Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don’t they move away?
If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out.
He stays on defeated and discouraged.
If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist.
But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. “They’re all the same. Might as well stay where you are.”
Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes.
Rarely was the voice of the miner’s wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing—but not an ancient ballad. Rather it was a rakish song picked up from drummers coming through the mining camps who sold their inferior wares to the commissary manager.
There was a church propped up on the hillside. But meeting usually broke up with the arrest of some of the young fellows who didn’t try hard enough to suppress a laugh when the camp harlot went to the mourner’s bench, or when some old creature too deaf to hear a word the preacher said went hobbling toward the front. Sometimes an older miner, who for the sheer joy of expressing a long-pent-up feeling, shouted “Praise the Lord!”, was dragged out by a deputy sheriff, along with the young bloods, on a charge of disturbing religious worship.
The limb of the law usually knew who had a few dollars left from the week’s pay. The law knew too that a miner preferred to pay a fine rather than lie in jail and lose time on the job next day.
There was no pleasant diversion around the coal camp for womenfolk and children, no happy gatherings such as the play party, a quilting, an old-time square dance. In their drab surroundings, little wonder men and women grew old before their time.