THE BOY WORKERS AT THE MINES.
In the coal mines of the United States boys are employed at two kinds
of labor: to attend the doors on the traveling roads, and to drive the
mules. This is known as inside work. Their outside work consists in
picking slate at the breaker, and in driving the mules that draw mine
cars on the surface. No one of these different kinds of employment is
such as to overtax the physical strength of boys of a proper age, but
they are all confining, some are dangerous, and some are laborious. Yet
the system of child labor in the coal mines of America has never been
comparable to that which was formerly in vogue in Great Britain. The
British “Coal Mines Regulation Act” of 1872 remedied the then existing
evils to a considerable extent; but the hardships still to be endured
by children in the British mines are greater than those which their
American brothers must suffer. The act of 1872, just referred to,
provides that boys under ten years of age shall not be employed under
ground, and that boys between ten and twelve years of age shall be
allowed to work only in thin mines. It is the duty of these children
to push the cars, or trams as they are called, from the working faces
to the main road and back. Boys who are thus employed are called
“hurriers” or “putters.” They are often obliged to crawl on their hands
and knees, pushing the car ahead of them, because the roof of the
excavation is so low. That is why boys who are so young are allowed
to work here; because, being small, they can the more readily crawl
through the passages cut in these thin seams, which often do not have a
vertical measurement of more than from twenty to twenty-eight inches.
The act of 1872 forbids the employment of females in the British mines;
but formerly not only boys but girls and women also worked underground.
There was then no restriction as to age, and girls were sent into the
mines to labor at an earlier age than were boys, because they were
credited with being smarter and more obedient. It was common to find
children of both sexes not more than six years old working underground;
and girls of five years were employed at the same tasks as boys of six
or eight. They took the coal from the working faces in the thin mines
to the foot of the pit. Sometimes they carried it, sometimes they drew
it in little carts. The older children and young women had a sort of
sledge, called a “corve,” on which they dragged the coal, but sometimes
they preferred to carry it in baskets on their backs. They were called
“pannier women.” The girls tucked their hair up under their caps,
dressed like their brothers, and in the darkness of the mine could
scarcely be distinguished from boys. And the girls and boys not only
dressed alike, but worked alike, lived alike, and were treated alike at
their tasks, and that treatment was rough and harsh at the very best.
As the girls grew they were given harder work to do. On one occasion
Mr. William Hunter, the mine foreman at Ormiston Colliery said that
in the mines women always did the lifting or heavy part of the work,
and that neither they nor the children were treated like human beings.
“Females,” he said, “submit to work in places in which no man nor lad
could be got to labor. They work on bad roads, up to their knees in
water, and bent nearly double. The consequence of this is that they are
attacked with disease, drag out a miserable existence, or are brought
prematurely to the grave.” Says Robert Bold, the eminent miner: “In
surveying the workings of an extensive colliery underground a married
woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals,
trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from
sinking under her. On coming up she said in a plaintive, melancholy
voice: ‘Oh, sir! this is sore, sore, sore work. I would to God that the
first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back and none ever
tried it again.’”
One cannot read of such things as these, of a slavery that condemned
even the babes to a life of wretched toil in the blackness of the
mines, and then wonder that the great heart of Mrs. Browning should
have been wrenched by the contemplation of such sorrow until she gave
voice to her feeling in that most pathetic and wonderful of all her
poems, “The Cry of the Children.”
“Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers!
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in their nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blooming toward the west.
But the young, young children, O my brothers!
They are weeping bitterly;
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
“‘For, oh!’ say the children, ‘we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces trying to go,
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For all day we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal dark underground,
Or all day we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories round and round.’
“‘How long,’ they say, ‘how long, O cruel nation!
Will you stand to move the world on a child’s heart,
Stifle down, with a mailed heel, its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold heaper!
And your purple shows your path;
But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath.’”
In the United States neither girls nor women have ever been employed
in or about the mines. The legislative prohibition of such employment,
enacted in Pennsylvania in 1885, was therefore unnecessary but not
inappropriate.
