals, and conveyances to overcoine a great deal of fiction and gravity in the course of any joumey. Freight costs in the re nal ongunic-energy economies consequently as- sumed astronomical proportions. ‘Trains, by contrast, ran on hard, smooth wheels of iron or steel that glided on sleek metal rails laid atop voadbeds carefully engi sered t level out the land!’ natural insegularities. Lovo tive Duilery rounded out the advantages of the tailtoad by bringing 0 bear the power of hundreds of horses Freight rates fell comrespoudingly. In moun- tuin regions without rail connections, the historian LeRoy Hafen found, “the average charge was about $2.50 per hundredweight for ten niles”—roughly $5 per ton per mile, The ist through fie Coast, by contrast, ele the Colorado capital in 1870 cary tral City silver ore to the docks of Neve York City and fiom dhere on to En lish smelters, a «fot charge of $382 ton. In the ove decades that follow hc wain from Denver to the Bast ng ten tous of Cen railroad freight rates fll sill farther. The average tariff of 6 cents per ton per nile in 1889 made it possible to wansport a thousand tons of goods on the railroad for the saute amount it cost to miove just one ton of goods by wagon. B anu larger the engines usec on mountain portions of th ‘weighed that company’s fist locomotives by more th iglit rates fel still farther in the years ahead, as locomotives grew faster DERG in gi out $800 percent and traveled 293 percent faster In the heyday of the organic economy, come 1otities and finished products had trickled into and out of Colorados busi sien purportedly griped that they could “get no goods, no machinery neral- out ftom the States uncler a year from the time of ordering.” In th intensive ecouony of rails and coal, however, unprecedented quantities of “The Reck ofthe New ludustrialism goods flowed into the Rockies. During the frst full year of allroad servi 234 million pounds of freight in all reached Dever, steep increase frow 17 inillion pounds four years eater.” “This figure reflected not simply an acceleration in exchange, but alse shift in its composition. Belore 1870, most goods hauled across dhe plaitis were either valuable (gold), essential (wheat) or capable of making up for high wansportation charges (wining machinery). With coal-powered trains though, waffic in bulky, low-value commoditics skyrocketed. Colorado rail- roads quickly grew to depend on mineral preduets. In an annual report for 1912, one railroad claimed that coal, coke, ore, rock, and bullion accounted for'85.5 percent ofits freight aud perhaps 50 percent ofits earnings." By making Colorado's wide range of coal and coke varieties available au affordable, railroads redirected the regiou’s development along new chan rnels, Locomotive smoke in the sky symbolized the attival of mineval-based cencigy economy powered by stores ofenergy excavated frou the earth, rather than flows of energy derived from rivers and winds, plants and animals. ‘enormous quantities of power began to course through « world long re- stricted by low precipitation and limited biological productivity, a spiral of radical but uneven transformations ensued. Among de most dramatic was population growth, the most vapid the teritory had ever experienced, from 39,864 non-Indians in Colorado in 1870 to a total population of 42.198 in 18go and 799,024 in 1gto. Even as the combination of railroads and coal imines was freeing people from age-old limitations, however ic was fast bind ig, Coloradans into new and troubling dependencies."* A Vast Industrial Ecosystem “The habit of seeing railroads as essential to the development of the West ‘while overlooking coal i just one aspect ofalanger gap in understanding, To bring coal, coal miners, and coalfield struggles back from the margins ofthe Western past, itis necessasy to follow the tril of coal as itanoved along what nental historian Willian Cronon calls che “paths out of tow Ii subsidiaries mined. Within just a few years, however, trains were hauling ally, the Colorado railroads consumed almost every ton of coal ther imuich more coal than they burned just three years after the general’ evewsKILLING POR COAL ‘The Rech of the New Industrialism 221. William Henry Jckson's Denver, erly 1890s, Copyright Co Society, WH PANO. prado Historical broke ground, for instance, Paliner’s D&ERG was already hauling evo andl a ines a mel tg es consumed. Most of the coal freighted by tail ended up in towns and cities in dhe region, There coal shaped the charac ter of urban groweh by fueling rapid industial expansion, deepening divi sions between rich and poor, and sowing the seeds of conflict." Wis Hey Jako, potogrpher who fst nade is ane i he 1860s and 18708 by capturing striking Western landscapes on fil for the Union Pacific Railroad and the U.S. Geological Survey, captured one of the filet visual representations of the remarkable growth chat fosi fuels Jacl made possible in the Front Range cities. Ow a elear summer ‘oon sere down Denver eon cb oe op ot Clo’ ow piling st pis pos and expe ves plates, cach oven ih he esto rete tringpnorana Den ver with the suoweapped Rockies in the backgroud Nary a cliuk or pile efeoal ean be seen in Jackson’s iconic, widely repto- duced visa, Yt Jacksons seene nonetheless ested on ong buredsuuhine ‘The treeless plains and sparsely wooded foothills in the background of the panorama testified both to the harsh constrains imposed by aridity ands and to the strain that decades of Anglo setdement had placed ot pography local forests, The city dominating the image materializes as if from nowhere ‘A crown of smoke hovers above rows of brick homes, stores, and factories Berween these buildings forged thanks to the alchemy of coal and clay 11 rows of uility poles and streetlights, streetear lines and railroad tracks, can mnerated power les of electrical wire aud powerhouse smokestacks. Coal ourses through all these conduits, the quickening current of the region's dominant urban center. Jackson captured the image ofa fossi-uel-powered retropois,a ety as dependent on the yield ofthe earth's depts as on water and the bounty ofthe soil Historians have long treated the cities of the Front Range as Gold Rush and railroad boonwtowns. Denver leveraged its location along what Willisss Palmer called the “shore ofa glorious new land” to become, it ellect. great iting mountain and plain.” Multiple transcontinental lines even port city“ tually connected the city to points east, and a web of mountain roa sa ated westward into the Rockies, Pueblo, « hundred miles co the south be- came the second most important transportation hub in the region andl the self-proclaimed “Pitsburgh of the West" As rail junetions, these citiesKILLING FOR COAL joyed! anany advantages ove less fortunate rivals. Perhaps the greatest was the presence of eonpetitive energy mrkets chat arose because multiple rslroads were wansport dyroual veritesand Puce could substitute coal rom elsewhere with relative ease. ‘This boon to business mid householders secking stability in an uncer~ tain world meant greater insecurity for coal miners, whe periodically sought 1o impro ot nigintain chit situation by cutting off the flow of energy from “Together, the railroads aud coal mines stimulated rapid economic growth ‘and demographic expansion in both Denver and Pueblo, Once track tgs linked the eapital with American rail networks. a prodigious booms lifted Denver trom its post-Gold Rush lethargy: The city’s 1870 population of 4.759 doubled in 1871, As coal began to flow into th ing year; another 5,000 people became Dewverites. By 1880, the capit population had swelled to over 35,000, and by 1914 it exceeded 200,000, taking dhe Western upstart larger than the Philadelphia of Palmer's boy- hood. Pueblo also Hlourished after coal and the railroad arriveds by the tine snetopolis the follow- of the Ludlow Massacre moze than 50,000 people called the town how ‘Thus did another of Paliwes’s dreans—that “the people never get to be as thick as on the Eastern seaboard” dissipate like a high plains mirage.” As Jackson's panorama suggested, coal fueled industrial development ancl ‘commerce iu both these Frout Range cities. By 1g00, Denver boasted 1,474 aauufactaring establishments with a total of 10,926 workers on their pays rolls and annual revenues of $41.4 jon, and Pueblo’s 241 manufacturers ‘employed neatly 5,000 people and produced $30.8 nillion in goods. Some ‘of these establishinents used organie energy sources—particularly wood sand water—to process animal, plant, and other organie inputs. Denver and Pueblo ti hicago before them, were yrowing into Nature's metropoises, ‘The Reek ofthe New hudustriatiom But they also stood at the epiventer of a miueral-incensive industrial revo lution, Grain elevators, flour and paper mills, breweries, stockyards, fun beryards, packinghouses: all harnessed fossil energy. The sooty incustsial distsicts of Denver and Pueblo, however, alo boasted hundreds of factor ries—brickyards and ironworks, railroad shops and mining-mmachine Lieto vies whose ingenious inventions “predominated in all the mines ofthe west and were even exported to Canada, Mexico, and parts ofSouth Americs st Asia “in large quantities.” All diese faites employed the power of esl govay ce transform minerals into forms of greater value largest and most inmportant const al in these cities, however, wete blast furnaces, uills,and siuelters. Without high-quality coke,energy-hunsry ints could never have done business in Colorado. inetallurgical establis these smoke-belching plants spurred economic growth along th Front Range, solidified urban dominance over the mining hinterlands, and replicated many of the ills Palmer had ¢ ‘ofa New West. Ti 1881 Palies’s Colorado Coal and Iron Company (CC&), precursor to Colorado Fuel and Iron, completed the first aud only integrated steel ul co be erected west of the Missouri before World War Il. A correspondent frou tle New York Daily Graphic predicted a bright future for this plant, which sciously tried to avoid in compas turned iron ore, coke, aud Lintestone first ino iron, then into raw steel, and finally into rails and other finished steel products: “The staring of this ti nace at South Pueblo marks the commencement of great iron industry at the foot of the Rocky Mountains." Hopeful prognosticatious aside, however, the operation would struggle for its first two decades. Diseriminatory rates set by transcontinental railroads at the bebest of eastern steelmakers such. as Palmer's old friend Andrew Carnegie xe it impossible for Pueblo steel to compete in many Western markets, and episodie busts in the regional economy periodically destroyed demand for rails and attier products, By the aly 19005, hough, the newly consolidated Colorado Fuel and Lrou resolved many of ts most pressing problems to beceme “the most self-sufficient and elaborate ofall steel-making companies. Iris more than a business,” journal ist Herbert Casson declated: “itis civilisation.” ‘The Pueblo mills swe! at the core ofa vast industrial ecosystem encompassing iron and manganese amines, limestone quarties, ruil and wholesale stores, immense hydraulicKILLING FOR COAL systeins, two subsidiary nilroads, a telephone company, a cooperage for raking nail kegs, sales ofhces stretching from Los Angeles to Kansas City ‘and fiom Spokane to Fort Worth, and, of course, more than a dozen collieries and several coking plants." very ton of iron and sivel turned out by the Pueblo works owed its ori- gins to fossil fuel. More coke than any other ingredient was loaded into the plant’s blast furnaces, Other parts of this, “busy city in tse” also bumed coal and coal gases to heat ingots, pump sixty million gallons of water through the works each day, and drive a veritable stable of engines col- lectively rated at 60,000 horsepower. By 1907, the Pueblo works was con- suining well over half a million tons of coal and coke annually—roughly 5 percent of Colorado's totaloutput. Ancient energy helped forge all the metal goods and tools Westerness produced to tame a reealeitrant land. “Enibed- «led fossil fuel thus undettay te rails facilitating the passage of people and ‘goods barbed wire fencing inthe open ranges pipes transporting wai age, and petroleum to their destinations; and the plates and bars fashioned by other manufactories into such produets as carriages, agricultural imple- ing machines. Rails made at Colorado Fuel and Iron even made the passage on Pacific steamships to Hawai, Japan, Siberia, Manchu- ria, and Australia!” mens, and Devil’s Workshops The price of the iron and steel products churned out at the Pucblo mills rarely relleeted he heavy tell that industrial labor levied on the five thousand to seven thousand mien who labored at Colorado Fuel and Lron’s Minequa Works during the early twentieth century: Most worked six or seven te to ‘ovelve-hour shlfs each week. Shop employees sometimes stayed ou the job for thirty-six or even sixty hours straight when machinery broke down. Heat and hazards only aggravated the physical and mental stain of long shi Death on the job was common and often grotesqu the fluid metal, dhe slag and the whir of machinery” declared one manager, “ll tnafde ittook like it was the Devi's Workshop."* Conditions proved justas diabolical inthe sinelters of Denver and Pueblo. Colorado's first gold and silver-refining establishments were clustered near “The steam, the fi ‘The Reck ofthe. the precious-metal mines in the mountains. Once railroads reached the high country, however, canny industalists, led by Nathaniel B, Hill began relocate their smelters along the Front Range. “The sagacious superinten dent,” one admirer explained of Hill's decision to anove his Boston and ‘orado Smelter out of Black Hass in the late 1870s, realized “that, to keep in the lead, he must be atthe place where the railroads ofthe State co sentrate grasped tain counterparts, Significantly more coal than ore was eonsumed by metal Iurgical works, soit paid to locate them nearer to collieries than to gold and silver mines. Moreover, because sinelters functioned most profitably by mix ing different types of ore, Denver and Pueblo producers benefited from their ability to combine ores hauled downhill tothe Front Range from mining dis- triets spread across Colorado and other parts of the North American West In eoujunction with lower labor costs, these fctors led Hill's competitors to establish three large smcters in Denver within a decade, ad three more in Pueblo. Soon the Front Range smelters harges that ore ‘producers paid to refine precious metals by 80 to go percent by comparison with the sums charged by Colorado's older metallurgical works. Savings vi that scale enabled silver- and gold-mnining companies to exploit ever lower~ grade 6resaea profit: By the eally 1900s, however, almost all the mount ned. These dosures and the Guggeubieinns “sinelters had been decomuni acquisition ofthe so-called eter rust (fomally known as the American Shnelting and Refining Company, or ASARCD), pluced Colorade’s lucrative fore markets under the conteol of just afew fins, a move that had both the no challenges fom workers oF woul Sinclers and steel mills influenced not only the economies of Dever and Pueblo, but also th Jurgical plants initially relied on the practical knowledge of skilled workers imported fiom established ore-processing centers like Wales, Saxony: sud Pennsylvania, During the late ninetecuth century, though, fully replaced many high-wage cralt workers with machines and unskilled ir demographic composition and physical form, Metal- agers success-KILLING FOR COAL bperatives drawn from other, supposedly more tractable populations. The Sicilian Fasula family, who came in the 1890s via Louisiana—*too many mos- «quitos there,” the Ukrainian Jewish Edelstein fanily—junk people” who ought scrap metal from thoughout the West and sold it to Colorado Fuel ad fron, the Slovak Hrusovsky and Baltazar claus~drawn to Pueblo “be- ‘cause of the stcel mill and che smelter”: all crowded together with other southern and eastern Europeans, Hispanos, Mexicans, and African Ameri- ‘cans into the working-class enclaves sprouting up around smoky wills and sielters. Capitalists located most of Denver’s metal refineries beyond the city limits, in such company-owned! towns.as Argo, Globeville, and Swansea, where lund was more affordable, workers easier to control, and muniepal ‘axes and nuisance regulations easier to evade. As for the polyglot inhabi- tants of Pucblo’s Bessemer, Goat Hill, Grove, and Peppersauce Bottom uucighbothoods, civic leaders complained that they “livfed] like live stock in large numbers in small houses and single roows.” Surely the most staring of the state’s “foreign quarters,” though, was Pucblo’s “Mexico.” A three-acre Hispano barrio built inthe 1870s, this adobe “remnant of the days when Pueblo was a fromticr village and erading post” housed just 4 Hispano families by 1903. The rest hud been displaced by 450 ftalian families, 3 blacks, Frenchmen, and 1 Arab, who ‘built im be- ‘oven, above aud below theadobes of the Mexicans, aud burrowed dugouts sand caves,” so that “the flat, dirt-covered roof of one dwelling—they could scarcely be called houses—formed the dooryard of the one immediately above?” This “Mexico” evoked other places and times. It probably reminded its inhabitants of Palermo or Naples. Eastern vistors, by contrast, made more fincilal associations as they struggled to square their expectations of West- cm primitiveness with the realities of modern industialisin. Asked to de- seribe Pueblo, oue tourist purportedly remarked “That's the place with the smiclters, the big steel plant and the setement of Pueblo Indians!” As smelting and steelmaking were spawning industrial enclaves and new centers of migrant life, these industries were also daunaging the aie, water, soil, and living beings. A small ancedote hints atthe larger dimensions of i dlusisil toxiciy. In 1902, Me. Milleson, a beekeeper who lived neat Denver, reported that le had “lost eight rine eolonies within a mouth lst spring.” Millesou had “invested in bees owenty-five years ago, when there was no The Rech of the New Industrialism City of Coal: Dezver fro the North Side. Photograph by L, C, McClure. Denver Pablic Library, Wester History Collection, MOC 409, smoke in the neighborhood, but now he is surrounded by the sineters, aud all the garden flowers and fiuit-bloom, and the grass, are continually coated swith a deposit from the smoke, and not one of his colonies is in first-class condition? The harm done to human health, of course, prompted even greater concern, Rematkably few contemporary accounts attest to the medi- cal problems that pollution from smelter and steel works caused better doc ‘umnented isthe toxic legacy passed on by the Colorado industrial revolutiv to the poor, mostly minority residents who today live on or near the site uf old smelters. City dwellers a century ago tended to look on pollution differently tian se do. One Pueblo booster claimed that though “unsightly perhaps in det selves,” the city’s smoke-spewing factories “nevertheless contribute their ‘quota to the general fand of beauty. If we follow the injunetion contained inKILLING FOR COAL the moto of the Business Men's Association, and ‘Watch Pueblo’s Snioke? sive pictures in black and white, and even in colors wwe shall see many impr runniug trom slate and cep blue, ou through opalescent gray co eiromie yel- low andl rich red.” Economies offered still greater cause than aestheties to celebrate smoke, Following the settlement of a hard-fought stike in 1899 in which smelter employees organi id by the Westem Federation of Miners ic the workday in these hazardous workplaces to eight hours, sought to li Denver Ties cartoonist depicted the weleome return oF inky black billows to the urban skyline abovea cap 1 that sad it all “Prosperity” Urbanites of al classes may well have equated smoke with economic vital ity yet neither prosperity nor pollu and Pueblo alike, urban dwellers of means fled the smoking ietallurgical plants and the migrant oth n was evenly distributed. Iu Denver .” who crowded around them. Denver's wealthy had once shared downtown neighborhoods with poorer folk, bu in- creasingly the rich and the middle classes drat emulated them left the center city for new suburban neighborhoods located upwind or uphill fron: emeng lustrial districts, Desirable residential neighborhoods, like Hill, University Park, Berkeley, and Montelair, all lay comfortably removed from the increasingly polluted Platte Valley. Prontoters of Highland, on the Dlulls west of the riv ragged, “True to her name and nature, she stands hight ancl sightly” with “no smelters, factories, or emitters of stoke within hhor borders.” A few miles to the northeast, meansshile, the ove Slavie workforce of the Globe smelter choked on a thick miasina of airborne pollutants. Even as the wealth produced by the smelters flowed to the sub- urbs and to Eastern financial een Fhelmingly 1s such as New York, the tosie by-prod- ucts of reining silver, gole lead, and other metals remained in the laborers! al inequalities that continue to characterize minerale id pleasant, others sickly and squalid. But coal-burning technologies not only pushed well-heeled Coloradans away from congested, polluted nies rendered certain parts of Front Range cities heath pufctur= ing districts; they also pulled then out toward the healthier, more spacious suburbs. Commuter railroads, electric tamavays, andl eable cars—generaly powered either directly or inditeetly by coal—“enabled men of moderate uis5” Denver historian Jerome niley explained, “wo acquire homes for The Ree ofthe New ludastrialism nese Deaweritest Hom Society, Wiliann W. Cecil Colletion, 20003554 e business center." In Denver andl themselves in pleasant places away from Pueblo asin other American cities, streetcar promoters who doubled as teal ng thei efforts father and farther outward, buile estate developers, expan sing upon ring of suburbs promising refuge from sinelter sumoke and urbua squalor By the early twentieth centuny, Denver's streetcar lines covered niure than two hundred miles. Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Cripple Creek, “Trinidad, and other cites also constructed extensive transit networks. Tour ist Richard Harding Davis described Denverites’ love alfuir with cable cars “beautifal white and gold affairs” that “move with the delightflly ert ig sped ofa toboggan, Ring ow dese cabl eof the Davis declared in 18g2. “Every onein Denver pattonizes this eats tits at oflocomotion whether on business or on pleasure bent and whether he has Inundeds of thousands of carriages of his own or not.” Well into the ty Coloradans used coal-powered mass transit every day, most of then to jour industrial enclaves snd ney between center city and suburb, others to reachKILLING FOR CoaL “the only parks suclt as Lake Minnequa, the steelworks reservoir that offere phice of amusement” for operatives and heir families. As dhese fossil-fuel dependent systems bound ever larger stretches of and together into coher- cenit metropolises, they simultaneously deepened the environmental and so- ial rifis along the Front Range. However far streetcar cables and wires reached, alter all, hese sprawling webs al ed back to the downtown generat- ing stations and powerhouses responsible for atleast some of the snioke and soot 90 many wealthy and middle-class folks were moving to the suburbs to avoid. Goal shaped how city dvvellers of different classes lived as well as where they lived. Depending whether they were rich or poor, people burued vary- ing kinds and amounts of coal in their homes, obtained thei fuel by different sueans, and used it or distinet purposes. Imagine three hypothetical Denver consumers of the late 1880s and early 18gos: a mining mogul holding court from a mansion perched atop exclusive wie inhabiting a modest Highland bungalow, and a widow sheltering with her offspring in a makeshift hovel in the Platte River Botton. Capitol Hill, a young clerk and his “The mogul would have purchased clean-burning Crested Butte anthracite in lots of a ton or more, paying eight or nine dollars per ton, He—for virtually all moguls were men—would enjoy wsany benefits from this fuel, but he and huis family would touch it with neither hauds nor tools. It was servants’ work, alter all, w feed furnaves, stoves, and boilers—and female servants’ work to clean up the comparatively small quantities of dirt and soot that the most ef cient household devices of the day emitted into the mansion. The Highland bungalow dwellers, meanwhile, would have bought a ton or halton of low= smoke domestic coal from the northern or Calon City fields at four oF five dollars per ton. The clerk might have rolled up his sleeves to stoke boiler and furnace, his wile spending some of her loug workdays kindling stove and hearth and sill more time tidying up the mess made by the house's vatious coal-burning devices. As fo: the widow mired in the Bottoms, she would have had litle choice but to spend part of every day walking alongside che railroad tracks with children ia tow, serutinizing them for bits of coal dropped by passing tains. Returning home, they would have fed these leavings into a leaky old stove, whose heat wok dhe edge off the chill ancl cooked their mea ger meal, while smoke and soot filled their shack. Coal offered all chree of The Rech ofthe News budustrialisme 4. “Gay Is Nice”: Middle-Class Cty Dwellers at Home. Copyright Colorad Historical Societys Harry H. Buckvalter Collection, 20030792. these houselioldls some measure of liberation. Yet in the new industrial order some Coloradans could procure more of suca freedont from the elements than others. ached the When urban dwellers gathered around the proverbial hearth, b city grime off their limbs, guzed out on winter scenes from toasty parlors. orKILLING FOR COAL “The Best-Ligted Building in the World," iyios, Photograph by Charles M. Smyth Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-24889, largely of brick, sometimes locally produced, sometimes shipped by rail from Denver, Golden, or Pueblo. By the early 1880s, Denver firms were turning ‘out huudreds of millions ofbricks a year; so brisk bad the demand become by the end of dhat decade that brickmakers turned to steam-powered ma- chines to inerease production. Without a device nicknamed “the Chief” one journalist wrote during a construction boom, “a brick famine would have surely resulted, and the inevitable necessity for importation of brick [would ‘The Rech ofthe Neve budustrialiom have] forced theit price up so high, that many of our building iauprovenents would have been greatly delayed, if iot abandoned altogether.” Constwuctny greatly delay "s with brick, a sensible adjustment to buileing where suitable clay was abun ant and lunber dear, received an added boost from building codes; Denver to give just one example, banned wooden structures after an 1863 fite razed much of the city. Brick was eventually used for all sizes and shapes of build: ings, from tiny outbuildings to huge factories: it also lined sewers, blast fir nnaces, and streets. Coal even helped transform lime, silica, ne gypsum ite Portland cement—both a key ingredient in the mortar that Held together those billions of bricks and the main constituent of foundations, bridges sidewalks, dams, canals, and other structures the hard angles andl burnt orange and red hues ofthe Front Range cities cart chat lent cheir industrial econ fitdingly evoked the elements of fire and ‘omy its strength and power. The sinok belching smelters, mils, and facto~ ries of the urban West, the extensive technological systems providing tans portation, heat,and light, not to mention the glaringly unequal ways in which the costs and benefits of all dese technologies mapped onto urban space together helped account lor the radical transformation separating the “newer and grander and Iappier Columbia” that William Jackson Palmer had sfinnpsed in 1870 ftom the burgeoning ityseape chat Willian Hemry Jackson depicted two decades later In single generation, Colorado's capital and its sonaller urban counterparts had grown outward and upward with astonish ing speed. The architectural artifacts ofa coal-powered “age of steam, elec tricity, and the various inventions for annibilating time and distance” bore little resemblance to the inber-famed houses of the American fontisr ot the adobe dwellings of the Southwestern bordetland. Instead, the unbaas landscape had become recognizable to Richard Harding Davis anc snay others as a Western variant of Easter industial centers. Colorado cities night be more scenie aud less fetid, but they hardly embodied the new ato wleavored to build. pia Palmer had Industrializing the Hinterland ron the gold- and silver-mining distriets to the farms of the plains stud mountain valleys, other Westerners were alse turning to fossil fuels to escapeKILLING FOR € labored over the stove, which one domestic engineering manual called “the pivotaround which a people revolve and live. they could not ignore the ven~ sier to overtook were the large quantities of coal that urbanites consumed indircetly in the forin of gas and electricity. These led to make the homes of wealthier Coloradans brighter, cleaner, and healthier than those of humbler folk, while furth twality of coal in their lives. energy sources te ating dhe rich from the negative consequences oftheir profligate energy use. Not long after Colorado's first gashouse startet forming coal imo it rating Facl, Denver's streetlights bummed so bright that miners could sometintes see them from Ward, a mile higher aul fifty miles « the north- west. Two years later, in 1873, ten thousand lamps were ligh highs. By the 1880s, Leachille, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Guu ‘other cities had mimicked the example ofthe capital” Alter electricity begun 6 supplant yas, Denver started calling itself the City of Light. Parisians would have scoffed at such presumptuousness, but the commercial elite ofthis Western upstart took the claim seriously enough. Ali Union Staio ng Denver's stualded arch welcomed train travelers as they crossed the street from lbs decorated the new Denver Gas & Blecuie Company headquarters, con a few blocks away, more than thirteen thousand fi pleted in 1910, “There is uo city in the country that ean boast better street lighting sand private lighting than Denver.” one souvenir volume declared ebrated the city’s “wonderful night illumination” for accentust- ing Denver’s “artistic appea Another c ance” and “contributing to the public safety?" is anid electriity did make public space more attractive and secures the ‘municipal franchises under which these utilities operated also made a sna ‘alte of capitalists incredibly rich, Junius Brown, a cofounder of Denver Gas & Blectric, built a special gallery it his gray stone ms sion on Capitol Hil, Uren filled it with one of the most impressive collections of paintings and sculptures in the West; Charles Bocticer, a leadi electricity, coment, and sugar beet industries, i force in the Colorado ished various rooms of his ion with Colonial American antiques, Japanese handicralis, and Delt tiles and Oriental rags pure holidays to the Netherlands and the Middle Bast. Many Coloradaus perceived conspicuous consuanpcion by wed on fa such grandees as resting or il gotten gains, forthe region's gas and electric ‘companies priced ther services so high that most city vellers could nota sv Induction The Reck ofthe ford to bring those superior sources of energy into their homes. Until an innovative early twentieth-century executive, Henry Doherty, “fushioned « strategy for boosting cousumption of gas and electricity” the historias Mark Rose contends, consumption of those two forms af energy in Denver was re- stricted to a “small group who occupied prestigious office buildings and whose lovely homes and apartments were located in neighborhoods estab- lished for the well-to-do.” In contrast with people of humbler means who m, elite Coloradans were had difficulty forgetting where their energy came fr experiencing what David Nye,a historian of technology, calls “an unintenced, collective effect” of fossil-uel-driven technologies: “enmeshed in systeus families consumed energy—often without thinking about it—whenever they tured a tap, threw a switch, twisted a valve, o: lifted a telephone receiver: Evidence of the existence of the systems bebiind such household appars- tuses permeates William Henry Jackson’s panoramic photo of Denver, and the impact of minetal-dependent industrialism becomes more visible still when we turn fiom infrastructure to superstructure. Consider fist the miass and height of the downtown distrit that dominates the center of the shor, Denver,as Richard Harding Davis declared, was fast becoming “a thoroughly Eastern city—a simaller New York in an encircling range of white-capped mountains.” Denver's “towering oflice buildings” shared with the skyscrap- ers of Manhatian or Chicago a reliance on fossil fuels. The Denver Gas & Electric Building, celebrated on one tourist postcard as “the best-ighted building in the World,” its thousands of bulbs shining “like a flashing dlise mond” below an illuminated sign that urged urbanites to “USE A GAS WATER HEATER” and “USE G&E COKE,” declared this dependence with unusual frankness. The deep-lying foundations that rooted these st tures in the earth were excavated by coal-burning steam shovels; the steel that braced their soaring walls had been forged in Pittsburgh andl array of energy-hungry technologies, including elevators, central heating, and clex~ tric lights, made their inner spaces habitable." “Brick,” proclaims a recent architectural guide to Denver, “made this cy, ‘And more often than not, coal made brick. Fossi-fuel-run kilns started oper ating in 1871; within a year a writer claimed, “Phe business part ofthe city is built almost exclusively of brick, and very many of the private dwellings ss well” Other towns and cities throughout the region were also constructedKILLING FOR GOAL the limitations of elimate and ecology. Yet like their urban counterparts, those who lived in the vast hintelands of Denver and Pucblo would find thae their desire for power in a place where energy had always been searce causes most as many problems as it resolved. “That coal had no visible presence in stereotypical portrayals of gold and silver mining reveals the wide abyss that separated the gileled myth from in- dustrial re es. Schola's have rightly assailed the popular image of the prospector, a grizzled loner with pick in hand and burro in tow for fostering 1isconceptious: the stereotype, i is claimed, gives the false the racially diverse mine workforce was predominantly white, writes women ‘out of mining history altogether, obscures the col ession that tive character of under ground labor, and wiviaizes the alienation that often aecounpanied it, Our stock prospector fils to convey the complexity of the past in at least one other crucial respect: weare given to believe that he was a tugged individual ist whose success or failure hinged on his brains and brawn, along with the pluck of his surefooted burro, in a frontier world where men were men and ‘coal was just another rock in the ground. Infact, wining camps placed heavy burdens on fuel resources. Along with forest fires, the demand for cordwood, building materials, and mine timbers denuded ever-widening circles of forest around the gold and silver camps. Railroad construction crews aggravated wood shortages by cle right of ways and harvesting lumber for ties aud bridge ti cutting bers. Once coul- powered trains began to run on wood-lined rails, though, the possibility ofa serious “timber famine™in che mining camps evaporated. One of Leadville’s largest wood dealers reported only “150,000 feet of native lumber ou band at present” atthe end of 1881, yet “a large supply of Chicago pine and Califor- nia redwood” stood ready to compensate for the “thinning out” of regional forests caused by “the rapid extension of our ni ing industries." In addition to transporting billions of board feet of umber into Rocky Mountain mining camps from distant woodlands, railroads aso hauled tens of millions of tons ‘of fossil fac into che gold and silver distriets. “The nevessties of the people following the exhaustion oft ber on the mountain sides?” as state geologist J-Alden Sith explained, “were met by cheaper aud beter fuel brought up from the coal beds of the pla We may nostalgically associate mountain ki ing wood lire, ‘The Reck of the New lndustrialism but denizens of the ninting camps often fed th re about cold wea store advised. “Go to Schluter & Spengels aad buy «coal stove.” Per pou! fireplaces and stoves with ex one Gunnison hardwave coal, “Dont growl anyn coal provided aiore heat than wood aud made it possible to dispense with the bother of felling, hauling, drying, and spliting timber. Breweries, uu: dies, gasworks, and generating stations supplying electricity wo ransit wet ‘works and homes—all consunued still more coal, which was freighted in ww the gold and silver distrits from the collieries below." ‘The biggest consumers of fossil fi ‘ways the mines themselves. Indeed, fossil fuels played an unacknowledged 4s in the mountains, though, were al but essential role in the success of gold and silver mining. Colorado's eh snimeral belts posed two formidable problens. First, the vast wealh of the tnountains lay not in the easily worked sunface deposits known as placers but rather in lodes and veins that plunged deep into the earth, Second, snosi ofthe gold and silverin Colorado consisted not of pure flakes or nuggets, but olecular rather of so-called refiactory ores, stubbom compounds whose bonds held precious minerals fast. Fossil fuels proved essential for solving both these problems. ‘The most widely practiced technique for unearthing ore from buried lodes and veins involved blasting shafis and tunnels through solid rock using so-called hard- rock or quartz ning practices developed in Saxouy and Cornwall and later improved on Nevada's Comstock Lode. Colorado's early is ngs history showed that synthetic explosives, muscle power, and wood-burn engines generally sufficed for starting a mine. But as shalis and tunnels fob wg stews lowed veins and lodes farther unclerground, an array of complex technologi- ‘al systems were required (o sustain life and labor. Pumps, fans, hoists, hau! age mechanisins, and so forth, all consumed prodigious quantities of ene “Though organic energy sources remained important, coal noneicless yw ered most of te state's largest mines from the lite 18708 onward." ~oasized-encigy made deep miuhag possible, yet it also changed the ns ture of underground labor. During dhe indastry’s early days, craft suiners di- rected tools, explosives, and sheer bodily force against solid sock. lu 1870 ll this beyan to change. In that year the steam-powered mining drill made ts suecessfal Western debut at Georgetown, Colorado, Such fossil-fuel-driven machines placed vast quantities of power at the disposal of winters aud theKILLING FOR GOAL capitalists who employed th 1. Power dlls advanced through solid earth at than five times the speed of hand-drillers?” The tourist Johut Codusaat 1879:**The great sted placers for the mountais, where, aader the noted the impact of these technologies along Clear Cr crowd have left dhe exh organized system of capitalists or corporations, there is ether great wealth to be gained or disastrous fuluce o be experienced. The poor mau, instead of, workin for himselfis a day-haborerforhire,and the rich man becomes eit lionaire or a bankrupt? Three decades later, a tavel guide explained that pple Creck’s fabled viehes lay “hidden deep in the granite’s close em- brace ... Far beyond the simple appliances ofthe old-time mint, ad as imi- possible wo reach with unaided human hands as if were in the very center of the cart, these treasures of the mountains yield themselves only to dhe im- pace of drills driven by cleeticity?