Coal and the coal mines

by Homer Greene

SLATE PICKERS AT WORK.

When night comes no laborer is more rejoiced at leaving his task than is the breaker boy. One can see his eyes shine and his white teeth gleam as he starts out into the open air, while all else, hands, face, clothing, are thickly covered with coal dust, are black and unrecognizable. But he is happy because his day’s work is done and he is free, for a few hours at least, from the tyranny of the “cracker boss.” For, in the estimation of the picker boys, the cracker boss is indeed the most tyrannical of masters. How else could they regard a man whose sole duty it is to be constantly in their midst, to keep them at their tasks, to urge them to greater zeal and care, to repress all boyish freaks, to rule over them almost literally with a rod of iron? But, alas! the best commentary on the severity of his government is that it is necessary.

As has already been said, the day is evidently not far distant when the work which the breaker boy now does will be performed almost wholly by machinery. And this will be not alone because the machine does its work better, more surely, more economically, than the breaker boy has done his, but it will be also because the requisite number of boys for breaker work will not be obtainable. Even now it is more than difficult to keep the ranks of the slate pickers full. Parents in the coal regions of to-day have too much regard for the health, the comfort, the future welfare of their children, to send them generally to such grinding tasks as these. This is one of the signs of that advancing civilization which has already lifted girls and women from this, for them, exhausting and degrading labor at the collieries; which is lessening, one by one, the hardships of the boys who still toil there; which, it is fondly hoped, will in the course of time give to all children the quiet of the school-room, the freedom of the play-ground, and the task that love sets, in place of that irksome toil that stunts the body and dwarfs the soul. It is now mainly from the homes of the very poor that the child-workers at the collieries are recruited, and the scant wages that they earn may serve to keep bread in the mouths of the younger children of their households and clothing on their own backs.

Accidents to boys employed at the mines are of frequent occurrence. Scarcely a day passes but the tender flesh of some poor little fellow is cut or bruised, or his bones, twisted and broken. It is only the more serious of these accidents that reach the notice of the mine inspector and are returned in his annual report. Yet, to the humanitarian and the lover of children, these annual returns tell a sad story. The mine inspector’s reports for 1887 show that in the anthracite region alone during that year eighteen boys fifteen years of age and under were killed while fulfilling the duties of their employment in and about the coal mines, and that seventy-three others were seriously injured, many of them doubtless maimed for life. These figures tell their own story of sorrow and of suffering.

Yet with all their hardships it cannot be said that the boys who work in the collieries are wholly unhappy. It is difficult, indeed, to so limit, confine, and gird down a boy that he will not snatch some enjoyment from his life; and these boys seek to get much.

One who has been long accustomed to them can generally tell the nature of their several occupations by the way in which they try to amuse themselves. The driver boys are inclined to be rude and boisterous in their fun, free and impertinent in their manner, and chafe greatly under restraint. The slate pickers, confined all day at their tasks, with no opportunity for sport of any kind, are inclined to bubble over when night and freedom come, but, as a rule, they are too tired to display more than a passing effort at jocularity. Door boys are quiet and contemplative. Sitting so long alone in the darkness they become thoughtful, sober, sometimes melancholy. They go silently to their homes when they leave the mine; they do not stop to play tricks or to joke with their fellows; they do not run, nor sing, nor whistle. Darkness and silence are always depressing, and so much of it in these young lives cannot help but sadden without sweetening them. We shall never see, in America, those horrors of child slavery that drew so passionate a protest from the great-hearted Mrs. Browning, but certainly, looking at the progress already made, it is not too much to hope for that the day will come when no child’s hand shall ever again be soiled by the labor of the mine.

It will be a fitting close to this chapter, and will be an act of justice to the memory of a brave and heroic boy, to relate the story of Martin Crahan’s sacrifice at the time of the disaster at the West Pittston shaft. Martin was a driver boy, of humble parentage, poor and unlearned. He was in the mine when the fire in the breaker broke out, and he ran, with others, to the foot of the shaft. But just as he was about to step on the carriage that would have taken him in safety to the surface he bethought him of the men on the other side of the shaft, who might not have heard of the fire, and his brave heart prompted him to go to them with the alarm. He asked another boy to go with him, but that boy refused. He did not stop to parley; he started at once alone. But while he ran through the dark passage on his errand of mercy, the carriage went speeding, for the last time, up the burning shaft. He gave the alarm and returned, in breathless haste, with those whom he had sought; but it was too late, the cage had already fallen. When the party was driven away from the foot of the shaft by the smoke and the gas, he, in some unexplained way, became separated from the rest, and wandered off alone. The next day a rescuing party found him in the mine-stable, dead. He lay there beside the body of his mule. Deprived of the presence of human beings in the hours of that dreadful night, he had sought the company of the beast that had long been his companion in daily labor—and they died together.

But he had thought of those who were dear to him, for on a rough board near by he had written with chalk the name of his father and of his mother, and of a little cousin who had been named for him. He was only twelve years old when he died, but the title of hero was never more fairly earned than it was by him.