Nothing Daunted (24 page)

It was all part of the West’s growing pains. Notwithstanding the Panic of 1893, brought on by excessive speculation in railroads, American industries and homes were voracious consumers of coal, and Sam Perry and David Moffat, who personified the symbiosis between mining and railroads, were determined to deliver it to them.
In 1902 Moffat’s railway company
was organized with the financial backing of Perry; the future senators Charles J. Hughes, Jr., and Lawrence C. Phipps; and several other Colorado tycoons. The deal included the acquisition of twenty-seven hundred acres in Routt County, in an area known to be rich in bituminous coal. Perry convinced Moffat to route the railroad through Oak Creek. In return, he named his mining venture the Moffat Coal Company, although locals referred to it as the Perry mine.

Sam Perry had grown up on a farm in Nebraska and moved to Chicago, where he worked for a jeweler on Lake Street in the business district. The store burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and Sam saved many of the goods. He married the boss’s daughter, Lottie Matson, a delicate girl who suffered from severe asthma. Sam and Lottie spent their honeymoon in Georgetown, Colorado, one of the silver mining towns that had been established during the gold rush. A few years later, they settled in Denver, believing that the dry air would improve Lottie’s health. Sam became one of the directors, then the president, of the Denver Tramway Company, which built the suburban line. He also began investing in gold and silver mines near Breckenridge and Dillon, and in the coalfields of Routt County.

By 1908 the Moffat Road had made it over the Divide and into Oak Creek. Sam Perry and his business associates also bought a flat, open property not far away that they called Phippsburg, after Sam
rejected “Perryville.” The area around Oak Creek was too narrow and steep for the railroad yards, roundhouse, and car and engine shops, so they were built in Phippsburg instead. Many believed that Oak Creek and Phippsburg were destined to be the two largest towns in Routt County. In 1908 the “townlet” of Oak Creek had fifty people;
four years later, it was bigger than Steamboat Springs
—1,033 registered voters, compared to 954. By then five other mining companies had set themselves up in the vicinity of Oak Hills.

On business trips from Denver, Perry and Moffat stayed in Moffat’s personal railcar, the
Marcia,
named after his daughter. It had an interior of cherry mahogany, oak, brass, silk, and stained glass. The floor was carpeted, and the wallpaper was embossed velvet. After an evening meal in the dining car, they walked onto the observation platform to see how the work was progressing.
A sign was erected on the road heading south
by the mine:
COAL: THE CREAM OF ROUTT COUNTY.
Local promoters referred to coal as “black gold.” The company eventually printed an advertisement
featuring a photograph of a wooden coal car loaded with blocks of coal the size of boulders
and three adorable children sitting on top, holding smaller pieces in their hands.

As in other mining towns, relations between owners and workers were tense. In addition to the physical demands, the double shifts, and the perils of the work, miners had virtually no control over their lives. From 1908 until 1912, Perry’s men took a special train from Phippsburg to Oak Hills every day and paid for their own transportation. Things got a little easier when they were moved into a cluster of cabins at Oak Hills called “the Circle.” The housing, supplied with electricity, was better than many others had.
But miners were paid in scrip
, counterfeit money printed by the company. It was good only at the expensive company store, or through the black market in town, where each mine had its own contacts. Workers for the Moffat mine took their scrip to a contact in Oak Creek, and sold it at a loss of fifty percent, or sometimes much more. The man might give a drunk miner only a dollar for scrip worth five dollars. The store or bar
owner was reimbursed by the mine’s pay clerk, who took his cut of the profit. The blacksmiths who repaired miners’ picks, shovels, and drills routinely cheated them. In order to have more productive working areas or a better mining “buddy,” some men paid their coworkers to switch places with them in the mine. That, too, caused resentment.

