In a Mucker's Camp in Alabama[ToList]
Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the South[ToList]
We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore. The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted out.
Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and drew what he needed—overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the loan.
As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us in Russian, Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was one of the excitements of camp life—to inspect and classify the newcomers.
One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the last act of the night.
As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows, four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the camp—never to return.
The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to light his pipe; then he dresses.