by Nies, Judith
Newcomen’s engine did the work of fifty horses, could run for twenty-four hours at a time, and could pump from much deeper tunnels. By the 1760s Newcomen’s steam engines were pumping water out of coal mines all over England and Scotland. (Alas, Newcomen was not given the credit he deserves for his invention, largely because of his class. His portrait was never painted and his grave has been lost because the institutional scientific body of the era, members of the Royal Society of London, didn’t believe that a commoner could be “the most inventive intellect of the era.”) The increased transport of coal made Newcastle (Tynemouth) a major port and shipbuilding center and stimulated both the growth of the navy to protect the coal transport boats and the development of maritime technologies.
The Newcomen pumping engine, however, had limitations. It was inefficient and used huge amounts of coal. Because of the quantities of coal required, the engine was limited to use at the mines themselves. Then in 1776, a year better known in America for the Declaration of Independence and the colonies’ split from England, the steam engine took a qualitative leap forward. It was improved to such a degree that it left the mines and became, in coal historian Barbara Freese’s words, “an all-purpose industrial workhorse.” The new engine was called “the Watt.”
James Watt, a Scot with some wealthy backers, stood on Newcomen’s metaphorical shoulders and devised a steam engine that was four times as efficient as the Newcomen engine. With its fuel efficiency, it liberated the engine from the mines and allowed the Watt steam engine to become an all-purpose power source—for iron smelters, for wagons on rails (railroads), and for factories. Textile mills, which, of necessity, had been located on rivers because they were dependent on waterpower, moved to new locations and became huge factories in new cities. Manchester, for example, whose textile trade began with a guild of Flemish weavers who moved there in the fourteenth century, became a city of factories unlike any in the world, the world’s first industrialized city, employing thousands of people under one roof, producing textiles of cotton and linen. Manchester was the template for Lowell, Massachusetts, America’s first industrial city (1820–1821), and cotton textiles were the foundation of America’s Industrial Revolution.
One German factory owner sent his son to Manchester to learn the textile business. Young Frederick Engels wanted to be a professor of political philosophy, but he did as his father requested and went to England to learn the textile manufacturing business. At the same time, he was appalled by the conditions of the laborers in Manchester and the economics of capitalism. He wrote articles about the bleak living conditions, the environmental degradation, and the political economy of how the profits of the merchants were never shared with the workers who produced the wealth. In 1844 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England in a German publication whose editor was Karl Marx. After Marx moved to London, Engels continued working at the Manchester mill to earn an income that could support them both in their research and writing about industrial England.
Although other European countries rushed to copy England’s industrial system, England had a fifty-year head start and didn’t stop innovating. Its government ignored the smog, the deaths from inhaling coal dust, asthma and respiratory ailments, diseases like rickets that came from lack of exposure to sun, and the polluted air that enveloped London and other industrial cities. Thousands died from asthma attacks, emphysema, bronchitis, and secondary heart conditions that arose from breathing problems. Daylight was often so dark because of smog, it required gaslights to be burned all day. One observer sent from India to England to study their industrial system described the smog-covered cities and wrote back, “The sun may never set on the English empire, but it never shines in England.”
England’s culture enforced the values that powered the industrial way of life:
•The desire to conquer nature,
•a faith in technology,
•a belief in private enterprise,
•tolerance for the misery of the working class,
•and a conviction that their nation had a larger destiny as a world power.
These values, needless to say, had crossed the Atlantic, where Anglo-Americans were rapidly industrializing. Equally important, America had astonishing amounts of coal, even more than Britain.
In the United States huge coal beds ran the length of the Appalachian mountain chain, from Pennsylvania to Alabama, with an especially hard coal called anthracite at either end that was used for smelting steel. Consequently, America’s steel industry grew up in Pittsburgh and Birmingham. Another massive coal deposit of bituminous coal that was 85 percent carbon ran from Illinois through Indiana and deep into Kentucky. Known collectively as the Illinois Basin, it was in Illinois that Peabody Coal Company got its start. (The enormous coalfields in the western states that parallel the Rockies weren’t mined until after World War II.)