™*” “Mechanization increased labor productivity and decreased mining costs. 15° craft and eroded their autonoiny. Labor-saving mite machines cost many men theirjobs. Those who remained mployed, meanwhile, found dat their labor increasingly resembled that of In the process, it degraded the m factory workers: it was closely supervised, performed for a wage, and ori- ‘ented around such tasks as operating machines, maintain ul performing whatever menial labor stil needed doing. To make inatters worse, devices that ran on fossil fuel often introduced new dangers 1g technological to already hazardous mines, As a Montana mining inspector launented, “it seems tht death lurks even in the things which are designed as besefits.” Electrification brought exposed wires underground the cages that workers rode down deep shatis had a propensity for dashing miners into rock walls ‘or smashing dem against dre shaft bottom: and power drills thrust thick clouds of rock dust into miners’ lungs, where i ping cerminal condition that shortened the lives of thousands of Colorado tmineworkers. Litle wonderthat gold and silver miners organized to fight the new work world that coal-powered industralism introduced, And so the as, cul- in the Western Federation of Miners, Au anarchosyndicalist union sveutually caused silicosis, a Colorado mountains beeane fertile yround for a succession of devoted to overthrowing the capitalist system, the federation’s members squated off repeatedly against mineowners and their state allies daring the saamte years that southern Colorado collers were waging industrial struggles ‘The Reck of the New Industrialism Even as some coal-powered technologies amplified underground hazards in metal mines, others were helping to overcome the second great challenys of Colorado yeology: almost all ofthe stae’s god, silver, and other precious metals were not only buried deep underground, but also entrained withi reffactory ores. Rel Nevada, Mexico, and Europe could unlock only a fraction of the silver and ygand smelting techniques imported from Califor ‘gold from these ores. “The tailings and refuse of the mills,” one early histo- rian noted, “were more valuable than what was saved from then." Alter years of experimentation, metallurgists and skilled smelter workers Jearned to overcome these problems, usually with the aid of prodigious quan tities of mineral energy. The process of fieeing precious metals from the co plex compounds in which they were trapped! often began in stamp mills hat used waterwheels or wood: or coal-burning steam engines to pound rock into sinaller particles. Many Colorado ores next required “roasting,” a pro- cess in which coal or charcoal helped burn of sulfur and other i np “The final and most energy-intensive stage of refining oves was smelting, Nowe cof Colorado's tree species in ther native Form contained enough thermal e cexgy to liquely solid rock. Braziers established a niche in the mining econouny by stripping the foothills and mountains of tees large and sinall, then piling the timber up in pits or kilns. When burned in low-oxygen conditions for a ‘day or more, this wood turned into charcoal, purer, more concentrated fuel capable of raising rock to temperatures of 800 degrees or higher. Given the limited supplies of wood in Colorado and ther rapid destruction, however chaicoal could not sustain the smelters’ voracious energy requirenients, “The fuel around the mills & mines must rapidly disappear,” one comment tor rightly predicted in the 1870s, “and its place must be supplied with coal, ‘or coke.” And indeed, the 2,500 braziers supplying charcoal to the Leadville smelters subsequently worked themselves out of business by deforestins the 1870s and 1880s, while luge stretches of the upper Arkansas Rive their counterparts in the Platte watershed westof Denver were fast “cutting] everything down to four inch diameter overall he country?"” Given the escalating cost of charcoal, the eapialists who operated tain smelters eagerly welcomed the railroads that would ultimately destroy their business. Ore processors in southern and western Colorado had been importing coal and coke at prices as high as $160 a ton, but fuel prices fellKILLING FOR COAL “caups. Ore processors quickly switched from onganie to fossil fuel (dhough they still ined in voughly one part charcoal 9 every nine parts coke). An “overhanging eloud of smoke yas now draped over Leadville and other large mining camps, shioucing chem with a “blanket of noxious black and yellow” poll 1 As te railzoad undercut the competitive advantages that anoutain stelter wns had initially enjoyed, though, the skies above many ning camps cleared, Fuel and labor, as we have seen, were cheaper in Det ver and Pueblo: meanwhile, downbill hauls ftom the mountains andl the con- vergence in these cities of ral lines from muliple mining districts ude it csier and more affordable for metallurgists along the Front Range tu size protits by mixing complementary ores. As early as 1888 one authority proclainued, “Smelt ‘aud chroughout the mountains, ore processors joined the swelling ranks of losers inthe West's new industrial ecouomy.! Iu the final reckoning, coal and coke made daily life more comfortable in 1g, communities and spared the mountain forests from complete devas- ie combination of coal and railroads also consider: cost of extracting and refining ore, thereby making it possible for mt cenwise marginal mines and miuing distriets to produce at a profit. “Metallur- gical science," one railread booster declared, “has revolutionized the pri ‘ive methods formerly employed in the extraction of precious metals.” Gold and silver ores could now ben «Jat an expense of cents where it formes cost dollars, aud are uansported for a song” But dhat was only past of the story, Polluted skies and streams, pockmarked lanscapes litered with til ings,a political economy dominated by jie Front Range cities aud in more distant metropolises—these and other feauares of the Rocky Mountain auining distiets all served notice that be- saath the glitter of god aud silver lay the grin of col. a tanciers and industrialists based in Fossil Fuels and Farming “The silver erash of 1893 and che ensuing collapse of mineral production hit fuel markets hard. Gold boom: in Creede, Teluride, and most ofall, Crip- ple Creek, the last of which had yielded more than $300 million by 19, stauehed the hemorshage of Colorado's economic lifeblood, but the teu The Rech of the New hndustrialism lieth century failed to yield even a single bonanza. Unstable inetal prices. labor-management stife, and escalating production costs together plungest the industry into a dowuturn from which it has uever recovered. fn 1910 state official comnplainted that fewer “men [had] been employed in che mines and smelters than at any time within the last twenty years.” The populasion ‘of Hinsdale County in the Sau Juans, shrank by 60 percent in the first de th century, while counties surrounding Cripple Creek 41 percent, and 38 percent ot cade of the ove Leadville, and Central City lost 50 per their populations, respectively* ‘As settlers abai hhabited them, de western Colorado collieries closed asa consequence. Mi Joned the mining regious neatly as fast as they hacl reise for coal in silver and gold camps collapsed, Sevetsl sin the soutien fields suffered, too, yet operators there were in a better position to tap ints ‘other markets. At the height of the silver panic, Colorado Fuel and Iron es ceutives reassured investors, “While the production of silver adds materially tw the success auc earnings of our properties and is che kurgest sage iu dusuy we depend on aside fiom railroads, the greater portion of our muse pryftable business isin supplyiaug domestic coals to the agriculeural sections ‘of Kansas, Nebraska and Texas" Much as CF&1 promised, boonting agricultural districts on the hil plains and in the anountais valleys combined with swelling urban urathets ts consume much of the excess supply freed up by the m yg evisis, Irrigation transformed tens of thousands of aeres of arid land on Colorado's Western Slope into flourishing farms and orchards; as a result, the populations of Delta, Mesa, ancl Montrose counties all doubled between ig00 and 1910. De- mographie expansion proceeded even more rapidly in eastern Colorado. where reclamation, dey farming, high crop prices, and relentless boosterisin combined to tiple the populations of some eastern Colorado counties vse: the same period. Growth was equally brisk in many counties of westera Kw sas, Nebraska, and Oklahos Panhandle in che throes of * and a St. Louis journalist found the ‘Tenes 1 agricultural revolution* ‘The sucvess or failure of harvests and lherds continued to depeutd ws the interplay of sun, soil, and water with planss, people, ancl other animals, Ad yet coal provided newoon Indian, Hispano, and Anglo predecessors could eke out of the Westex0 sei to the region with mach more power thau theirKILLING FOR COAL “Many an emigrant fiom dhe woods of the Midalle States,” agricultural his- torian Alvin Steinel claimed), “was appalled to find here « country without When the straggling woodlands that bordered the streams and rivers soon gave out, farmers, ranchers, and orchardists confronted unpleas choices. Wood was expeusive to import, sod difficult to eat and dry, animal «lvoppings unpleasant to collect and smelly to burn. ‘Phe memoirist Hal Bor- land recalled his father complaining, “The only thing about this country 1 dow’ like is there’s nothing to do with. No timber; wot even any rocks. “There’s sod. And cow chips. Why, there’s wot even any old boards.” Fi considering, then disinissing, the notion of burning sheep dung on his hearth, Mr; Borland concluded, in a way that was fast becoming second iia- ture throughout the plains and valleys, “We'd beter get some coal Agricultural setlers, like the city dwellers and minets they fed, stoked fires ‘hearths, stoves, and boilers with coals farmers like their counterparts, also relied on fossil fuels to help them produce, transport, and process goods, q inthe Even the cultivation of peach orchards along the Colorado River, where coal vill smudge pots bade “a final ‘good-bye’ to spring orchard frosts" benefited from minerab-inten industralization, but the example of wheat offers the best illustration of coal’s impact on Western agriculture. Bituminous coal powered Colorado's first deep irrigation well in 18853 in 1g08 a newly built “steam-powered electric station” near Garden City, Kausas, began to pump ‘water from the ancient Ogallala aquifer to the thirsty wheat fields of west sas by way of more than two hundred wells, Farmers invested ot only in steam-powered irrigation, but also in coal-burning mac Reeves tractor, deseribed by historian Donald Worster as “a mina motive weighing several tons” Oxen, horses, and anules continued to pro- vide the power for pluniting and sowing many fields, but come harvest time, snost wat farnns on the plains relied by the early wwentieth century on enor- 1s “fred.” as one CFT attorney dramatically phrased it, “on indiguation and Colorado coal.” The slow but inexorable substitution of tmineral energy for ongunic sources helped farmers wrest more fiom the soil with less labor, In 1830 the average merieau farm exerted 61 man-hours of labor to produce twenty bushels of wheat, but by 1896 the figure had roped to 3.19 man-hours, With coal meeting an ever-larger percentage of their energy needs, farmers could also increase the amount of land devoted The Reck ofthe New Industeialism to wheat, Farmers typically fed draught animals by consigning some of th land to pasture and feeds by replacing animals with machines, farmers freed ‘up these ands t grow more wheat.* ‘The impact mineral-intensive induswialization had on agriculearal hin- terlands only intensified after the crops were harvested. Had people in the Front Range cities and mountain mining camps traced dhe bread they ate backward from bakery to farm, they would have found that coal was used to bake their loaves, coal to mill the flour, coke te refine the sugar beets that sweetened the bread, coal to power the elevators hat sorted andl stored wheat kernels before milling, and coal to power te locomotives that hauled golden streams of grain and piles of beets from countryside to metropolis. By the 1910s, calories extracted from coal seanis helped produce a considerable per- centage of the food calories Westerners ingested. In the increasingly indus- trial food systems on which everyone from silver kings to ranch hands, store lerks to coal mincrs was growing to depend, did anything remain truly or ganic City dwellers generally welconted the bounty that fossil fuels made possi- ble, but the faru population wrestled wih its implications. Steam-powered tools and other factory-made goods enticed farmers into debt, empowered ud encour- the to destroy the soil on which their livelihood depended, aged them to abandow time-worn practices to restore the nutrients that crops ew from the soil, Draught animals, for instance, helped replenish depleted soil with manure, but steam-powered implements left only ash and stoke in their wake. More immediately, growing reliance on coal inereased farmers dependence on the railroads, whose subsidiaries monopolized the coal trade any agricultural regions, Farmers consequently paid some ofthe highest fuel costs in the regions; lice the confidence CF&:L executives expressed when they reassured investors rated by the collapse of silver by explaining, Phe greater portion of our most profitable business isin supplying doxes- tic coals to the agricultural sections of Kansas, Nebraska and Texas’ ‘Phe coal companies’ yain, of course, was the farmers’ loss, as Hal Borla learned. Havitig resolved to “get some coal," Borlanc?’s father hitched up his teain and drove his wagon to town. Pulling up o one of two lumber and coal dealers in Brush, he walked inside and inguirec about the price of coal. The dealer “mentioned a figure.” Hal Borland recalled that “Father shook hisNG FOR COAL 2.6, Boiler Room, Suga Beet Factory, Fout Col 1089, #, Colonudo,ea.4yo0. Denver Publi Libary Wester History Colles hnead. “lt svems pretty high; he said.” Father and son proceeded to the see cond coalyard, only to find the same price prevailing. Both retailers, i seems, Dought their fel fom the same source, ad neither could deviate from the price mandated in a Denver or Chicago office, Borland bristled at his di- Jemma, yet he knew that bis family could not survive winter on the tree- tess plains without fuel, And so father and som Teli town with a tow of coal i he wagon and the biter burden of powerlessness weighing on their shoulders. Like the Borlands, most people who lived in the farming and mining hi terlands of Colorado had grown to depend on coal by the time of the Ludlow Massucre. Coal wot only heated sheic homes and caked thei als. also The Revk ofthe New Industrialism inn, and harness eeval yore productive and c millions of tons of coal dey burned sgreatly increased their ability to plow, drill, dig, urant Western lands, waters, and organisms into profitable configurations. Each of freed them a little more from the con the process, farmers all wo often compromised their autonot uts of isolation and aridity. Yet in In the New West that che labor of southern Colorado mineworkers was making possible liberstion and dependence stood in close, often paradoxical relation, Crossing an Industrial Rubicon Iu both the city and the countryside, then, Coloradans burned coal to break the bounds that had Jong constrained natural ecologies and human econo- Fossil fuels gave peopl wer, and haul unprecedented quan mies in the re wenfound power—to tran sh P bodily limitations, transform es of ‘goods, information, and people farther, faster, and more cheaply than ever before, With every passing year, Westerners demanded more heat light, aiid motive power, more food, gold, steel, and electricity and hence more eva By the time of the coalfield wars, fossil fuel was in enormous demand for industry and homes alike. Less conspicuously, coal was te crucial compor nent that produced aud delivered the foods Westerners ate, the goods they bought, and the tools they used. It helped determnine the work they per- formed and the places they called home; it was present in the very air dhey breathed and even in the eells that made up their bodies. Every ton of coal provided clear economic gain; every ton provided store ‘of additional power that people could use to elange their world, Rough lige tures on per capita coal consumption offer one andex of the boost that fossil fuels offered. In 1870 the average Coloradan consumed perhaps .3 tons of 1 1880 at least 2 tons; in 1890 6 tons; by 1900 almost 8 tons; and in 1910 ‘over 12 touts, A few comparisons illustrate the magnitude of the fossil-fuel dependency these figures reflect. At the time of William Palmer's tour i the 1850s, Britons constuned fewer than 4 tons ofeoal per capitas current cual 3.5 tons per capita; and Australia the most voracious consumer of coal today, burus about 7.2 tons for each resident. By consumption in the U.S. av 1914, Colorado's collieries had yielded nearly 185 million tons of eval. Ob- ta vg am equivalent amount of energy from wood would have necessitatedKILLING FOR COAL the destruction of at least 8 million acres of forest. By the 1910s, 600,000 ound 1,000 square miles” worth of timber—would have needed to find its way from Colorado's wooded hinterlands every year in a state chat possessed fewer thant 18,000 square miles of woodland), much of it sparsely forested and slow to regenerate. Econom sgrowtlt under Colorado's organ energy regimes had gener- ally been slow, hard-won, and ephemeral. The miueral-intensive industrial hat ook root afer 1870, by contrast, grew in a manner E. A. Wiig- Jey likens to “mutati and its scale.” + And a defini its inrevocabilty. By the early eth century life without coal was unimaginable." in its suddenness, its unpredictability chara istic of uw we Had coal suddenly varished on a winter’s day around 1goo, a long- forgotten silence would have replaced the clanking, whistling, screeching world of steam. Virtually all rain waffc in the West would have stopped, halting die flow of people and goods between hinterland and metropolis, Western cities and outside markets. Mines excavated by men and machines would have filled with water and poisonous gases. Most construction would hhave ceased. Smelters and mills tractors and combines would have run out of steam, Country folk, eu: off from so snany necessities of life, would have scurried to pantiies and edlas to see how long their stores of food ancl fuel ‘could last. City dwellers, meanwhile, would have maneuvered around street- cars stopped dead on their tracks. Fora time, horse-drawn wagons and bug ies cobwebby with disuse might have been drawn into service. But before loug, horses, livestock, and poultry would have devoured every last vestige of browse, rass, and reluse—ifthe hungry human population had not eaten the Js firs, that is. Ou dhose trees guarded by force would have remained standing, for people would have needed wood not simply to stave off the cold, but also to cook their dim hing food supplies. The energy crisis ‘would quickly have moved from the public to the persoutal sphere, from the social organism to the individuals that composed it No such doomsday scenario was ever likely, of course. The revolutions initiated by Palmer and his competitors ensured tat coal had become to0 thoroughly imbricated in the very structure of the region's political economy andl society, is ecology and built environment, for such a nightinare to have ‘The Reck of the New hudastrialism bocote rei the worst ha comet pa a ota sige ton of Cole rado coal had made its way from inine to market, the railroads would have hauled it in ftom other states~at a premium, Hooked on fossil ful, Westeen// industries and consumers alike encountered the sane dilemma Me, Borland, Ihad confronted when he sought to purchase winter's supply of fuel ou the ‘The Denver Chamber of Commerce ou ined up the high pla situation ina 1907 report “The region’s dependency on fossil fuels generated considerable fe foreboding, As early as 1872, editor Jolin J. Lambert of Pueblo’s Chieftain lashed out at the unexpected consequences of crossing the indas- trial Rubicon. “Heretofore we have been entirely depettdent upost wagons ously su coal “We cannot exist without it?” Colorado for our coal supply, which lias been laid at our doors at prices ranging frou ten dollars to fourteen dollars per ton. With the completion of the brauch road to the coal fields”—the D&RG extension linking Pueblo with Fremont County—*this system has been revolutionized. Palmer's trains made che transport of coal cheaper and faster. Yet so long as the general retained his exclusive monopoly of the carrying business," the editor warned, “it {did} not look as though we were destined to reap any great advantage from the ‘liauge.” For Paliuet’s enterprises charged prices so high that dey could be “viewed in uo other light that that of an extortion . .. which dhe railroad. company will nd out sooner or later, our citizens will not submit to.” gouging by the \ ‘coal trust,” the polluted skies, the heavily publicized mine disasters Land fraud perpetrated by coal companies, alleged pri region’ that offered periodic reminders of the heavy price colliers paid to keep every one else's home fires bun denizens of the coal-powered economy ofien acknowledged the deleterious { consequences of their dependency, though, they nonetheless lacked both the all dhese generated no shortage of erties. It will to change the way they lived their own ives aud the power to alter hows others conducted theirs. [As forthe coal miners, they knew fall wel, that their labor made dis world go round. And though it was a radical colber indeed who fantasized about an absolute fel blockade, mineworkers understood that if hey could slau down the flow of energy, they might be able to use the region’ fossil-luel dependency to secure concessions from Palmer, his competitors, and theirKILLING FOR COAL successors, United and coonlinated action, in short, could win mineworkers lonnnidable power. T drawn w the southern coallields c difficulty lay in unifying men, women, and ehildren from the four corners of the globe, “The carth has been wansformed,?a Greek immigrant co the West wrote, in one of the forlorn poems he jotted davn i his journal between stints of work, “And I ride the wave to survive. 