Accidents were an inevitable part of the job. Explosions in the mines could be caused by gas, smoke, or even coal dust. Men were injured or killed by falling rocks from the roof, especially in areas of shale or fossil remains. If the props were not properly set, the roof caved in. This happened most often near the mine face, where the mountain was rearranging itself—“taking weight”—as the coal was removed. Inexperienced workers smoked cigarettes
as they carried powder, caps, and fuses
. Efforts were made to institute safer procedures.
The Moffat Coal Company hired experienced shot-firers to place the explosives
, but it passed along the cost to the miners by charging higher prices.
Although the company was known to be “one of the most careful and considerate
” in the state, of the half-dozen explosions in Oak Hills, the worst was a dust blowout years later at the Perry mine. The dust caught fire, and flames ignited the coal, causing a chain reaction that resulted in a massive ball of fire. “When the wind and fire came out of the mine portal,
it threw cars, rails, and the tipple
clear across the draw in an arch of fire and destruction,” a Colorado inspection report noted. Five men were killed. Afterward, a list of new safety precautions was added, including, “No lights, matches, cigars, cigarettes or pipes allowed in mine.”

In 1910, when the miners in a coalfield
in Boulder County went on strike, so did the men in Routt County. In Oak Hills, workers demanded scales to weigh the coal, the right to live where they wanted, and to be free from the costs incurred by the shot-firers. The strike was quickly put down, but the United Mine Workers continued to organize, and the unrest throughout Colorado never really ended. Three years later, in September 1913, local miners joined a statewide walkout that started to the south near Trinidad and culminated in the infamous Ludlow Massacre. Twenty people were killed there,
including eleven children, when the National Guard opened fire. Miners retaliated with increasing force around the state.

That fall, the Moffat Coal Company erected guard towers with spotlights and machine guns around its mines, and in November, the companies in Oak Hills reopened with nonunion men. Bob Perry was in charge at the Moffat mine, with his father’s close oversight, and an organization of mine owners hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to provide security.
Baldwin was notorious
for its brutal strike-breaking tactics, including an armor-plated car, deployed at Ludlow, that had a swiveling Gatling gun mounted in the back.

In Oak Hills, for a short time
, the striking workers fought back more or less with impunity. When a mob of miners and their wives marched to the Pinnacle mine to object to new guards installed at the tipple, the man in charge of security was stoned and clubbed, and the sheriff escorted him to the train to Denver. A few weeks before Christmas, some miners’ wives, who were shopping for presents, were denied credit at Bell Mercantile. They hauled the owner outside the store and beat him up. One night, when strikers fought scabs in the bars and on the streets, women and children were sheltered in the bank basement. The state militia was finally summoned.

The United Mine Workers had promised a strike fund for the workers, but it never materialized in Oak Hills, and the situation grew desperate that winter. Some workers left the area; others chose to return to the mines rather than starve. On March 20, 1914, two miners walking by the railroad tracks were shot to death by two nonunion men. One of those arrested for the murders was released on bond and worked as a rope rider at the Moffat mine. Not long afterward, as Paul Bonnifield put it, “a string of cars broke loose and ‘accidentally’ killed him.” In April, President Wilson sent federal troops to Colorado, and the 12th U.S. Cavalry arrived in Oak Creek. The strikers were defeated.

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On Saturday morning, Bob took Dorothy and Ros through the Moffat mine. The other women elected to stay home, but the teachers, who understood that he had a complex and demanding job, were interested to learn more about his work. He had wanted to be a doctor, but Sam needed him to help run the coal company. Bob knew that his years at Columbia, his comfortable cabin, his good clothes, his Dodge, and the gifts he liked to bestow upon the teachers would not have been possible without Sam’s perspicacity and hardheadedness. The only son, he never seriously thought about defying his father.

Bob was good at his job, and although he was firmly anti-union, he often listened to the complaints of one of his young employees on this volatile subject, explaining, “
First we have to think about production
.” The success of the Moffat mine, the most modern in Colorado, was critical. If it shut down, so would the others in the Yampa coalfields. Moreover, the Moffat Road depended on the regular transport of coal. If the railroad was abandoned, most of the businesses in northwestern Colorado would close, settlement would stop, and towns would die.

Bob showed Ros and Dorothy how the coal was mined.
They passed the shower rooms, the mess hall, and the mine office
where he worked and where the miners stopped each morning to take their numbered metal chips from a board on the wall. They put their chips on a hook fastened to their lunch buckets, or to the front of their leather belts. Not far from the mine portal was the powder room, where explosives were kept. It was a concrete-lined hole dug into the mountain and hung with black powder pellets. Secured with a steel door, the room was built far enough away that if there was a fire or gas or dust explosion in the mine, it wouldn’t reach the powder supply.

