By Casey Jarmes
What Cheer Coal Mines and Blackdamp
It was March 29, 1890. Five Swedish miners were sitting in the What Cheer Coal Co’s shaft No. 2, waiting for the mine cars to arrive. Without warning, a huge piece of slate broke loose above their heads, falling on two men by the name of Peter Matson and John Hoff. Matson suffered a severe scalp wound that “laid bare some five or six square inches of his cranium,” to quote the What Cheer Reporter. All things considered, he was lucky. He was able to return to work, with a few stitches. Hoff’s spine was broken by the crumbling mine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down with no hope of recovery.
I think it is unlikely that this news would have been shocking to the people of What Cheer, in 1890. Because, as I learned while reading through old newspapers last week, horrible mining accidents were routine in the late 19th Century. That article that described Matson and Hoff’s injuries even noted how similar Hoff’s injuries were to that of John Keister, a miner injured when a large piece of slate landed on him the previous February.
I could not find any of the original reporting on Keister’s accident, just his mention in the 1890 story and another mention, in a 1929 What Cheer Chronicle Paper, which listed out the big events of 1889, including Keister’s accident; 18-year-old John Trammel being crushed to death under a 13,000 pound of slate the same month; Robert Wyper being severely injured by falling slate in March; and Sam Crawford being killed while blasting at a mine in May.
Another accident happened at shaft No. 2 on Aug. 30, 1890. 42-year-old Thomas Glassell was digging out pillars in the mine with another man. His partner operated the mining machine, cutting under the face of the coal, while Glassell was down scraping out the cuttings with a shovel. Unfortunately, there was a water seam in the middle of the coal vein, slanting towards the face. The pressure from the water seam forced out a large, triangular block of coal, which landed on top of Glassell. As his partner and other miners tried to extract him from beneath the massive piece of coal, Glassell said that he was “done for.” He died thirty minutes later. Glassell had only moved to What Cheer a year and a half earlier, after his wife died in childbirth. Glassell had moved to What Cheer with his ten-year-old son and infant daughter, who were left orphaned by the mines.
On January 20, 1890, Peter Frank, a day laborer employed at the What Cheer Coal Company’s shaft No. 1, was shoveling coal when a huge piece of slate fell from the roof, striking him in the back and crushing him to the floor. Six men were drawn to Frank by his screams and were able to, with extreme difficulty, pull him out from beneath the slate. Frank died of his injuries eight hours later.
Three more minor miner accidents came within a few days, not long after Frank’s death. On Jan. 30, Job Dyer, a young man employed as a driver at the Vulcan mine, “suddenly came in contact with the business end of a mule,” to quote the What Cheer Reporter. The mule kicked out three of Dyer’s teeth, forcing him to wear his face in a sling. On Feb. 1, John Smith narrowly avoided being caught under a falling piece of slate at shaft No. 1, after the falling slate hit him so violently he was pushed out of danger. Smith was laid up for a few days. Finally, on Feb. 5, Thomas “Kerosene Tom” Capel, a driver at shaft No. 1, had his arm broken after being kicked by a mule.
On May 16, the tower and dump-room at shaft No. 1 caught fire, when 300 men were down in the mine. Fortunately, all of the miners were able to evacuate through the air-shaft, with none of them being injured. It took just 22 minutes from the alarm being sounded for the fire company to stretch out the 1,000 feet of hose needed to reach the fire. The fire company, as well as a bucket brigade who had kept the fire under control while waiting for the firefighters, put out the blaze. This fire also almost caused a train crash, after train cars were moved onto a side track, to get them away from the flames. An approaching freight engine nearly crashed into these cars, forcing both engines to reverse to avoid a collision. The trains stopped only seven feet away from each other.
These are far from the only accidents to happen at What Cheer’s mines. This is two years worth of tragedies, out of the decades the mines were open for. I could certainly revisit the topic of mine accidents, in the future. But, for now, I will end this with the saddest mine accident story I found.
On the afternoon of July 9, 1890, a group of children were playing around the open air shaft at the old Chew mine in What Cheer. Eight-year-old Roy Hawk began climbing down the fifty-foot ladder going down the mineshaft. Then, when he was halfway to the bottom, the other children watched as Hawk relaxed his hold and fell backwards. His foot caught on the ladder, leaving him dangling, unconscious. The children ran for help.
Fred Armstrong, a man who had been delivering milk in town, saw the commotion and sprinted towards the mineshaft. He climbed down the ladder to rescue Roy Hawk. But, as he reached the boy and attempted to unhook him from the ladder, Armstrong too fainted, falling off of the ladder, into the mine.
By then, several men had arrived. They realized with horror, as they watched Armstrong fall, what had knocked him out: Blackdamp, a deadly mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapor that builds up in mines. Coal, when exposed to air, absorbs oxygen and released CO2 and water vapor, filling mines with the invisible, odorless gas that asphyxiated Roy Hawk and Fred Armstrong.
A rope was tied around another volunteer, George Baldwin, who climbed down the ladder and unhooked Hawk’s leg. Then, he too fainted, dropping the boy’s body to the bottom of the shaft. Baldwin was hastily pulled to the surface and resuscitated by the others. According to the Sigourney News, several more people volunteered to go down the mine shaft, but were talked out of it, because going down would have been certain death.
Eventually, they were able to pull Hawk and Armstrong’s bodies out using grappling hooks. Hawk had been down in the blackdamp for an hour and Armstrong had been down there for 45 minutes; both were long dead by the time they were brought out of the mines. The What Cheer Reporter wrote that Armstrong, aged twenty, “was a young man of generous and noble impulses, and the possessor of many sterling qualities.” He left behind a wife and a young son.