3 Riding the Wave to Survive an Earth Transformed Wheu a group of British collers arvived in Dawson, New Mexico, each cat= ried a fat trank bearing the most precious toel ofthe collier’ trades a safety lamp, its glass globe their journey from the eastern shore of the Allantic to the Rocky Mountain West! “Twenty shrouded in clothing to guard ayainst the perils ot ups jumped off a fright wain 1893 in souther Colorado with sganmysacks slung over their shoulders and issued a prediction: if the impending session of Congress could grant “no relief to the people, they ams?” The ‘expect{ed] the laboring people out of employment to rise up i tramps told a newspaper reporter they anticipated “a war and [were] ready to fight” Few could have brought along with them more than Mary ‘Thomas did "The young Welsh bride came with 156 wedding presents, including “a beat til Bible” she had received from her church, a gold bracelet, and $1 cash—pethaps two years? wages for the average coal miter in Colorado. Mrs. Micek, who had always kept geese outside her cottage in the Mora- vian coalfelds, “had to bring her featherbeds with her, and her pillows, aad her kids?" her daughter later re anything else back there” After a twenty-tvo-day crossing from Hamburg to Galveston, she bundled her children and her bedding onto a train ant set snbered. “She said she didn't care ifshe lettKILLING FOR COAL “They inhabited « shiing world, neither the world apart that Willian Palmer hoped cartographers and goveraments were seeking to impose on the earth and its loraclo might become nor the bordered, static domain that peoples, but rather transtational space in which states and comporations fluid ideas egies and populations. Migrants, hough they inhabited a world structured by all sorts of iuserutable forees b offen lacked the will or the power to conta el institut theless retained ond their contio, some power to choose, shape, or atleast influence the course of their own lives. In addition to the journeys the migrants made, there were paths not cake ab: idoued before the goal was veached, or retraced. For the vast mae jority of migrants, alter all, dhe Colorado coalfields represented a place that they were nuuich more likely to travel through than te! ‘The travelers came for many reasons. For some, Colorado lay ata sale dis- tance from things they wanted to leave behind. Others came because jour neying to Colorado to work underground now took no longer than it once had to walk to a neighboring prefecture to plant rice or to move herds of sheep fiom the Sangre de Ceistos to the San Luis Valley or to leave the Croa- sian countryside for the Rub evalfields, “They came because the land no longer needed them, we longer even had room for th because steum power was making the world a smaller places because William Jackson Palmer had dreamed of a new Columbia and be- cause the general and men like him had come to Colorado to build railroads and steel wills and colonies and tourist resorts; because the bonanza mines ‘of Leadville the smelters of Pueblo, the streetcars of Denver, and the cox bines of the Great Plains were all developing an insatiable appetite fora vock that burned, “Phe migrants cane becaase they wanted to reassemble families sepatated, by the wedge of industrial change. Ora steamship agent had visited th lage, beating a drum and promising that fortune lay across the ocean oF silver-tongued recruiter had deceived thet into signing up as seabss or their husbands or uncles or fathers or rivals, their cousins and friends and fellow villagers, ad sent letiers extolling this far-off country. Thy snoney along with leters. Besides, the migrants knew they coulel retrace their y came because some of the envelopes arrived containing tickets and Riding the Wave to Survive an Earth Transformed steps if they wished. And so they imagined heroic homevomings, in which, the travelers pockets would be stuffed as full of dollars as Mrs. Micek’s feath- cerbeds were with down, ‘The Irony of Goal Capitalists all over the world encountered temendous obstacles when they \ sought to replace coal miners with coal-mining machines. Indeed, the coal industry paradoxically renuined one ofthe last sectors to experience the full ¢ adoption of fossil impact of mineral-ineensive industrialization. Even as th fuels in other sectors of the economy was liberat and country, agricul ture and industry from the constraints of organic energy regimes, coal min- ing itself continued to vely overwhelu skill. ‘while regional demand increased exponentially, coal companies in the sou ngly ot human muscle power aul iveu that labor productivity in the collieries incteased incrementally, ern Colorado coalfelds could never have satisfied the Wes’s growing appe- _/ tite for fuel without the migrants who flocked in from nany American states, | as well as thvee dozen countries on four coutitents.* ‘The first documented effort to mechanize « Colorado coal mine, the 2881 experiments of Palmer's Colorado Goal and Iron Company at the Engle ine opened a few years earlier southeast of Trinidad, illustrates both the motivations dhat led companies to experiment with mechanizing collieries and the combination of natural, socal, and tedmological obstacles tht hian- pered these efforts. Hoping to erode the contol that skilled coliers exerted underground, Colorado Coal and Iron officals contracted with the South Pueblo Machine Company (SPEMC). and skilled operators freighted together by the machine company to Phe cutting machines, air compressors seemed to promise the mining company “a valuable adjumet,” as a later re- port plirased it, “especially in dhe matter of controlling labor and wages." Afou 1 the spring of 1881 and went co wor an team led y the machine foreman David Jones set up is equip loosened the coal from its bed, laborers hired from nearby Hispano plazss ‘would load itinto ears. The coal company directors imagined that the cou: Dination of machine techuology aud unskilled labor would break the contol colliers had exerted over production in the cual industry’ first decade. Soon, Z x x \KILLING FOR COAL alter the deafening sereech of the machi es first echoed off the mine walls, combination of forves began to undercut the undercutters, Local mine officials posed one problem. Drawn from the eolliers' ranks, tey had lide respect for machine operators who were untutored in the min- cers’ cra. Skilled workers had still more reason to oppose the machines. Some colliers intentionally held up the contraptions by leaving debris in dhvir path. Others expressed their misgivings by forsaking dhe collieries for tie San Juans. “Men are leaving us daily forthe silver perintendent George Engle lamented, “& as a rule, these are our best men.” Mine blacksmiths dragged their feet on niking simple epairs, chen charged ines,” the harried st astronomical prices, while miners pleaded with or pethaps ehreatened ma- chine operavors. “Two good men I frst brought out here froin Obio at eon siderable expense machine company executive E, 8. McKinlay complained, were in some way persuaded that this was nota good country.” Atwit’s end, McKinlay surveyed the accumulated obstacles and saw evidence of a “con certed plan” whose object was “getting rid of us & our machines.” ‘The CC&I and the SPMG anticipated opposition from skilled workers and by Anglos as tractable manual laborers, the local residents of the southern ranagers. They did not expect trouble from Hispauos. Long portrayed. ‘coalficlds proved as irascible as the colliers the companies wanted them to replace. For the many suewomexicares who belonged to Penitente groups. tle public rituals during Holy Week defined their obligations to God, eom- smutty, und self. Work counted for litle by comparison—particulaely te La- up rubble dislodged by deafening machines in a dark, dusty bor of load rine, Wh Holy Weck began it April 1881, 56 many Penitentes refused ¢0 work that the coal company had to shut the Engle uiine down, Still more suprising, the Penitentes refused to work the next week, too, Operators {quickly ran out of room to work yout loaders to clean up the coal they had cut, and further cutting became impossible. Most disconcerting ofall, though, was a “Strike of Mexicans” that began on April 29, Hispano laborers “came out” of the mine nasse to protest low wages, an they stayed out wel into the following week." vironmental factors exacerbated the mechanizers? woes. Cutting, ma~ chines were powered by compressed air that was generated by coal-bursing boilers, but Engle occupied dry strata underlying arid lands. Even after Riding the Wave to Survive an Barth Tinnsformed (CCL built an underground cistern and filled + wich Purgatoire River water ran too low to freighted in at great expense in tank cars, supplies sometimes generate steam, and Jones and his men were forced to shut dows their wa- chines. Even when the operators had plenty of water ad sufficient laborers to load the coal chat was cut, the machines stillet dhem dows, One break: down after another maddened machine operators and infuriated the cou ired them. Only alier these glitches were worked! out pany officials that bad did it become clear that even under the best of circum: tees the eueting ma- chines were inadequate for the job. After an operator worked one machine for ten straight hours, he reported that it “could do no nore.” Less cau a ‘week later, Superintendent Engle informed hissuperiors with seeret satisfac tion that the mach reported, “the machines with full work 8 more men than they need, ext could not keep pace with the market. “At present,” he not cut the coal we require—and we will therefore have to put on regular In the three decades that followed, mining machinery improved iat mensely. Mechauization did eventually succeed places where “the nature of the coal” favored it, particularly in the thin seams of Fremout and Huer- fano counties. And even in thick or gassy seams less suitable for machine the devices exerted what one executive prouounced “an important influence in controlling the :nining” but also “lessen[ing] the liability ofsrkes and labor troubles.” Par tial mechanization of eutting com for haulage and an intensification in traditional hand x33" not only “reduceing frie] the cost of cl with th use of steam and electricity ng to double the of Goloradl’s mineworkers betwen 1885 and 1910. Inthe end, produetiv though, the most siguificane Feature ofthe incremental increases in produc- } ng Colorade collieries in 1919 accounted for 24 percent of due annual coal ouput forthe Livgy was their inadequacy. The 393 cutting machines wor state—a good deal more than the 8 pereent ofcoul cut by machine in Butain that year, but well below the US. Tos national average of go percent.” . isfy an eightfold increase in coal consumption between 1885 xd 1910, Colorado coal operators followed George Eugle's advice by ermploy- } stead of more machines. Employ ing more men went in and around Colo rado’s coal inines mushroomed. From just a few colliers in 1870, the Figure zose to around 1,500 int 880 and approximately 6,000 in 18g0, The depres-_KILLING FOR COAL jon of the uid-18g0s lelt thousands of mineworkers jobless, but recovery Drought the workforve to 7.000 by 1900; agricultural booms, urban expan sion, and industrial recovery drove the total number of employees up to 15,000 by 1g07 and to a peak of 15,864 in 1910, before it ell to around 14,000 1 gig." Though a far cry from the 1.2 million mineworkers laboring, in Brit- ain or the 800,000 working in Pennsylvania at the time, Colorado's mine ‘workforce nonetheless accounted for ally 10 percent of those employed in the state~enough to sustain a large population of 60,000-75,000 depen ents in the Rockies and well beyond, while competing in energy markets that served upwards of : illion people.” 2} The paradox of coal, chen, was this: even as the introduction of fossilized © energy into transportation, gold and silver mining, metallurgy, manufaetur- ing, domestic vchnologies,and urban infrastruc “educfing] human muscles to” what geographer Vaclav Smil regards as “a marginal source of energy” the provision of the new energy forms remained utterly dependent on human brawn and organic energy supplies. This seeming contradiction served as the impetus for migrations every bit as compelling aud significant as the gold rushes and overland sagas that have long dominated Western uyth and memory. Journeys "Phey had left because people like them were being dragged out of their hhomtes and killed simply fo: being brown or black or “Dag.” Fow suspected that the sume thing could liappen in Colorado, too, but Stanislao Vitione, Lorenzo Andinino, and Francesco Ronchietto learned this deadly lesson using the so-called Ttalian massacre of 1895, it which a posse attacked sev- ‘ral Lalians accused of murdering de Rouse salooukeeper A.J. Hixon.“ ‘Or they lef because they had exhausted the coalfclds in h they had labored. Or they were younger brothers who stood to inheritlitde, or no one required their strength or skill. Or dey wanted their sisters to find good hus- bands. They left because no company would hire them afier they hd risen ‘up only « fall back down in defeat. ‘They wanted more security against the vieissitades of environmental changes, the cruelty of landlords, the parsimony of corporations, more Riding the Wave to Survive an Earth Transformed money and what it could buy: food and possessions, status, and especially land. But most ofall, they left because they dreamed that their journey night lead to a better life, whether in the new country or the old.* Hemy Johns ike many other men who made their way into Colorado's eval camps, was bo he colliery town of Stepasie southwestern Wales. And though he managed to postpone his entry into the mine labor force longer than wost—he stayed in school unsil the age of ten, long enough to master the written English and basic math that would later give him an advantage over later migrants to Colorado's coalfields—he would nonetheless recall with pride and perhaps a tinge of regret chat his “boyhood days were spent in coal mining: Once Johns started working underground, a second and, it many ways, more significant phase of his education began, Working his way up a wel defined occupational ladder, Jolns was eventually apprenticed to a master ed ‘ocean liner to cross the Adantic, he had become a skilled miner with a deep, collier. By the time the ewenty-seven-yearold bourded a steam-pow ents in which he respect forthe dangerous, dynamic underground envito labored. Leaving behind his fiancée, Margaret Thotnas, who worked as a do rmestic servant, Johns set out to make a bettrlife for himiselfand bis family in Fremont County, Colorado, When Johus arrived in November 1886 (direct from Wale, it seems), the county’s domestic fuel mines employed upwards offive hundred Welshinen—enough to support Methodist churches singing societies, Welsh literary clubs, aud the Bistedfad, a “blessed old institution through which Cambrian celebrated their distinctive cultural and national heritage.” Mining companies tolerated and even encouraged the Welsh conmititent to education, devotion, and cultural pride. They looked much less kindly, however, on one of the migrants’ cherished taditions: trade unionism. Johns arrived to find his countrymen still reeling tiom a disastrous strike of 884.8, which colliers organized by the Knights of Labor had been crushed by the operators, and then blacklisted; according to the community's chronicle William Jones, the unsuccessful campaign organized by the Knights of Labor to protest wage cuts and other aflronts had caused “our mation . . «sich trouble," leading “many of them to leave.”