The mine had three pits. At its main entrance, an electric hoisting plant ran the cable system for the mine cars, although mules were still used to take the coal to the main haulage way. As the women walked into the narrow entrance, the tunnel dropped steeply. Bob
told them that there were fifteen miles of tunnels connected to “rooms” under the hills. Three hundred miners worked there, in helmets that resembled hard leather baseball caps, with a carbide lamp burning on the bill. They also wore long underwear, to keep warm and to prevent coal dust from settling on the unexposed parts of their bodies.

Miners considered it bad luck for women to go into mines, but Bob brushed aside the superstition. Dorothy and Ros, in their own helmets, noticed the eerie shadows that the lamplight made on the tunnel walls. “We saw all the different processes, stumbled along in those dark, wet chasms with our flickering lights,” Ros wrote, “and marveled at the thought of it all. I never appreciated ‘coal’ before.” A fan forced the stale air out of the ventilation shafts, but as they descended, it became increasingly claustrophobic. Coal dust hung in the air, and there was a musty smell of standing water. The roof was reinforced with six-foot wooden props, which creaked under the weight of the mountain. The tracks made by rats were visible in the dust.

Each day the men went to work with their pickaxes and shovels. If there were pools of water, they pumped it out. Miners, two to each room, loaded the loose coal into the cars, then hung a chip on the cars they had filled. The rope rider pulled them to the surface, where the check-weighman measured them and recorded the weight and car numbers. The chips were then returned to the board, and the weighman transported the cars to the tipple. There were some details that Bob left out of his account. The miners always checked their tonnage and counted the number of chips to be sure that all of their cars had been weighed. On the trip to the weighman, the rope rider occasionally “lost” or changed a number. Men were paid by the ton, but if any ordinary rock—called bone—found its way into a car, the miner wasn’t paid for that load. If a man didn’t return at the end of the day or was found dead in the mine, he was identified by his numbered chip.

At the end of their shift, workers cut out a space underneath the
coal. The goal was to avoid “shooting on the solid,” which crushed the coal into slack; they wanted valuable lump and nut coal. Then they drilled holes for the explosives and placed the charges. Only the shot-firer remained, to be sure the charges were tamped in and the fuse was the right length. Mine explosions were caused by a shot “blowing out” or going off at the wrong time. The shot-firer lit the powder and “shot the coal down,” breaking it up into chunks to be loaded into cars the next day.

As the women walked back to the surface of the earth, Ros was struck by the enormity of the enterprise—a feeling reinforced that afternoon when they gamely accompanied Bob four miles, behind two mules in a steady rain, to Phippsburg, where the roundhouse and other engine and car-repair buildings had just been finished. Sam Perry had spent heavily on the improvements, and it was an impressive sight—no better way, Bob must have felt, to show the woman he loved the role the Perrys were playing in the future of the West. Dorothy, though, was shaken by her experience in the mine. She wrote afterward, “I am glad to have done it, for I never need to go through another. I was scared & didn’t like it.”

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It poured throughout Saturday—an equinoctial event, Perry told them. The women all slept late both mornings, while their imperturbable host started the fire and made breakfast. His housekeeper was sick, so Charlotte and Portia, who were used to cooking for large groups at camp, took over the other meals. Dorothy and Ros helped with the dishes. The food was magnificent, they said: grouse for breakfast, and for dinner, duck and ice cream.

Before they left on Sunday, it stopped raining, and Ros took a picture of Bob leaning casually against the back-porch rail with one of his Airedales. The downpour had turned the rough roads into a slurry of mud. Perry put chains on the tires, and they started home—six women squeezed into his little car. Dorothy was glad that for once
she and Ros hadn’t overpacked; they had just put a change of clothes into their knitting bags. The chains didn’t make much difference, and after skidding in the mud for several miles, they returned to the Oak Creek depot and took the train. Charlotte and Portia got off at Steamboat Springs, while the others continued on to Hayden. The Harrisons had invited Dot and Anne to stay with them for the rest of their visit.