Coal and the coal mines

by Homer Greene

One afternoon I chanced to be in a certain mine in the Wyoming district, in company with the fire boss. We were standing in a passage that led to one of these mule ways. In the distance we heard a clattering of hoofs, growing louder as it came nearer, and, as we stepped aside, a mule went dashing by with a boy lying close on his back, the flame from the little lamp in the boy’s cap just a tiny backward streak of blue that gave no light. They had appeared from the intense darkness and had disappeared into it again almost while one could draw a breath. I looked at the fire boss inquiringly.

“Oh! that’s all right,” he said, “they’ve got through work and they’re going out, and the mule is in just as much of a hurry as the boy is.”

“But the danger,” I suggested, “of racing at such speed through narrow, winding passages, in almost total darkness!”

“Oh!” he replied, “that beast knows the way out just as well as I do, and he can find it as easy as if he could see every inch of it, and I don’t know but what he can. Anyway the boy ain’t afraid if the mule ain’t.”

In deep mines, as has already been said, it is customary to build stables not far from the foot of the shaft, and to keep the mules there except when for any reason there is a long suspension of work. At many mines, however, the greater convenience of having the stables on the surface induces the operators to have the mules hoisted from the shaft every night and taken down every morning. They step on the carriage very demurely, and ascend or descend without making trouble. They are especially glad to go up to their stables at night. Where mules are fed in the mine, and especially in those mines that have stables in them, rats are usually found. How they get down a shaft is a mystery. The common explanation is that they go with the hay. But they take up their quarters in the mine, live, thrive, increase rapidly, and grow to an enormous size. They are much like the wharf rats that infest the wharves of great cities, both in size and ugliness. They are very bold and aggressive, and when attacked will turn on their enemy, whether man or beast, and fight to the death. There is a superstition among miners to the effect that when the rats leave a mine some great disaster is about to take place in it; probably an extensive fall. Rats are hardly to be credited, however, with an instinct that would lead them to forecast such an event with more certainty than human experience and skill can do.

But it is not improbable that the driver boy and his mule will be superseded, at no distant day, by electricity. In one instance at least this new motive power has already been put into use. This is at the Lykens Valley Colliery of the Lykens Valley Coal Company, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.

The duty of an outside driver boy is to take the loaded cars from the head of the shaft or slope to the breaker, and to bring the empty ones back; his work being all done in the open air. Of late this service, especially where the distance is considerable, is performed by a small locomotive, which draws trains of as many cars as can well be held together. The wages paid to inside driver boys by the Pennsylvania Coal Company in 1888 were from one dollar to one dollar and ten cents a day, and to outside driver boys eighty-eight cents a day.

The door boys are usually younger and smaller than the driver boys, and though their duty is not so laborious as that of the latter class, it is far more monotonous and tiresome. The door boy must be at his post when the first trip goes in in the morning, and must remain there till the last one comes out at night. He is alone all day, save when other boys and men pass back and forth through his door, and he has but little opportunity for companionship. He fashions for himself a rude bench to sit on; sometimes he has a rope or other contrivance attached to his door by which he can open it without rising; but usually he is glad to move about a little to break the monotony of his task. There is little he can do to entertain himself, except perhaps to whittle. He seldom tries to read; indeed, the light given forth by a miner’s lamp is too feeble to read by. In rare cases the door boy extinguishes his light, on the score of economy, and sits in darkness, performing his duties by the light of the lamps of those who pass. But there are few who can endure this. It is hard enough to bear the oppressive silence that settles down on the neighborhood when no cars are passing; if darkness be added to this the strain becomes too great, the effect too depressing, a child cannot bear it. The wages of the door boy are about sixty-five cents per day.

Although the duties of the breaker boy or slate picker are more laborious and more monotonous than those of either driver boy or door tender, he does not receive so high a rate of wages as either of them. His daily compensation is only from fifty to sixty-five cents, and he works ten hours a day. At seven o’clock in the morning he must have climbed the dark and dusty stairway to the screen room, and taken his place on the little bench across the long shute. The whistle screams, the ponderous machinery is set in motion, the iron-teethed rollers begin to revolve heavily, crunching the big lumps of coal as they turn, the deafening noise breaks forth, and then the black, shallow streams of broken coal start on their journey down the iron-sheathed shutes, to be screened and cleaned, and picked and loaded.

At first glance it would not seem to be a difficult task to pick slate, but there are several things to be taken into consideration before a judgment can properly be made up in the matter. To begin with, the work is confining and monotonous. The boy must sit on his bench all day, bending over constantly to look down at the coal that is passing beneath him. His tender hands must become toughened by long and harsh contact with sharp pieces of slate and coal, and after many cuts and bruises have left marks and scars on them for a lifetime. He must breathe an atmosphere thick with the dust of coal, so thick that one can barely see across the screen room when the boys are sitting at their tasks. It is no wonder that a person long subjected to the irritating presence of this dust in his bronchial tubes and on his lungs is liable to suffer from the disease known as “miner’s consumption.” In the hot days of summer the screen-room is a stifling place. The sun pours its rays upon the broad, sloping roof of the breaker, just overhead; the dust-laden atmosphere is never cleared or freshened by so much as a breath of pure sweet air, and the very thought of green fields and blossoming flowers and the swaying branches of trees renders the task here to be performed more burdensome. Yet even this is not so bad as it is to work here in the cold days of winter. It is almost impossible to heat satisfactorily by any ordinary method so rambling a structure as a breaker necessarily is, and it is quite impossible to divide the portion devoted to screening and picking into closed rooms. The screen-rooms are, therefore, always cold. Stoves are often set up in them, but they radiate heat through only a limited space, and cannot be said to make the room warm. Notwithstanding the presence of stoves, the boys on the benches shiver at their tasks, and pick slate with numb fingers, and suffer from the extreme cold through many a winter day. But science and the progress of ideas are coming to their aid. In some breakers, recently erected, steam-heating pipes have been introduced into the screen-rooms with great success; the warmth and comfort given by them to the little workers is beyond measurement. Fans have been put into the breakers, also, to collect and carry away the dust and keep the air of the picking-room clean and fresh, and electric lamps have been swung from the beams to be lighted in the early mornings and late afternoons, that the young toilers may see to do their work. Indeed, such improvements as these pass beyond the domain of science and progress into that of humanitarianism.