™KILLING POR COAL ‘die numnber of days colliers could work, an unskilled migrant reason (0 anticipate annual earnings of at least $375, and quite possibly $500-8o0—attractive figures indeed ata time when the typical unskilled Kal had yood ia sojouruer in the Unitee States could expect to make $300, “prosperous J peasaut fails] in Kaly” earned the equivalent of from $50 inthe Marches to just over $100 in the Piedmont, and Hungaria field hands averaged just ‘$22 per yeat, Kinship networks and the formation of ethnic enclaves in the coalields exerted another strong pull. Many migrants left cher old cow tries or earlier migration destinations for Colorado to rejoin husbands, brother mothers, comrades, and countrymen, Finally, less tangible factors the worldwide appeal of America’s mythic frontier, Colorado's reputation larity of the Rocky Mountain land- isin the Tirol, Slovenia, and New Mexico—aay have for healthfulness, perhaps even the seape (© hom bhvightened the allure of Celorado." “The factors stimulating people o leave their old countries during te late ninezeenth and early twentieth eentuties were even re complex than those pulling them to the coalfelds. We ean nonetheless draw useful distinetions between idiosyncratic, sociopolitical, and economic-environmmental pushes. Some people lft dieiv homelands because of private circumstances; a Greek named Condas sought to escape an anvanged marriage, for example, while Ed Tonsic fled co thwart his parents’ plans for him to join the priesthood. Less randou forces motivated most others. Young men facing conscript reasoned that it was beter to venture out into the wide world than tisk leach fighting in foveign wars or domestic insurrections. Orliers were fleeing revolution or racial or ethuic violence. A surprising number of coalfild agrauts sought refuge in the American Southwest ftom conllictridden bor- de Also seeking refiye were Alrican Americans terrorized by the violence and repression of the Jim Crow South, Chuistian Skwvs seeking to evade partitions and Oto- nian oppression, radicals exiled fom many homelands, and blacklisted utionists." ads in the iol, northern Mexico, Crete, and elsewher us tiost instances, though, economic factors se to have provided the ‘greatest motivation for emigrat fick Hakanandatis’s father, for instance, snason in Asia Minor. Years of back-breaking work entabled hina to amass no more than ow left Greece to work as a st ty-live dollars. Coming to the Riding the Wave to Survivean Earth Transformed United States made seuse to Halamandaris and others “because their cout ‘uy that they cote from couldn't support them.” ‘Phe Colorado collier Dan DeSantis used similar language to expla teen: “Phere was nothing to make a living over there; there was no mioney. So > Mickey Judiscak remembered the stories his Czech parents told: “They were very poor and fiom what they told ine things were tough. They didn’t talk too much about it—they were why he left Italy at the age of tt ave came over here to make a better living tad to be away from there. I don’t think they had too many pleasant meano- ries of the old country. My mother did say that wealthy people owned all the land. She said her people were sort of like tenant farmers; making only enough to live. Except for food and shelter they had very lile.™ [As the recollections of Halamandaris, DeSantis, and Judiscak all auest, many parts of the world could provide their habitants with only the paluti- 1 parts of Slovenia, lay and Japan, for instance, exorbitant taxes left smallholders liede move than a pittance. Feudal holdoversalso helped mie some rural at- ‘eas of Europe and Asia in poverty. “The land is held alinost exclusively by the atistocraey and the church,” a U.S. immigration inspector reported from southern Italy, “and the peasantry are afforded practically wo opportunity to estoflivings. Why? Government policies deserve some of the blan acquire possession of even sinall tract." ‘These long-standing problems, however, only partially explain the mass migrations ofthe late nincteeuth and early wentieth centuries. Larger forces were clearly at work, Problems that might be described in purely economic terms—rock-botiom incomtes, high food prives, narrowing access to agricul tural land, falling wages, the abandonment of handicraft industries, and so forth—almost always resulted, atleast in par, from some underlying eco cal factor.” Let us start by looking at the most powerful force driving migration, dhe lobal population boom that produced labor suxpluses in rural regions and indusuial centers in many parts of the world. The population of Europe. / Which was 140 nallion in 1750, swelled to 250 mnillion by 1845 andl 468 wil-( lion by 1919. Japan’s boom began later but quickly assumed analogous pro- portions. Hovering between 25 and 27 million from 1721 to 1846, the nusuber ofinhabitanes in the island nation grew to perhaps 33 million in 1868 and 50 tvillion by 1920. Mexican demographic expansion remained move gradualKILLING FOR COAL ‘but was substantial nowetheless from 6 million people ater independence, it rationand had grown to 15.1 million by 110. North ofthe Rio Grande, num the decimation of indigenous populations facilitated the most prodigious increases of al, from perhaps 6 million inhabitants in 2800 to well over 100 million a century later All told, the work's population inereased from. around 900 million in 1800 10 around 1.6 billion in 1900.” Fundamental changes in the way people related to one another andl their /eowirorment constituted both a cause and an effect of population growth in all these places. One particuarly influential set of dynamies involved hu- cobes, and heir habitats. Advances in medicine and public health served to moderate the impact of infectious disease, the single greatest cause ‘of death in most human populations before che twentieth century. Changes in the exter | euvironment reinforced the transformation of the body's in (eiual environment, Lnproved disposal of sewage and garbage; campaigns against such vectors of disease as rats and mosquitoes; and the development of technologies aud regulatory structures that ensured a growing minority of the world’s citizens access to clean water, pasteurized milk, and wicontaini- nated food all helped inaugurate a new eta of bu population dynamics, “Phis uew regime of relationships between and amoug people, germs, vec- tots,anl kiudscapes marked turning point in the history of the planet. From this fork in the road, some socities would travel toward Famine and starva tion, others toward seemingly boundless plenty." Whatever factors Jped determine which path a society would take, how= xgy proved inescapable. To put it it stark terus, declining death rates led to population growth only if the people spared by disease could obtain the food they needed to survive, In all the migrant ever, the caleulus of e source regions that supplied laborers to the Colorado collieries—Johus’s ‘Wales, Vigil's New Mexico, Halamandaris's Greece, DeSantis's Italy, Judi cak’s Bohemia, and so forth—the sanitary revolution of the late nineteenth, and she twentieth eeuturies would surely have fazed out fit had not been for agricul al evolutions that mukiplied the consumable energy available 1 fel human metabolisms, ‘The age of European discovery, as Altied Crosby has emphasized, tiated a series of uneven biological exchanges. The Old World offered its suallpox and rats andl weeds, its what and its livestock, in return for seeds Riding the Wave to Survive an Barth Transformed and euctings in whose genes were encoded mil 1 of patient, sill, ancl serendipitous collaboration between New World peoples and the pants they used to turn the sun’s energy into food. American plants circulated along, global ade corridors firstas no Consider the humble potato, prolific plant that yielded more clties, then as necessities." per acre than almost any other crop. This once-despised tuber—sixtecrs century Europeans blamed it for causing leprosy eventually facilitated tre- ‘endows inereases in population. In Ireland, just an aere and a half of pots toes—about a football field’s worth—could “keep a fanily hearty for a yeu according to Crosby. The extension of hundreds of thousands of such plots enabled an island whose soil provided 3.2 million inhabitants wih the barest of ivings in 1754 to support perhaps 10 million by dhe 1840s. Thauks to the potato, Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Russia, and other parts of northern Europe also experienced rapid demographic growth, ifless dis- matic than Ireland's. When an American pathogen known as the porate blight first crossed the Atlantic in the early 18:08 (surviving, it seems likeli the hold ofa fast clipper ship), many ofthe people who had come to depend ‘on the tuber for food had either to emigrate 0: to starve. we trace the genealogy of any Colorado coalfield fami wwe ate quite likely to find dhe family tree spreading its branches ducing the back far enough. period when these epidemiological and agricultural revolutions began: the 3600s in parts of Britain, the ealy nineteenth century in muuch of the Unived States, Germany, and other parts of Northeru and Western Europe, aul the late nineteenth and eatly ewentieth centuries in southern andeastern Europe. Japan, Korea, and Mexico. Asa result of fancamental transformations in how ‘humans related to their environments, some combination of unemployment underemployment, and low wages almost invariably ensued, Some of the asants who’ suffered these woes rebelled the eras of agricultural chasse pe 7 e were consequently times of tumult—of peasant revolt, social bandit that loon everyday forms of resistan cl large in the collective an Many more, however, sought co free themselves from de land. Writing © southern Italy in the early twentieth century, the traveler Robert Foerster ar sgued that Jeaving che known patterns of agricultural life chrough migration, aa “simpler and ...surer than revolution." “The distance laborers put berween themselves and the farms they lel ot4 Dying with Their Boots On In January 1884, after “kissing loved ones and bidding them good-bye.” tuinety men and boys stumbled from their boardinghouses and homes out into dhe darkness ofa bone-chilling dawn. In their heavy boots, some walked lone, others alongside friends and family in litle clusters, but all trudged toward the same destination, a spot perhaps five hundred paces west of the town center that east an infernal glow on the mountainside above.! “Phe men swung lunch pails and traded stories as they walked. ‘Their ac nderson, Laux, Williams, O'Neil, Lodenwald, Hughes, Creelman, Hular, MeGregor, Probst, Donegan—hearkented back to two continents and many natious. Brogues and burrs, singsongy Welsh and sgutcaral Pennsylvania Dutch echoed off the false facades of this archetypal (Old West mining town: isolated, makeshift, aught withthe possibilty of vi- lence. cents and their name—A A few were just boys. Morgan Neath and lide Tommy Lyle were only twelve years old, and Morgan's 1 brother William was seventeen. Of the most were in the prime of lifes afew had passed it. Perhaps halfthe men were married. Six lived with their families in Crested Butte, but che others had left behind wives and often children in the old country ‘The destin sof these marked men would soon diverge stil more sharply of than their origins. Fify-nine of them were walking to their death, vi Dying with TI Colorado's first major colliery disaster Like the gunslingers of Western love. ‘most would die with their boots on, Some ofthose boots were hardly charred nd ven others were left with jagged bone and ragged muscle protruding, tvee pairs inal lay evisted and cor amid “a mass of raw and ble distorted all out ofhuman shape” A reporter for the Denver Tribute por trayed the carnage with breathless ghoulishness: “Phe clothing was burned and blackened, bruised out of all semblance to humanity: Hands were raised as if protect the face, the skin and flesh hanging in burned and blackened shreds, arms broken, legs broken, and in s the foree ofthe blast. Skulls exushed in. One man liad both ars blow off, another was found on hhis back, his head in a pool of water, and ‘when they lifted him up the back of the skull and brains fll witha sick nto the blood puddle. Another man hasa hand raised, the the faces in many caves were ne cases boots torn oll by «ening splash fingers bent ike talons, che skin and flesh gone tothe wrist, leaving only horrible claw ‘The fate of these men—the day shifi at the Colorado Coal and Iron Compa ny’s fokerville mine—and the thousands of other Westeru coal uiine workers who perished on the job in the following decades take the association be- tween violence and the Wild West appear eurious, even negligent, Mer all on-the-job accidents and workplace disasters claimed manty more lives that dustrial violence thas range wars and gunfights ever would. The grueso resulted when colliers unintentionally detonated the yense energies lent in the ancient coal seaus where they labored has been almost entirely over looked by novelist, filmmakers, and historians alike. The mining funilies of the Colorado coafields, by contrast, could afford no suc luxury: * The Ludlow S den histories the surface of the Colorado coalfield the intersetions of living beings with jssacre and the miners rebellion of 1914 emerged fun hic de deep underground. Dozens or hundreds of fect below earth, air, water and fire elped create, sustain, and sowetimies destroy what I call mine workscapes. In one way or another, these workscapes coutstivuted both the source ofthe southern colliers’ persistent discontent and a unilyngKILLING FOR COAL He Disaster at Crested Butte, Calorads, Harper's Weel, Febwusey 16,1884. Dewver Public Library, Western History Collection, Z-4004, Dying with Their Boots On factor that drew coalfield migrants from remarkably diverse buckgrousuls to snake common cause ‘What isa workscape? On the most basic level, iti a place shaped by the interplay of human labor and natural processes. Whereas “landscape” relers to particular stretch of ground, a scene that can be taken in ata glance a represented ona single canvas oF wit photo frame, “workscape” implies something more complex: notjust an essentially static scene or setting neatly contained within borders, but a constellation of unruly and ever-unfolding ‘relationships—not simply land, but also air and water, bodies and organisms, as well as dhe language people use to understand the world, and the lens of ‘culture through which they make sense of and act on their surroundings. Inu- possible to bound, own, or represent in two-dimensional space, workscapes straddle material realities, the ways int w and direct the course of shifting realities, and the identities people have cre ated out of these material and perceptual building blocks. Going beyond the hoary dualisms that separate “ much of Western thought, the workscape concept treats peeple as laboring beings who have changed and been changed it turn by a natural world that remains always under construction, Ukimately, exploring the mine workscape reveals much about hiow nature shaped the lived experience, identity, and polities of Colo- rado mineworkers.* Wherever people work, in short, the boundaties between nnature and culture mele away people have tried to petecive ‘nature an” and Subterranean Crucibles “Watching coal-miners at work,” as George Orwell once wrote, “you realise momentarily what different universes different people inhabit” Like scuba divers of astronauts, colliers ventured into an environment fundamentally different fiom those in which our species evolved. Conditions undergrouid. like those in space or beneath the sea threaten the hunnan organism with ex- piration at any moment. To make sense of the labormanageinent conflicts that frequently erupted at collieries like tke Jokerville ine, we must take s loser look at these subterranean crucibles of industrial struggle.” ‘The Jokervlle day shift had started innocuously enough. Carpenters tracklayers, blacksmiths, and engineers reported for work at the mine officesKILLING FOR COAL 44, Butering de Mine Workscape, gto, Denver Public Library. Western History Collection, 26303, and workshops; some then headed underground to perform maintenance on the: ‘truisportationand ventilation systems. The drivers, mostly young sxperienced, turned off toward the stables to feed and hamess the mules responsible for carrying coal on the first leg ofits journey out ofthe earth aud ‘on to the market. For their part, face workers the majority ofthe mine work- {urce responsible for the aetual work of wsining, would have filed toward the shed covering the n ne entry, past Luke Richardson, the inine’s fire boss, and ito the tumnels beyond. Investigators would later blame the ensuing ex- plosion on Peterson, a Swedish niiner who allegedly iguored Richardson's ‘warning about the dangerous levels of methane that had built up i his work Th thvough a portal of stout imbers and into a familiar world. Those of usu ‘custonted to underground mine labor might have felt out of place. Unmoored from our everyday reales and thrust into a dark, claustrophobic, utterly alien environment, we would sou have conftonted the limitations of senso Conyans designed to decode radically different surroundings. ‘outcome lay in the fature, dhough, as sixty-seven of dhe men walked Dying with Their Boots On Railroad aud coal company executives used information obtained throusl: their own explorations as well as from geological consultants to determine where to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollats of capital generally ve quired to launch an industrial coal mine. Crews of expert colliess and oxher skilled workers ten began to build the inffastructure ofthe mine workscape. ‘The techniques and tools used to extract coal were ofitle use for pencttat- ing the comparatively harder ruck that separated fossil fuel deposits fui the surlace,so development workers had to maser not only the eralt of coal mist ing, butalso skills more connnonly associated with hard-rock mining ot tail oud building, Driving their picks into the earth and blasting their way is, even a trough impediments, miners drove main tunnels through doz deeds, of feet of rock, If the tunel they excavated t0 reach a coal seat plunged vertically, colliers called it a shaft if ie dipped at an angle, it was a slope.