The general mine law of Pennsylvania of 1870, which was the first to
limit the employment of boys in the mines according to their age, fixed
twelve years as the age under which a boy might not work underground;
but maintained silence as to the age at which he might work at a
colliery outside. This provision was amended and enlarged by the act of
1885, which prohibited the employment of boys under fourteen years of
age inside the mines, and of boys under twelve years of age in or about
the outside structures or workings of a colliery.
The duties of a driver boy are more laborious than those of a
door-tender, but less monotonous and tiresome than those of a slate
picker or breaker-boy. When the mules are kept in the mines night
and day, as they frequently are in deep workings, the driver must
go down the shaft before seven o’clock, get his mule from the mine
stable, bring him to the foot of the shaft, and hitch him to a trip
of empty cars. He usually takes in to the working faces four empty
cars and brings out four loaded ones. When he is ready to start in
with his trip, he climbs into the forward car, cracks his whip about
the beast’s head, and goes off shouting. His whip is a long, braided
leather lash, attached to a short stout stick for a handle. He may
have a journey of a mile or more before reaching the foot of the
first chamber he is to supply; but when he comes to it he unfastens
the first car from the others and drives the mule up the chamber with
it, leaving it at a convenient distance from the face. He continues
this process at each of the chambers in succession, until his supply
of empty cars is exhausted. At the foot of the last chamber which
he visits he finds a loaded car to which he attaches his mule, and
picking up other loaded cars on his way back, he makes up his return
trip, and is soon on the long, unbroken journey to the shaft. There
are sidings at intervals along the heading, where trips going in the
opposite direction are met and passed, and where there is opportunity
to stop for a moment and talk with or chaff some other driver boy.
If there be a plane on the main road, either ascending or descending
from the first level, two sets of driver boys and mules are necessary,
one set to draw cars between the breasts and the plane, and the other
set to draw them between the plane and the shaft. Of course, in steep
pitching seams, all cars are left at the foot of the chamber and are
loaded there. There are two dangers to which driver boys are chiefly
subjected; one is that of being crushed between cars, or between cars
and pillars or props, and the other is that of being kicked or bitten
by vicious mules. The boy must not only learn to drive, but he must
learn to govern his beast and keep out of harm’s way. He is generally
sufficiently skillful and agile to do this, but it is not unusual to
read of severe injuries to boys, given by kicking, bucking, or biting
mules.
If the mine in which the boy works is entered by drift or tunnel,
his duties lie partly outside of it, since he must bring every trip
of cars not only to the mouth of the opening but to the breaker or
other dumping place, which may be located at a considerable distance
from the entrance to the mine. So that for a greater or less number
of times each day he has from ten minutes to half an hour in the open
air. In the summer time, when the weather is pleasant, this occasional
glimpse of out-of-doors is very gratifying to him. He likes to be in
the sunlight, to look out over the woods and fields, to feel the fresh
wind blowing in his face, and to breathe an unpolluted atmosphere. But
in the winter time, when it is cold, when the storms are raging, when
the snow and sleet are whirled savagely into his face, then the outside
portion of his trip is not pleasant. In the mine he finds a uniform
temperature of about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. To go from this, within
ten minutes, without additional clothing, into an atmosphere in which
the mercury stands at zero, and where the wind is blowing a hurricane,
is necessarily to suffer. It cannot be otherwise. So there is no
lagging outside on winter days; the driver boy delivers his loads, gets
his empty cars, and hastens back to the friendly shelter of the mine.
At such openings as these the mine stable is outside, and the boy must
go there in the morning to get his mule, and must leave him there when
he quits work at night. Sometimes, when the mining is done by shaft
or slope, there is a separate entrance for men and mules, a narrow
tunnel or slope, not too steep, and in this case, though his duties lie
entirely in the mine, the driver boy must take the mule in from the
outside stable in the morning and bring him back at night.
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.
[Illustration: 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.