Only in recent years has the mountaineer begun to forsake his cove,
however unproductive the earth may be, for the valley and public works.
Indeed mountain folk long looked down on their own who sought employment
at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any
employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being
an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise
none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark
Wellford's family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to
quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills.
"There's a good mine there, pays good money, and there's a good mine
boss on the job," so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary
figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was
smudged with coal dust. A miner's lamp still flickered on his grimy cap.
He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder
hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At
his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her
arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that
dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There
was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a
hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might
have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet
the rounded arms--her sleeves were rolled to the elbow--looked youthful.
Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens.
"What'd you load today?" the younger asked after casual greetings.
"'Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back," Clate complained,
shifting the dinner pail and the baby. "Always something to hold a man
back." "I'm figuring on going to Georgia," the young lad sounded
hopeful. "Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any
day." He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join
them.
"Come on, Phoebe!" Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, "get a
mosey on you. I'm hongry. And 'ginst you throw a snack of grub together
it'll be bedtime. An' before you know it, it's time to get up and hit
for the hill again." He plodded on up the winding path to a row of
shacks. His little family followed.
The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the
mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough
posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile
chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted,
though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or
brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But
the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or
grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage
gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods
come high at the company's commissary.
A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day
after day. When Phoebe--you'd never have known her for the pretty girl
she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge--rubbed out a washing on the
washboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door
to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she
rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it
dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung?
Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite
hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and
carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no
sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up.
"What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on
the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having
heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to meet you."
"Don't try to get fresh," the fellow scowled. "Don't you know this
ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle
horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!"
She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in
haste.
There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did
sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in.
Clate Wellford's was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to
kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other
things to be taken out of date's pay envelope before it reached him;
there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.
"None of my folks have been sick. We've never even set eyes on the
doctor," Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.
"What of it?" the script clerk replied. "You'd be running quick enough
for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met
with an accident, wouldn't you? The doctor's got to live same as the
rest of us."
So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he'd vent his
spleen upon his wife. "You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht
I'd never married. A man can't get nowheres with a wife and young ones
on his hands." And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women,
offered no word of argument.
When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up
output and earnings they didn't take time to make a tour of inspection
of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of
miners.
Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other
mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange
work-a-day of the mining camp.
Back on Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to
drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he'd carried buckets full of
half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a
drop of cow's milk to drink. You got it in cans--thick, condensed,
sickeningly sweet. Couldn't fool the children, not even when you thinned
it with water. "It don't taste like Bossy's milk," the youngsters shoved
it away.
What was more, back on Shoal's Fork there was always fried chicken in
the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose,
through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date's
folks couldn't go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn,
and cabbage. He'd never known a time when there were not potatoes and
turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for
granted. But here in the coal camp you could walk the full length of the
place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never
see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there
was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.
"That's company-owned!" the boss growled at Clate that time he was
trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.
"I've got my own onion sets," Clate tried to explain. "My folks fetched
'em down."
"Who cares?" the company boss snarled. "What you reckon the company's
running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions--ready
to eat."
So the miner didn't set out an onion bed.
Again, Clate found some old warped planks outside the drift mouth of the
mine; he brought them home and was building a pigpen. The mine boss came
charging down upon him.
"What you doing with the company's planks?"
The frightened Clate tried to explain that he had supposed the wood
thrown aside was useless and that he was making ready for the young
shoat his folks meant to bring him.
"What you suppose the company would do if every miner packed off planks
and posts that he happens to see laying around?" he eyed Clate
suspiciously. "We'd soon shut down, that's what would happen. And as for
meat. You can buy sow-belly and bologna at the commissary." There was
something more. "If you want to keep out of trouble and don't want a
couple bucks taken out of your pay, you better get them planks and posts
back where you found them!"
The miner's shack was perched on such high stilts that the wind whistled
underneath the floor until it felt like ice to the bare feet of the
children. It took a lot of coal in the grate and the kitchen stove to
keep the place halfway warm. The children were sick all through the
winter. Now and then the company doctor stopped in on his rounds of the
coal camp to leave calomel and quinine.
With the birth of her last baby, Clate's wife got down with a bealed
breast after she had been up and about for a week. "I'm bound to hire
someone," Clate told his wife. So he hired Liz Elswick to come and do
the cooking, washing, and ironing and to look after the children.
Out on Shoal's Fork neighbor women came eagerly to help each other in
case of sickness.
Though it was not much they had to pay Liz--she took it out in trade at
the store, the makings of a calico dress, a pair of shoes--it was a
hardship on the Wellfords. For Liz Elswick, like other women in a coal
camp, never having handled real money, knew little of cost. Nor did she
know how to supply the simple needs of the family. Phoebe was too ill to
offer a word of advice, poor though it would have been. So, before long,
Clate was behind with his store bill. Or to put it the other way around,
for the company always took theirs first, Clate had nothing left in his
pay envelope on payday.
Then, when he might have had a few dollars coming, something else would
happen: shoes would be worn out, he'd have to buy new ones for the
children couldn't go barefoot in the winter. He himself had to wear
heavy boots in the mine in order to work at all, for Clate had to stand
in water most of the time when he picked or loaded. Another time the
house caught fire and burned up their beds, chairs, everything. Even
though he had steady work that month he had to sell his time to the
script clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the
mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife
had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a
billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a
permanent.
"Why don't you buy new furniture at the commissary?" the script clerk
wanted to know of Clate. "There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables.
Get them on time."
"I can't afford it," Clate said honestly.
So, after much bickering, the company's script clerk offered to give the
miner script for his time.
"My buddy has to have cash money," Clate argued. "He's quitting. Going
back to his folks over in Ohio."
Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents
for a dollar.
"What you think I'm accommodating you for?" the company's script clerk
wanted to know. "I'm not out for my health. Course if you don't want to
take it"--he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate--"you
don't have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their
time."
There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have
the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.
Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always
overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an
empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was
company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he'd never be paid out.
Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word
redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of
unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the
Deep South, the Okie of the West.
How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the
creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!
In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments.
They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow
path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was
black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud
holes.
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.
That was yesterday. Today there are model mining towns throughout the
coal fields. Holden in West Virginia even has swimming pools and modern
cottages for its miners. A miner can work on the side too--it is not
uncommon to see signs over his cottage or barn door reading, "Painting
and Paper Hanging," "Decorating." There are thrifty vegetable gardens,
and miners' wives vie with each other in the product of their flower
gardens. Holden is sometimes called the Model Mining Town of America. It
has welcomed visitors from all over the land.
In Harlan, Kentucky, once the center of many stormy battles between
miners and operators, the county crowned a Coal Queen on August 23,
1941, commemorating the first shipment of coal thirty years previously.
The queen, a pretty eighteen-year-old high school girl, won the title
from six other contestants, enthroned on a replica of the railroad car
which hauled out the county's first coal. As part of the celebration a
$1500 public drinking fountain was dedicated and speakers hailed the
economic progress of Harlan County since 1911. Each day 1200 railroad
cars loaded with coal leave the county.
It was an all-day program being sponsored by the Harlan Mining Institute
safety organization in co-operation with the County Coal Operators
Association.
Not only were mining officials present from many points but politicians
as well were present, including Mrs. Herbert C. Cawood, Republican
nominee for sheriff, a sister of the crowned coal queen.