*and “as aligned horizontally, they referred to itas a dri Having driven at least one passageway between the coal seaun and the sur- face, development workers next proceeded (0 lay out the rest of the mine Old colliery gether different from the grid commonly used for Western towns and cities, maps reveal an underground arrangement of space not aloo Though geological regularities, surveying errors, and diffuse authority over these underground environments led practical miners and coal comp: igineers to depart freely from r htangles, itis nonetheless helpfal to imagine a coal mine asa gridded space or underground town, Haulageways known us centries funetioned a a avenues; “side entries” worked like side streets: tnd “rooms” ind “pillars,* the foruner destined for removal, the latter tended to stay in place and support the roof uutil all the coal in that district of the mine had been removed, compris The support systems dueaded through this grid—car tracks, eompressed-air pipes and hoses. lectrical wires, air courses, punips, fans, and so forth—fi ment of energy, materials, and creatures such as mules, mice, tween the One th begin. Soon colliers began to labor in dozens or even hundreds of wtive ye workscape and the outside work infrastructure was in place, the work of extracting coal could rooms, each bordered by an entry to the rear, the blocks of standin, coal known as pillars ow either side, and a working face atthe frout, Salaried ene ployees kiown as mine bosses had the authority to assign miners to ten.KILLING POR COAL but once a miner reached his room, he entered a space where companies ex- erted litle supervision and exercised only rudimentary authority. ln the small earthen workrooms distributed around the mine grid, miners~generally ‘working in pairs—employed techniques and tools that traced their origins to Europe anid the northeastern United States. The precise methods used var- ied, depending on the thickness of the seam, the concentration of ructhane, the expertise ofthe collier, the weight ofthe overburden, and several other factors. The basic process usually began when a the lower portion of the eval face. He uext picked up an augur and drilled several holesin the shelf of coal he had just undermined. After filling some of these holes with cartridges—hand-rolled and filed with either black powder ler swung his pick against ‘or giant powder taken fiom kegs placed in the crosscuts or side entries where tniners from adjacent rooms congregated for proceeded to light the wicks or “squibs” that hing out from the eartidges, wals and breaks~a collier then hurried toa relatively safe spot to wait for the povider to explode (by the carly twentieth century some collieries used electric shot firing systems op- crated by specialists). Preindustral eythms and eraft skills persisted in the collieries well into the twentieth century. In contrast with hard-rock miners ancl the many odes whose crafts were destroyed or compromised by eoal- burning machines, colliers owned th ir own tools, started and stopped work at will, coiled at their own pace, and worked not for wages but for tonnage Colliers, once they could see through the smoke and dust the charge hid drow into the air, retuned to the room to load the eoal and rock broken off the face by che blast. If necessary, miners split large chunks into more mnan~ iageuble pieces, then used crowbars, shovels, a even bare hands w pack their cats tightly with several tons of coal, then pushed the cars along iron or steel tracks tothe side entry. Next, the young men or recent jnmigraats who performed dhe comparatively unskilled work of driving males or locomotives collected these cars and took them cither toa shaft, where they were lifted up to the surfice, or diveetly out the mine tunnel to a scale outsides in ether case, a car’s journey might cover hundreds of yards in a new or small nine, but upwards of five miles in the larger collieries. Co the cars and re pany officials weighed red each coller’s tonnage on a ledger. From the scale, the imine cars proceeded either to the coke plant or to a large wooden-framedd Dying with Their Boots On structure ouside the mine mouth known as the tipple, where mechanical de- vices dumped the coal out of the mine cars and into railroad cars. ‘Thus did generations of Colorado coal miners earn theirliving and dhus did the fossil fuel unearthed by the miners’ wil begin to make its way out of the ground and coward the market OfMice and Mules and Men Prodigiously lethal places, the Colorado coal hissed, hooted and howled and roared with exuberant life. Ina very real ways, colliers devoted themselves to opening.a channel thanks to which the buried life force of the distant past could invigorate the Rocky Mountain economy When mining began, Colorado's coal seams were almost as lifeless as the surface of the moon. Mine development work began to breathe vitality bach into these long-dead places. People und animal interlopers from the surface world sojourned underground; meauwhile, rodents, microorganisms, andl inules started to make a permanent home in the collieries Canaries and coal mines seem to go together like swallows and Sant Juss Capistrano. In Golorado, though, the miners’ canary was usually a mouse, Quitea varity of rodent i all referred to simply as mice—unintentionally itched a ride into the mines in the loads of oats and hay that woule fortify the mules For their day's work, Creatures that survived the passage and found a mate begun to reproduce prolifically; one female mouse could bear as many as 150 young in a single including native pack rats and exotic how Apart from mule feed, the most reliable souree of organic energy under- ground was to be found in colliers” dinner pals. Hungry or resourceful mice oficn begged miners for foods at least some men obliged by throwing scraps to the rodents or even feeding them by hand. As men and mice shared lovod, a strange symbiosis began to develop. At first, one miner recalled, rodents would “go about their business.” Mice let down their guard,as Dan DeSantis told an interviewer, only when a mis tine, mice grew to trust colliers. Workmen event began to anticipate the ro- dents? appearance at their daily meal: as one group of mineworkers ate their x “efi them a piece of bread. Over dinners, for instance, “four or five beady-eyed litle scroungers” would venKILLING FOR COAL ture out of their holes and commence “waiting.” as another miner rement- bered, “lor bits of food to be thrown to them." Miners learned to differentiate beoween theit lunch companions on dhe basis of their markings and behaviors some even began to nan mice, prac~ tive dhat signaled dhe mix hited their rooms. “Oh yeah,” Dan DeSantis recalled with a yeah, Pete this and that, boy they is’ growing sense of familiarity with the rodents tac inl “the litle buggers they knew their nam come out ofthe crack and they get that close with you. Little by lle you ‘ould just about feed thea by band.” In the camps above, the aet of breaking bread together ofien cemented communal bonds across deep cultural di- nes below,sharing food across the boundary between species helped collers turn rodent fellow travelers into fiends." “We take care of them," DeSantis explained; “we like them.” Such eolliers «as DeSantis appreciated mice for both emotional and practical reasons. Mak- ing pets of playful, fiend harmless ereatures took men’s minds off work, while dispelling the boredom and tension that often developed as pairs of ten labored side by side for long hours in dark, isolated, and dangerous workscapes. Moreover, most misters had igrated from agricultural or pro= toindustrial regions; for some of these men, beliiending mice may have re- tninded them of rural ife back hom Making mice into pets brightened workers? days, but coal-msini to value the rodents’ presence for anothe also taught mi cason: the ani- snals were preternaturally sensitive w danger. Mice, ike canaries, would lose consciousness or die when exposed co even small concentrations of carbon, monoxide: their delicate hearing and sensitivity to vibration also alerted them to a cracking swof overhead. Canary miners kept an eye on their rodent friends. Ifa mouse started to scurry away at top speed iit grew lethargic, or iit simply keeled over, then miners knew to “watch it, You beter be cael” as DeSantis put it, “because something’s wrong, either gas or cave-in.” Build ing bouds with mice dhus helped men forestall dager, even as it alleviated the ntonotony ancl alienation they sometimes experienced in the course of a dlay’s work." Mules, of course, were altogether different animals. Hybrids whose exis- tence and propagation dep ied on human intervention, mules are among ls. The veterinary historian Juliet Clutton- the newest of dhe world’s Daring with Lheir Boo's On Brock explains, ~Dillerent species of Equidae will not normally imterbteed in nature and it requires the guile aud expertise of inau co bring it about, Cluttou-Brock surtnises uhat Sumerian herders assisted dhe conception of the first mule by uieking a male ass into mating with a female horse. This tule, like almost all mules, was sterile. hndeed, the animals would quickly have vanished if humans had stopped finagling horses and asses ato matin The i 00 meuse utility of these hybrids, though, prevenced that outcome aud le then a mainstay of labor in the Ole! World; possessed of “more stamina and endurance” chan either the ass or the horse, “more sure-looted. and capable of hauling “heavier luads," the mule constitutes, in Clutton Brock’s words, “a perfect example of hybrid vigour “Phe first mules to arrive in Colorado accompanied Spanish conguistudo: Aw los, dispossessed native peoples and initiated an agvicultural revolution. wore followed, as Hispanos, and Lat res in the sixteenth century. Many ‘The industialization of the Mountain West set it wotiou by Willian: Palin: ex's dreant of coal-fired benevolence only intansified seliauee on the energy and instincts of dhese beasts of burden. Singly, in pails, or it teams, ules helped! haul practically every 101 of eoal extracted in Colorado up trough te 1g20s, Haulage took place in usu stages: first, dhe movenseut of loaded nine cars trom the colliers” roo aloug eutrywayss and second. b uuules from the second ofthese tasks inthe late nineteenth century. Whether the cp from these sidings to shalt or tipple, Much to displace diveu by steam, by €0 fossil fuels required no food or v ,pressed air, or by electricity, eehnologies reliant ou and litle vest. Properly sec viced, they could *stand up to the work all day and all for many yess thus of ‘an estimated cost savings of 50 percent over auitnal ng compa hhaulageways. Bewween 1902 and 1916 CFS proceeded co re tire halfits mules. Even so, mules continued to work in Colorado mines well inwo the wventieth ntury because they posed less risk of igniting methane and were capable of maneuvering in tight spaces much more effectively dhaut machines. As late as 1937 more chan tree thousand mules were sill at work underground in Colorado, one for every two coal nine workers. Most worked oily on the first stage of haulage, though some continued to work the tts ‘eutries of gassy m trough the 1950s." ‘The need to feed so large an equine workforce provided a stimulus te loKILLING FOR COAL 45. Mine Mules, Rouse, Copy 20004922 cal economies and transformed local ecosystems in many parts of the eoal- fields. Mine operators intially bought hay and alfalfa for their nnules from ranchers along the Cuchara River and other local growers. But just as coal companies integrated backward by building railroads and starting stores, so did ac east one company seek to control its own supply of animal feed. Colo- ado Fuel and fron purdiased the Maxwell Land Grant west of ‘Tinidad, kicked setters off their nds, and then started a company farm ou whieh some of the very jes they had dispossessed were hired to tend feed crops con shares or for wages.” Several factors mad mules the draft aninias of choice in the Colorado collieries. First, dhe creatures varied greatly in height. Mate a burro with a pony and the progeny will be short; cross a Clydesdale with an ass and you ge a much bigger beast Phese variations enabled companies to fit mules to pauticular mines. Colorado Fuel an Iron, for example, bought short mules fou Texas to ply Fremont County's thin seams, and taller mules from Mi sour and Nebraska to work the thicker seams of Huerfano and Las Animas counties, Horses and donkeys varied in size, too, but hybrids possessed sev- cral advantages over their parent stock. A Welsh miner remarked of mules Dying with Their Boots On td it was “truly wonderful the bard work they stand,” adding that “no horse can stand the same amount of work.” Coal companies uployed mine mules for their brains as well as their brawn. Drivers could readily train the ania to respond to four universal voice commands—*giddap” for “go.” “whu for*stop,? “gee” for “right,” and “haw” for “lft” “All you liad to do was just tell dhean wht you want to do,” diver Dan DeSantis recalled, and “they'll do for you." In fairly short order, mules le and entries"* ved thei un,” a relatively fixed route connecting set of 100m I was the job of drivers to coax or compel these ereatures to apply their formidable energy and intelligence to the hard work of moving coal. Colliers aud rodents developed symbiote relationships that revolved arouuie ute times and moments of dangers drivers and mules, however, engaged in battles ‘of will day alter day for nine hours or more. Though drivers and mules sounie- tines collaborated harmoniously, mulish desires tended to diverge frou deiv= erly duties, Horses, donkeys, and people made mules, but mules 1 own decisions. Stubborn and powerful, the animals offer a whimnyis le ceit ick: ing metaphor for the cenaal problem mine workseapes posed for wotkers and ananagers alike these hybrids ereated and maintained by a combinativs ‘of huntan artifice auc natural processes proved all too capable of eluding hu ‘man control Partnerships between drivers and anules ranged from respect to dys- sgentle” mule named Jack. Like che ice that skittered below him, Jack became part fianctiowal, Alex Bisuleo fondly recalled ularly friendly during luweh ss, “He'd eat all the sand. breaks. Approaching Bisulco and his co-wor wwiches... bananas everything we'd give him all the peelings and all that kin ‘of stuff” Mules such as Jack “were just beautiful,” Bisuleo wistilly recalled. But then he qualified his praise: “Phere was some mean oues. Very mean, Mules, as Bisuleo knew all too well, could be ill-tempered and exttetuels stubborn, ‘The organization of production underground made mules’ will fulness all he more infuriating. Under the tomnage system, colliers’ earuinss depended to uo small extent on the efficient flow and equitable distribuatiy of cars between their rooms and the surface above. A driver who fale curb his mules’ recalcitrance thus coustiwted a served." bility to che miners beKILLING FOR COAL Deivers sometines enticed balky unules with food, but most masters used! the stiek rather than the eatrox. The resulting abuse eoutributed further da ser and violence to workseapes already beset by fling rock and explo sis. Interviewed inthe late 1970, Bisuleor Draided-wire “popper” behind his neck. This whip, he recalled, would “cut the mules every time... Sometime itd draw blood on the nisced while holding his old poor mules.” ‘The old driver quickly veined in his sy pathy, though: “Ifthe mle needed whipping.” he claimed, “well, they sure got ix” Poppers cut into mule flesh, 1gs~ thick wooden sticks used! to brake descending mine ears—eould na. By beating mules with little restraint or regret, tines blinded or even killed dheir equine assisants Iuteiguingly,a few former drivers likened dheir animal co-workers tw peo= ple, Mules, claimed retived driver Vietor Bazauele, “had sense like a human ‘On x couple of occasions, drivers extended their anthropontorphie stance, remembered a fi Nelly il behind” in his work, When Nelly “ran crue” to her and revoted, the driver explained, “by jingle, Pd just lose sles. Bisuleo, for pale mule nam rat al ways made hin ‘womanly “breed suy patience” and “really beat [her] up. .. Those balhy mules was aw Bisulco concluded, “worsethan any balky wounau you ever saw! Drivers even likened the mules? resistance (th own struggles. Vietor ivanele joked that mules *knew when starting time was and quitting dine was.” When “aitting ine came around,” he deckared, “you couldn't make those mules do nothing.” Bisuleo coneurr he animal workforce, he clainted, “was unionized before some of us Even though Bisulco and Bazanele were jesting, the humor conveysa seri- ‘ous message about the conuadictory nature of power in coalfield society. By telling stories that cast mules in the role of women and unionists, drivers hinted a the anauifold con ections that knit together mine workscapes, o- mestic spaces, and industral struggle, Such comparisons captured the an biguous social position that drivers occupied: just as surely as they wete dominated hy the companies they in turn dominated nuules and wore, Lil ordinates. At the same tin, it portrayed the animals as arkedl mulesas sub- tors filly eapable of 1g obstreperous animals to strikers or woun ‘essting their subjugation, With their sharp hooves and sturdy leys, strength Dying with Their Boots On ‘ened by pulling many tons of coal a dozen miles or more a day. de auitels ed or even killed drivers. After ious and ill-tempered” animal seraped its back against the roof of the Brookside utine, for instatice it erupted into a rage, knocked down a young ltalian driver, and dragged string of cars over both his legs. Mules, in short, were rebels with a kick heaping abuse on then was just as likely to provoke tent as it was to break their will Mules, along with rel other eveatures, enlivened ne workscapes. “The close, ofien violeut relationships drivers forged with mules shaped dhe nature of labor for thousands of underground workers. Mules gave way 19 in haulageways, yet continued to play a role inthe mine werk machines om m of roomts and side enbies, thus demoustr ig both the limitations anul che surprising persistence of old-fashioned horsepower, Crossbreeds in wore sways than one, these stundy creatures embodied the close relation betwee: labor and natural processes that made colliery workseapes 50 violet wind contradictory. When the Earth Grows Restless Every mine tuuel driven into the side of a hogback opened a portal into a other world, another nature. For those who labored under the earth, there was no getting away fom it, Barth surrounded anineworkers: it formed the floors beneath their feet, the roof ever their heads, the walls on all sides. Most other Coloradans stood on solid ground, but col ed the mine work: 1s pa scape with anxious strides, Geological ieregubarities threatened to block their progress and hamper their work. Worse, the unpredictable eval and unstable rock that “To toil iu such cased them was liable to fll down at any mou couditions was to embark on a close, complex, and sometines fatal ation ship with a capricious environment Miners knew dat ancient geological processes hud formed! the coal seams in which they labored. lu the course of their daily work, colliers encountered impressions of seaweed and clam shells, noc to mention recognizable ve offs, palms, redwoods, breadfruit, and other tree species altogether litier cet fiom the scrubby junipers and pifions that grew outside the mines, ‘PheKILLING FOR GOAL vers’ craft thus bound iss practitioners to a past when the dark seams in which they toiled had been teeming swamplands dappled by the sun rays” ‘Vsiations is these ancient ecosystems determined the thickness of coal n some places than oth- seauns and their character, Peat accumulated faste ers conditions fostering its deposition also prevailed longer in some parts of ‘Colorado than others. Coal deposits consequently varied in thickness from avouud huge fet in Fremout County to between five and eight feet in the rest of the soutl eld co fonty-five feet it a thick bed near New Castle aptly ow as the Mammoth seant. The yeography of prehistorie peat swamps shaped not just che thickness of deposits, but also their extent and compos edges, tion, Most coal seams were shaped like an elongated lens; near th where roof and floor converged, miners knew the deposit to be “pinching out Other geological inregulacities occurred less predictably. Ancient streams and rivers had sometimes carved ch ke More uniform but eq nnels throu peat swamps, wing behind troublesome features that miners called washouts or rolls. ally problematic were layers of shale or other rocks ttuese “bands” or “partngs” of “bone” or “boney” had formed when volea- hic eruptions, catastrophic floods, droughts, or other eataclysins deposited asl silt, or sand on top of Cretaceous and ‘Tertiary swamps. Thicker layers ad resulted ‘of valueless rock between bands of coal, so-called split seam, h liom more drastic and enduring shifts in depositional environments." By molding the physical environment of the mine workseape, geology red colliery labor. The thin seams of Fr nc County, for instance, made it impossible for 8 to work standing up and ensured that they would remove less coal in day”s work than their counterparts in other parts of the state, Companies consequently had to pay eolliers a h rate wo attract and vetain miners co work these eramped mines he ch acter of mine earth varied not simply from field to field, but from etry to entry and room to room, Coal seams were thicker here, thinner there, split and parted trom place to place, pinched out on the edges. This uneven ented tension betw underground topography fon neworkers and their eiuployers. Room assignments proved! particularly contentious. Since cers were paid only tor the coal they extracted, subterranean geological varia- tions taste into large disparities in the wages colliers could potentially Dying with cir Boots Ow different rooms with the sae expenditure of time and effort, Mine bosses assigned winers to the various rooms ofa colliery: huvariably crassa fiom the ranks of British American craft colliers, mine bosses parlayed their intnnate knowledge of He contours of risk and reward in the mtine wotkscape into power and souetimes even profit, Suspected untiow organizers, collicts of some other race or nationality, maleontents, an men who simply got ous auine boss's entss friends, rela aves customarily rece sd the worst assig tives, countrymen, and colliers loyal to the company were given the best rooms to work, Some bosses, however, learned that a litle Hexibility could ys along way. A miner whe wanted keep a good place knew to treat the mine boss to drinks atthe saloous «few colliers were allegedly so desperate for good places that they pisuped their wives and daughters to nine bosses—or that made the ro so went one ru uly of the strikers? camps in yore problematic uhan the geography of reward, however, was the excavated tunnels aud ron far sworkscape’s cartography of risk, Ibelow the surface, they exeated perilous spaces in which the immense pote tial e gy a any nioment. Miners would have faced great danger € increly removed coal ftom the grounds but they rau a heightened risk be gy of the eur above their heads threatened to beconte kinetic cue en if they hud ‘eause they also bres to oxy ‘poor eutvironments, then lay sealed off from the atmosphere for eons. Pyrites 1 mineworkers exposed a coal fice it began to weather rapidly, forall coal seams fornued in oxygen cavrained in coal could ignite spontaneously, though this was in Colorado, given the low sulfur content of Western coals. Far noe troublesome was the rapidity wih which microseopie fissures and cracks iden. Where them, as the flaking shale roof and sloughing coal faees of the nine suche ould, 1s labored, dhey weakened the earth arounel scape attested.” Such problems were wothing mitigated the danger of falling rock and eval by employing two types uf cool ew in the coal industry. Colliers bad lon, support, First, miners periodically left solid eoal intact, in “pillars,” the yeu exous proportions of which servedl to prevent overlying strata from crashing down all ut once. Second, miners wedged rough timbers of pine or spruce between oor aud ceiling, support dhe expanses of roof that spannecl theKILLING FOR COAL space trom pillar to pillar, Operators procured mine timbers in wo ways tlhrough malliyear contracts with logging companies and through short-terin contracts with Hispano properes (prop cutters), Halian migrants, and local Anglos. ‘Phe amount of lunaber in the subterranean workscape increased in lirect proportion to the rising demand by regional consumers for fossil fuels, stinuulating companies and contractors to enlist muscle and steam power to fell andl hal in an ever-growing number of trees from the forests of southern | Colorado." ‘Phe boundaties between organie and minerabintensive economies blurred in the mines—andall too frequently collapsed altogether, Falling roof and walls struck workers down in ones and twos, inflicted bead wounds, pruned men dow ancl even squashed colliers flat, “like @ newspaper” “Phough such accidents atracted less notice than dramatic mine explosions such as the Jokervlle blast, they nonetheless accounted for the greater part (814) of dhe 4,708 on-the-job deaths in the Colorado collieries beaween 1884 and gia." Props, stn ctually sound ancl properly placed, protected workers fro, snost ofthe rocks and coal detached by undercutting and oxidation. There way a knack to setting props that some miners never acquired, however Worse, dry rot, corrosion inflicted by cliemicals it mine air, and inleerentir- regularities in the wood could all bend or break even expertly positioned tiinbets, Even when timbers were sound and well placed, gaps remained. jown as potholes and water slips had a bad habit of ng large chunks of ck between props. Miner Sam Goffatt received a fatal knock ou the head in 1898 when a “small rock” fell rough the props of his “exceptionally well timbered” place. On a few Geological features loos stretches of mint roof could even break fiee. Paul Pulto probably never knew \vhut hit him when an “enormous” block of sandstone measuring perhaps city leet in length crashed onto his head.!* Plough pillars and timbers made mining possible, chey could not make it Simple bud luck could fell the most careful collier, Read through enough accident reports, though, and you will quickly see that happenstance alow is not sufficient to explain most deaths caused by falling earth ayment left miners little eho ‘with their ives. By compensatiny ‘Phe tom 1ge system of pa e but to gamble rs solely on the basis of the amount of Dying with Their Boots On coal they extracted, companies rendered timbering a form of “dead work the colliers’ grim name for tasks that were necessary but uncompensated “This system forced m cast hese life-and-death decisions in cold economic terms, miners had si reworkers into constant and complex calculations, To suaneously to assess thei the comparaive exposure ovisk and to est costs and benefits of devoting time to setting timbers iustead of extract coal, Or to put it mote unequivocally, men had to decide whether to sal guard their lives orto temp fate. Miners who pushed their lck in hopes ut caring. litte store money sometimes paid with thee lives comrades sacrificed wages for safety. This devil’s baryain seems nal still given the insecure, often seasonal nature of work it the mines, the ‘widespread indebtedness of eoliers, and the dreaut af economie advance- rent that had drawn so many migrants tothe coalfield in the first place ‘A different but related calculus explains some ofthe other choices work- crs made in the face of underground! vik. Just as the drive for exta tonnage ‘could motivate a mineworker to court danger, so too could a man’s need wo demonstrate his masculinity lead him to ignore his beter instinets. Joh Bonomo, for instance, was working with fize other men to remove coal ut Crested Butte in 1897. The “coal was free on one side,” Bonomo later re- I knew hat the coal lated, “and wi supported! by timbers. The six men vas about ready to fall ofits own accord.” Bonoano “remsonstraved with thent dha it should be taken down rather than tking any more chances.” Fratk Norden and John Pilone replied to Bonomo’s entreaties by “ridiculing his cowardice” Stung by his comrades’ derision, Bonomo shut his mouth sul labored ou. As he shoveled coal and kept “out af danger” as best “suddenly the whole mass fell” on Norden andl Pilone. “A few minutes ater the eval fell the overlying slate fll” further erushing Norden and Pilone and e could. sing} great delay in exticating their bodies” Bonomo survived, but is ike many other mieworkers, suffered fatal injuties wh lowed masculine insecurity to outweigh selfpreservation." comrades, Miners butted up against earth at every tur. Tt butted sight back, wit ess intention but much greater might. Try as miners would to control the posver~ fil physical and che turn back the clock. The collier-bard Jolin W. Brown eut to the heart of dhe iatter in verse: “Pick! Pick! Pick! [In de cunnel’s endless gloom j And every nical forces that their work unleashed, they could swtKILLING FOR COAL blow of our strong vigharn / But helps to earve our ton craft and absorbing the knowledge of u sghalto their trade could mineworkers beg aly by learning ne workscapes so inte nto balance dhe need w carn wages with the will to stay alive aud save face." Weolliets n le trouble for themselves, however, they were uot te sole urs oftheir predicament. When the earth grew restless and miners died, the working people of the coalfields blamed their suffering on their employ crs—and for good reason, Dependence on fossil fuels had hidden costs, which miners and thei fanilie often paid with their lives. Instability and vir lence underground invariably engendered more of the same on the sur Deadly Currents Betore examining either ype of violence more closely, let us frst reconsider ‘our assumptions about terva firma. The ground beneath our feet, after al, is porous and permeable, as well as solid an seem ily dependable. As rocks yo, coal is unusually riddled with cavities. Overlying strata tend eo fill pores and larger fissures in coal in exo ways: by pressing water into the, and by blocking the escape of volatile gases released from ancient swamp depos M 1 workings intruding into preexisting hydrologie ystems released meth- roduced dangerous gases underground, je into the min -workseape ad t rough their labor, miners helped turn mines into toxic, volatile envirot wcapable of sustaining lan lie without the aid of vulnerable tech uuological systems, Groundwater reflected the qualities of searcity and abund tee that had Jong characterized human economies on the surface, Mines in Lats Animas County tended to be the driest. The lack of water atthe Bugle mine contrib ‘ated to the failure of Colorado Coal and Irons 1881 mechanization drive. Ou. balance, however, underground acidity hurt miners more than it helped th riosphere, where they sggravated acute and ehronie hazards to bw hhealth, Sprinkling the most com snore dificult in Picking au blasting in dry mines sent clouds of dust into the mine ate a dust mitigation technique, also became e abseace of steady water supply. Conipanies could es- cape this vicious cirele only by hauling water to the mies by rail, but this Dying with Their Boots On solution was costly, One mine inspector adhitted, “Phere ute several ies in this State situated so faraway from the source of water supplies that spr bling as profisely and thoroughly as is suggested would incur au espetise nearly equalling the margin of profit at they would be Force to case ost ating.” Parsimonious executives primed ine environments for disaster avhen they balked at the expense. Inadeqeate sprinkling contributed 1 spate of mine disasters that claimed hundreds of lives iu the easly eveunietls A litle water could unake labor safer, but there cant always be to miuel o's good thing. Most collieries int Huerfauo County lay jast beneath sand aud x i vy lay gravel deposits. These alluvial sediments could conduct large flows uf wate fou streams and arroyos into the mines below: The wet eonditions thas re sulted sonetimes forced workers in the mines around Walsenbury co labor is water up to their waists, thereby causing much discomfort and diseise Southern Colorado mines sulered wo agedies such as che White Ash disas- ter near Golden, in which water from a neighboring mine, imundating a col lierys killed ten, Flooding posed probleans nonetheless. Geologist James Gat- mer that diner had warned With nig the Walsen tract woukl always” involve the risk of large inluxes of water. Aer the gen Gardi in 1889 “a large water pocket was struck?” the 0 ignored ignore 1's advice, miners and managers suffered the consequences. When Hooded completely: f= teen years liter, storm waters, pouring through the intervening allaviuin. agai filled the mi Other Huerlanto County collieries flooded, too, buta more coumuon probe lem throughout the coalfclds resulted fiom less-spectacular dripping aud seepage. In Colorado, as on most other terrestrial expanses, the ground likls esas much, Since tne int ‘much more water than the surface—over sixty eal down into bedvock emorial, falling rain and melting snow hal perco ough pores anc fissures. lnpermeable sirata eventually slowed the loys ward course of the water and forced it to colleet in more porous strata know as aquifers. Souther Colorado's richest eoal horizons oecupied the Raton and Vermgo formations, ovo of dhe most important aquifers i the regi ygether with their neighbors, the eoal-beariug strata of these f lle and curves upward at its edges. The westem lip ofthis basin outerups it the fon a basin, a bowllike geological structure that dips down in dheKILLING FOR COAL ‘mountains on the Upper Pargatoire, where rain and melting snow soak into dhe earth and charge the aquifer with water, whieh then ereeps down the ugh these bodies of ground downward and eastward at a sate ofjust thirty-two feet o 80 a sloping contours ofthe basin’s weste water year, the high elevations at which they start their downward journey give them considerable hydraulic head—enough in some instances to push water back up the basin’s eastern slope.” “The flow of water into mine workings accelerated as entries and rooms penetrated ever deeper io subteramean aquifers. Surprisingly enough, sone operators made the most ofan otherwise trying situation by piping the water pumped out of mines into coal camps, where it sustained mining, lies and draft animals. Caanp and Plant described the water thus obtained as “pu sand wholesome, with just enough sulfar i ic to make it healdhful”—a dubious description at best, considering that the water passed through a ‘workplace where hundseds of mules and men labored for long days without privies Wherever groundwater flowed, it seemed, easy distinctions between na- ture und artifice dissolved luvariably, the flow of water into the workseape accelerated over the life eycle ofa mine. ln fact rising waters and the mount- ing costs they the dlosure of some of posed were au yportant factor CE&I’s most productive Huerfano County collieries. Even in the eompara- jntes of Las Animas County, the growing influx of groundwater nade mine workseapes more expensive for companies to operate, more chal- engin, for workers to labor in, and more difficult for either to control. Problematic though the intersection of mine workings and groundwater hydrology proved, the air in mines presented stil greater risks and dilemunas. “The peril that mine air posed was a direct consequence of the first faet to confront almost anyone who set foot in a coal mine: darkness. Boys and men fiequently sulfered disorientation, even terror, the first time they ventured underground. “Mother I don’t want to go ito that dark hole," one fifeen- year-old eried alter his frst day on the job. “hn altaid to go in theres” the boy begged. “Ul do anything fT didn’t have to work there.™# The absence of natural light meant that humans could survive in mine \workscapes only trough aificial means. Mines lacked the living plants and algae whose photosynthetic capabilities had ereated and maintained dhe su- Dying with Weir Bouts Ow face atmospltere iu which human beings had evolved. Goal n elke space craic or submarines, intruded into alien enviro ing higher ie forms. That collieries we and possessed neither firm oute tor and ventilate dhe air within gives some notion of dh ents incapable of support exponentially larger that such cralt rad sd technologies w mosis niners faced once they passed through the mnte portal Mi serving de fine-t and sight, and learning to identify hazardous gases by the way dhe Hanes of obtained a measure of protection against aisborne dangers by by ied reactions of mice, cultivating their owu senses of smi their lanps burned. These techs yues enabled colliers t distinguish be bled the z relatively unpolluted, replete with oxygen, and neither tween two broad categories of mine air. The ‘inst, “good” ain ve: surface atmosph {00 hot nor too cold. “Bad” air by eoubast, contributed to the dangers of the First ofall, swine ears the respiration of atin several ways. at was a common charaeteristic of bad ait. The oxidation of wan and animal wor ers, geotliermal energy the weight of the atmosphere above, ancl other factors all warmed the mine atmosphere, Underground temperatures in Colorado's collieries never ap proached the searing heat of Nevada's Comstock Lode or Bolivia's Potosi though the heat made workers “not as lively” and less able “to yet out of te ‘vay when [danger] approache{d}:"* ‘A second characteristic of bad air was its impurity. Merely by breathing animals and colliers depleted the o aumosphere uf oxygen. Av a conse quence, workers so that they lacked “the desire and ambition to accomplish a yood day's work etimes became 50 “depressed, fatigued and indlfletent ‘oF of earning a fall day’s pay” Accidents alo beca ore Frequent ins Colliers laboring iu rooms filled with dust sud wd," anisty mine atmosphere. smoke, a state mine inspector exphi isnt a ighly contanminsted air,..."The falls of root aud tot see oF hear warnings of danger as quickly”; moreov wion of de roof and sides and the decomposing oftimber and ties.” the same inspector argued, “are noticeably hastened in dhe presence of sides occur offener and the decaying of timber is quicker." Bad ait thus revealed the intereonnecteduess of mnine earth, mine ait, au the ong tinetions about workseape atmosphere, which offer furd sn that labored underground, Miners drew stil more precise dis-KILLING POR COAL dynamisin aud danger of the Colorado coll vs. Stinkdamp, blackdamp, af yp, and so forth—their names all build on an old ‘Tentonie ‘orm meaning “au exhalation, a vapour or gas, of noxious kind.” As this ety: ology might suggest, these appellations referred not to elemnents isolated in a chemists laboratory, but rather to real-world compounds formed during erdhanyp, fiveda tie interaction of human labor and natural processes. skdamp, to begin with th ty the socten-eyg stench of hydrogen sullide. A by-product of bla most innocuous of dhese mixtures, owed its ing, spontaneous combustion, or the decomposition of sulfates and submerged ‘inbers due to the action of microorganisms, stinkslamp was comparatively rarcin Colorado, though itdid occasionally sicken miners. Slightly more dangerous was blackdamp. Formed by the combination of carbon dioxide (exhaled by mammals and given off by burning lamps, ex- ploding powder, oxidizing coal, decaying, timbers, and smoldering fires) and nitrogen, this heavy, potentially fatal mixture “invariably” accumu lated in the “worked out and abandoned portions of mines.” From there it ‘occasionally surged into active workings. Between July and August 1891, for ‘example, the Robinson mine suflered a spate of blackdamp incidents. The ‘gis raised the respiration rates of seven workers until they lost conscious- nes one reportedly “knew Nothi "These men eventually recovered, but miners who breathed in afterdamp were rarely so fortunate. A compound produced by the explosive combus- tion of gas and dust, afterdamp contained heavy concentations of carbon for wo days.” ide, ‘The majority of casualties in Colorado's mine explosios proba biy resulted not from the force of the blasts, but rather from ide poisoning as alierdamp seeped tough the workings. Perhaps dhe most draunatic case unfolded at Starkville in ‘of dead bodies surrounded by 10. Rescuers there found a cluster ty dinner pails. Since the explosion had ‘occurred not long after dawn, investigators deduced that the group had sar the explosion, then banded together to look for an escape. Finding that they were trapped, the men sat down and waited for help. Lunchtine artived with no sign of rescue, so the new sat dove to share a mieal they must have kuown would be dheie ist. Carbou monoxide claimed one, then another, un- til all lost consciousness and died.** Dying with Their Bosts On Stinkdamp, blackdamp, and afferdamp poisoned miners who breasted ngs. In a letter to the Deuver Past, diree experi- these mixtures into their enced colliers described firedamp as “the monster most dreaded by the prac 1." and for good reason. Its main ingredient was methane; the tical coal mi ost dangerous forms of fredauup also contained carbon monoxide. Meth- ane, commonly called “swamp gas,” was produced by the decomposition of ancient vegetal matter Like groundwater, the gas occupied pores and fsstwes ‘within coal sens. As miners exeavated tunnels and rooms in dhese gas-filled ane begs to flow—silently and slowly under ordinary conditions i most noncoking mines, much more rapidly im tnas County and the western fields, In “gassy” properties such as the Joker ville ning surat, yy collieries in Las 3 imethane hissed out of the earth and into the mine atmosphere through so-called blowers. On very rare occasions, it even burst forth fiom the mine face, heaping rock and coal on uilucky miners. Mineworkers: ways dreaded firedamp’s “dangerous nature” and horrifying potential, but those in coking-coal mines had particular reason to fear for methane concen trations in such uaines were much likelier ton ich 5 percent to 15 percent. the range of greatest volatility for the yas." Damps and the explosions they caused poisoned minuets, and tore their bodies to pieces, but another component of mine air proved just as inimical to human life, Dust—produced by picking and blasting and often jostled back into the air by miners and mules—presented both chronic and acute risks, Colliers inhaled large qua resulting buildup of coal dust in their lungs eventually caused a debilitatin painful, and often fatal disease, hnk-black spatum first announced its pres the es of airborne coal as they labore ‘ence; over months or years, the malady developed into pulmonary fibrosis. Progressively blocking oxygen from reaching the bloodstream, the condition asphyxiated its ds as n the disease is now called pneumoconiosis or black lung disease. jetins with agonizing slowness. Known in the Colorady 8’ consumption, asthma of the mines, or miners? asthma, the prese ence of coal particles in the health of Colorado's min sudden, iresistible force. Suspended dust could cate fire indirectly as it josphere not only erocled the pulmonary workers but could also ravage their bodies with: did when iredaanp exploded ora miner's shot “blew out” to detonate meshKILLING FOR COAL ane and other mine gases—or ditectly,as it did whit a spark from au electric wire ignited coal particles in the mine atmosphere. In either ease, a ch action of devastating proportions quickly eusued.* Colliers conbibuted in manifold ways to the airborne hazards that plagued nlite workseapes; they also stood to lose the most when disaster sock, Min workers developed various techniques t0 “read” nine ar, but che eoustruc- tion and maintenance of th reasingly elaborate technological systeas re- quited to ventilate the mines were largely entrusted to supervisors, engineers, snd sorealled company men. nthe 1880s the ace coal company geologist R.C. Hills had observed, “Phe matter of ventilation will, nore than anything cbse, determine the limit of profitable working” it the Colorado coalfield. Thiee types of ventilation lelped extend these limits in the decades alead. The fist and simplest ofthe systems, “natural ventilation,” employed two thine openings constructed at different elevations; pressure differentials caused air to flow into one tunnel and out the other. Unfortunately, the inethod proved “uncertait- and unreliable,” for natural ventilation stopped altogether when susface temperatures equaled those underground. A second and iiote complicated fom of ventilation, furnaces, relied not on onganic ergy Hloves, but rather ou the combustion of fossil fuel atthe bot shaft to draw a current ofair throw nota hte mine from an intake shaft, Furnaces were more reliable and provided a suonger flow of air than natural venti tiow did, but they suffered from awe sevious drawbacks: most Colorado tines were too shallow for the optimal operation offarntaees, and dey intro- duced open ilames into highly explosive environments. "Phe third ventilation tecluology; fans, avoided both these problems. Powered by coal via steau, compressed air, or electri c fans employed giant rotating blades or cylinders. Operated in onedine jon, they propelled spent air ont ofthe miine atmospheres when reversed, dhey sucked fresh air in uudergroun* The superiority of fans ed companies to invest Large sus in them by the late ath century. Nevertheless, ventilation in collieries remained poor “The difficulty iu the provision of air in many nines.” as an 4893 minding ‘Buide asserted, “is not so much because sullicint air does not enter the in- take, but on account of the inefficient distribution throughout the workings.” Binging good air imo all she enuies and rooms of sprawling mines aud ex- pelling bad air frou every point on the underground griel was nu simple task, sie Their Boots On Most mineworkers not employed a the coal fice spent some or all oftheir workdays building aud Jntaining trapdoors, cloth brattices, concrete siup- pings, air tunnels, and other structures that collectively divected air wlan « ss extended half a doz agg n miles. Trapper buys opened and closed haulageway doors, timbermen erected props and set dm bers to keep entryway roofs atl walls from collapsing ire bosses inspected jing path that sometin mines for gas, engineers and mechanics serv.ced and operated fans, and la 1d diversions and removed obstacles from air courses. ‘Together, hun wn labor andl teclnology’ helped sustain an undengromu atmosphere capable of supporting mammalian life, Yet mine workseapes so fact, they grew deadlier as etheless remained disaster-prone places: iit time wore on. Between 1884 and 1912, Colorado coal 1 nes averaged 6.51 fatalities per year per thousand workers empoyed—more than twice the tie tional average of 3.12 deaths during the same period. By the early igtos though, arash of explosions pushed! Colorado’s annual average mine fatality rate above 10 deaths per thousand. Mineworkers, as they toiled away in work: seapes linked only by a precarious cireuit of tunnels and rooms to the surface aunosphere Ihuncreds of fect above, must have shivered in their boots. Every breath they took, after all, depended on the competence of other workin. the capricious forces that their work underg-ound unleashed, and the yoos! faith of employers who passed up few chances to exploit then. The persis- ant solidarity aud militancy of Colorado mineworkers makes more seuse when we realize their vulnerability to airbome hazards capable of illiting incredible devastation on every boy and man underground. Wha the ius: wwial st 1d through les toted inthe pts surfaced frou te mines nel spe ‘out the southern coaltilds, it is small wonder that batalions of sti liers exacted revenge in the wake ofthe Luullow Massacre by dynamiting ty imine they could." Disaster Imiineworkers breathed easier at the end ofa shift, it was both a reaction tu inhaling the comparatively clean air outsidl: and an expression of reliet st hhaving eluded harm for yet another day. Dange als could kick with deadly foree, the earth wa they knew, stalked sniners i many guises. Obstinate aniKILLING FOR COAL uustable, yroundssaier might flood mine workings at any diwe, aud toxic sub: stances filled the ar. weworkers feared fire more + mining companies and i than any other danger: Falls ofvock aud coal actually killed and injured more mea, bu these accidents stack miners down one or two at a time, Fires and swine explosions, by contrast killed mineworkers by the dozens. Fires take place wher dhce elements come together: oxygen, fel and an ignition source, Mine workscapes possessed all dee in abundance. Ventila- tion and i ulation systens brought oxygen underground. Fuel was ev ‘exywhere—coal’ ability to burn, afer ll, was what inpelled men to burrow deep into those ancient deposits. Mine work, le, filled the air with dust and explosive gases, while introducing powder, timber, hay, aud other flanunable macerials into the collieries. Only slightly less ubiquitous were ig- nidon sources: miners’ lams, powder squibs, electie sparks, matches, py- sites capable of bursting spontaneously into flames on exposure to oxygen, and so forth. Er cased by a rock that burned: filled with flanuuable imple- iments and by-products of mine labor; well-supplied with oxygens and rife ‘with more ariggers than a Wild West Show, the Colorado coal mines were Det prin | than most places to catch fire. When the latent possibility of disaster became a reality, nine explosions revealed both the sinews of brav- ery and solidarigy that braced mining communities, and the grievances that fucled tnineworkers’discoment, Comunon fires occurred when solid substances, sueh as coal or hay, sol «lered or flamed. Ln November 1910, for instance, a fire broke out in the wi- dlerground stables of the Bear Guleh Mine, One ian succumbed to th “dense suioke,” but a heroie rescue effort spared 173 others “by the warrow= est of margins.” As this ease shows, underground blazes posed 2 real danger, yeta second kine of fre could prove far deadlien’* Explosions resulted when fire, oxygen, and an ignition source combined ina confined space. Contained between earthen walls, roof, and floor, explo: sious roared dhrough mine workseapes much the way gunpowder blasts ‘through the barrel ofa gun, Firedamp and coal dust dirown into dhe mine ar ‘caught fire, then burst outward with incredible foree, chain reac tions that released extraordinary amounts of energy An 1888 explosion at Starkville, for example, “dislodgfing] the massive entry timber ing.in both directions like saplings belove a tornado.” catapulted logs so large Dying with Their Boots On grown man could hardly wrap his arms around chen the distance of more than thiee football fields. On ground at the time, “Had there been five hundred," state wine Neil believed Back colliery explosion was distin; each had its own saga of death, hp wo unfortenat working under wspector Me jor one could I 1c possibly lived after suela blast. heroism, aud malfeasance, Most disasters begat when a miner's kin oF « inisfited blast of powder (known as a blowiout shot in colliers’ path iguited ficedamp or coal dust. The resulting explosions behaved chaoticully we) Some simply knocked men dows; of ripped their bodies apart. Some drove particles of coal dust deep into mine tinbers andl human flesh; others inllicted no visible ravages on the meu they killed. Some wrecked timbers and dislodged rock; others left litte wace. Extending their “deathly inll 1 one state mine inspector described the 1904 Tercio disaster, toe ‘ery point in the workings,” explosions exhausted the available supply of oxy ‘gen and fuel within seconds.” Once a blast lad run its course, survivors began to struggle with its alier~ math, Usually sou but their roubles were hardly over. As deadly aterdamp seeped through the workings, blast survivors faced wrenching decisions: Should they stay in number among the mine workforce evaded instant death their place co await rescuers or retreat wo a safer place to erect a barricade aginst afierdaump? Should they abandon injured comrades and workmen who succumbed to afierdamp, or jeopardize their own safety by staying with their fellows? And which of the amuy routes from their room to the mine portal was the niost promising way to safety? Panie reigned outside as well as in. Explosions could offen be heard for miles around. The blast that he and his friends had“ Ol ofthe men underground, townspeople, and sometimes tourists hastened 1 ner Harry Bailey claimed of the booting Sunshine never heard anything ofthat kind before ers and colliers frow neighboring properties, wives and children the mine workings. The “wildest confusion” prevailed. The hopes of this ansious, wailing evowd were lifted aul dashed with every piece of news. «v= ‘The reseue effort began immediately, for there was no time to lose. Laval collicts and mine managers arrived first, soon joined by men who had cote it i ‘on foot or had boarded special trains fiom neighboring mines. After fortisKILLING FOR COAL parties led by mine bosses, nine superintendents, and sometimes state of cials, rescuers began to penetrate the choked depths ofthe aul shattered timbers usually blocked their way. Crumbling roofs and caving walls dhreatened to fill a any time, while invisible, generally odorless aier- ine, Fallen earth daiup crept through the tunnels and rooms. lu the sgoos crews of colliers rained i ledicated, mniquues joined these parties; aviving i w cars owned by Golorido Fuel and Iron or, after 1910, by the U.S. Bu- teat of Mines, they donned! special breathing apparatus that enabled then to reach areas where unaided rescuers would have die Rescue work was hard, heroic, and dangerous. Afierdanp posed the great- est threat, sneaking up on erews with litle war 1g Those who regained their senses after suceunnbing to carbon monoxide abnost invariably rejoined the rescue effort, Au unfortunate few never recovered, having sacrificed their lives in trying to fulfill perhaps the most sacred obligation of their craft: to aid 2 fellow miiner in need. Moreover, colliers knew many stories about men sur- lor a week or more afier explosions, Lagi 1g themselves in their comrades’ boots, rescuers worked around the clock. Picking their way through smoky air, fallen rock, splintered timbers, aud other debris, they searched for their conmrades, improvising air courses as they worked, while vigilntly watching for signsofafterdamp, Crew afer crew took its turn, pushed forward systematiclly but with great urgency, relenting only when it could do 10 more; then another plunged into the darkaess, the mood of the crowd outside changing with every advance and retreat.” Rescue shacled into recovery: The grim work of finding and extiicating te dead—often dismembered or badly decomposed because of corrosive nine gases and water—could continue for weeks; iu at least one instance covered at all. Crews gathered up the remains their comrades with stoie resolve. As one old niiner put it, “Well, i makes you feel bad bat what you going to do, that’s one of those th to putup with it” Men who worked undergzound knew that death eame with the wgs that we got Rescuers caried injured miners to the eamp doctors office or, more rarely, to the depot for wansportation to such facilites as Colorado Fuel and Iron’s state-ofthe-art Minnequa Hospital in Pueblo. ‘The dead, meanwhile, were usually placed in improvised morgues. From there, some corpses traveled by Dying with Their Boots Ou rail or sometimes steamship back to the places fiowt which they Ital coms. Family members earried most others to the front parlors of their hoes, where undertakers worked their strange magic, endowing blasted, decom posed corpses with he illusive appearance of peaceful slumber. The 1 dad photographer Fred x called him to take a fanily portrait with their dead husbavls propped up and all visible signs of their expiration disguised. A few «lays acer, survivors and the families ofthe victims joined with churches, fraternal ulunan even recalled two separate 04 when won lodges, nutual-benefit societies, miners? unions, and townspeople t0 bury ¢ dead. Only then eould the survivors begin to put their lives back together ‘The reckoning, uteanwhile, had begun along with the rescue. Blane flew fast and furious. Company officials pointed the finger atreekless workmen ur union agitators. Mineworkers, labor unious, and muckrakers blamed the cagedy on corporate carelessness. Most newspapers and public oficals pur sued a more moderate course. Coroners’ juries impaneled to determine the cause of death aso reserved judg they attributed mine disasters either 10 company negligence or to the actions ofan individual employee.” Lon occasion, though more commonly In the legal, moral, and shetorical blame gue that followed almost every blast, professional mining men, particularly the state coal mine inspector. played a prom train, the inspector—invariably a Br ent role, Rushing to the disaster site on the next available American craft collier of long expe- rience—assisted in the rescue while simultateously launching investigae tion, luspecting the underground workings in meticulous detail and taking testimony from blast survivors, supervisors, and experienced ininers fanilisr with the suicken mine, he tied to reconstruct the cause and course of the di- ly identified the mes, though, inspectors admitted that despite their best efforts, the source of au explosion nonetheless eluded their cow prehe Alter the 1896 Vulcan explosion, for instance, Inspeetor David Grittilis claimed that although he had carried out his duties saster. On many occasions, these investigations conclusi reason for the blast. So tious.” all his endeavors were fruitless, and ...no definite cause could be found." Accord ing to Griffiths, even “ifthe most competent fre boss had examined the mieKILLING FOR COAL. sxplosion,” the official “would have proclaimed the tine to be perfectly safe for“our present mode of detection of dangers 0 van B. L, Davis sounded a similar note in testimony before a coroner’s jury impancled to int- crude and the dauger Hine is much too high.” The mine for vestigate the Sunshine mine disaster: (Q. You believe trom your experience asa miner that chere fs an element casing these explosions that we know nothing about? A Bs, sewer of them. Why do you believe that? 4, Because when you can't discover what has cansed the thing, there must be something: mysterious about it ‘Phe 1go7 Primero disaster was just as much of x mystery to State Mine Lae speetor Jones. “ht all other explosions,” he asserted, “I have been able to come to a definite conclusion as to inception aud point of origin.” At Pri nero, by contrast, Jones claimed that multiple “evidenees of coulicting forces make ita most difficult task to come to any absolute couclusion as 10 the origin ofthis explosion’ Mine officials and mine inspectors often asserted that the elemental force cof fire defied not only human control, bat hunan understanding, Predict- ably ineworkers saw things differently: Even though they knew better than anyone else the complesiy and capriciousess of underground environ sents, they tended to attrigute mine disas rs not to the mysteries of nature ut t the misdeeds of corporate overlords. The companies" successful sup- pression of the ineonvenieat nuth concerning coal dust suggests that work crs had yood reason to ataibute “mysterious” explosions to employer negli- gence. AAs far back as the late 1880s, State Goal Mine Inspector MeNeil blamed, «coal dust fora deadly blast that sent three miners hurtling fifty feet out the vw Castle mine entrance. This ease and wany others in collieries world: wide notwithsta ading, Colorado Fuel and Iron and its competitors insisted that it was impossible for coal dust co explode without the prior ignition of or another aveclerant, State mine inspection reports, viting ongoing debates in the international mining literature about the volatility of coal dust, Dying with Wheir Boots On Jeut some legitimacy to the companies’ assertion. The veil of deuial parced ‘only when a seties of Uree dust explosions killed more than twy hundied men in 1910, Before @ coroners jury iimpaneled to investigate one of these 91 Y is plosious had “established hitherto unrecorded fact i under certain conditions dust may explode without the contributing ages es of gas or fire” ‘The volatility of eoal dust was, however, not an “unrecorded faet”—Jubn MeNeil had noted it more than a quarter century before—but an officially suppressed fact. The consequences of denial became all too clear when cual ‘companies, having skimped on sprinkling and other dust abatement meth ods, set the stage for disaster in the volatile atuosphere of the coking collie iesin Las Animas County, Though mineworkers recuguized the mysteries ui mine workseapes, they had ample reason to attribute mine explosions to eu ployers’ perfil. Mollyfication Mine disasters such as the Jokesville blast were significant events iu their uve right. Yet they also bi ctions linking the violence ut ced at the abiding eon the Colorado mine workscape to dhe struggles mineworkers waged on the surface above. Colliery development in southern and western Colorado tos tered the florescence ofa regional economy based on fossil fuel andrew wage-seeking migrants from adjacent valleys, neighboring states, and neatly every comer of the globe. Following these men and boys underground co the workscapes formed by their tol tea names shaped life, labor: es us much about how elemental ds- | cleath in the voalfields. It also demonstrates why contemporaries associated explosions in the uuines with eruptions of lax bor viole Not longafter the Jokerville mine blew up, stories beyan to circulate. “he a Denver Tribune correspondent reported from Crested Bute, “is full ot rumors,” and “the wildest excitement prevailed” Another journalist noted that “grave fears were entertained that at any moment an outbreak ot» ature would take place.” Colorado collie, many people worried, were beat ‘onavensging their dead."