PEABODY COAL COMPANY
Francis Peabody started the Peabody Coal Company in 1883, the year after Chester Arthur signed the Executive Order. A Yale graduate, the son of a prominent Chicago lawyer, he began his career as a banker.* From a financial vantage point he saw coal as an investment of the future, particularly the bituminous coal of the Illinois Basin. He started the Peabody Coal Company with two partners and bought them out by 1890. Peabody was a coal retailer, buying coal from the mines in Carbondale and transporting it by rail to sell to Chicago home owners and businesses for heat. In addition to coal as a heating fuel, coal was the power source for America’s ever-expanding railroads.
At the turn of the century, a major new market for coal appeared: electricity generating stations. Thomas Edison’s innovation had spread to other cities. Light was what attracted people to cities. Chicago’s World Exposition of 1892 was called the “White City” because the exhibition buildings covered in white stucco were illuminated at night by electric streetlamps. By 1913 Francis Peabody’s Peabody Coal Company owned several mines and had won a long-term contract to supply Chicago Edison, a major electric utility, with coal. As the century unfolded, the demand for electricity was unstoppable.
Peabody’s business evolved into the production of electricity as well as the mining of coal. Rate setting, plant siting, distribution systems, peak loads, use projections—all were factors in Peabody’s contract negotiations and coal pricing. From a small Illinois operation to a dominant force in the industry, Peabody Coal became the owner of more than thirteen mines and supplied the major electricity utilities in the country. Francis Peabody was in the business of power—generation, transmission, distribution.
The marketing innovation that Francis Peabody brought to the coal industry was to precontract the coal supply to the utilities at a fixed price. The benefit to the utilities was that they were protected from changes in price and spot market fluctuations; the benefit to Peabody was that his company had a known amount of coal it needed to produce every year. With new contracts, the company bought more mines. These long-term, high-volume contracts put Peabody Coal ahead of most other coal companies. By the time of Francis Peabody’s death in 1922, his company had contracts with major utilities throughout the country and owned the largest mines in the Great Basin states. He had a personal fortune of $35 million ($487 million today) and a business fortune of $75 million ($1 billion). The coal industry’s relationship with its workers, however, was among the worst of any in the country—hostile labor relations, harsh working conditions, lax mine safety, health issues, and frequent strikes. Like Britain, America’s coal industry had a high tolerance for the treacherous working conditions and poor pay for its miners. Peabody Coal was no different.
By the 1950s Peabody Coal was the eighth-largest coal producer in the country and had added many more mines and more utilities to its portfolio. Led by Merl Kelce, a former coal miner who had held many jobs for Peabody, its headquarters had moved from Illinois to Henderson, Kentucky, where it had some of its largest mining operations. But in 1966 Peabody began a global growth spurt that led it to become
the largest coal company in the world. Kelce was able to buy the leases on Black Mesa, Arizona, at the time considered the largest untouched coal reserve in the country. (Powder River, Wyoming, and the Montana mines were still in the future.) Kelce had purchased the leases from a Salt Lake City exploration company called Sentry Royalty Company, now a subsidiary of Peabody Coal. Industry journalists thought he had paid too much because the coal deposit lay beneath Hopi and Navajo Indian reservation lands, and many thought the leases could not be exercised. The business journalists did not know about John Boyden.
JOHN BOYDEN AND THE BLACK MESA LEASES
John Boyden had arrived on Black Mesa to recruit the Hopi tribe as a client for his legal services. As one of the lawyers who had just successfully helped the Ute Indians of Utah and Colorado receive the largest financial judgment ever entered against the US government, he was seeking to find another Indian client with a good case to take before the Indian Land Claims Commission. Later some people mistakenly thought Boyden and his partner, Ernest Wilkinson, did the Ute work pro bono, for free. In fact, the two lawyers shared a fee of $2,794,606 ($25.4 million in current dollars), at a time when $1 million really meant something.
With the Ute case settled and his $1.4 million safely in the bank ($12.5 million today), John Boyden knew that Indian land-claims cases could be highly profitable work. The Claims Commission was a quasi-judicial body whose legislated five-year existence was due to expire in December 1951, so Boyden had no time to waste. (Congress subsequently extended the commission’s existence until 1978, when all remaining cases were transferred to the US Court of Claims.)
He went first to the Navajo Tribal Council in Window Rock because he had spent time on the Navajo reservation in the 1940s as an observer for the FBI and knew their legal system. But someone on the Navajo Tribal Council remembered Boyden’s earlier role as a US attorney in enforcing the disastrous and devastating livestock reduction of the 1930s ordered by John Collier in Utah’s San Juan River section of the Navajo reservation. Theoretically, the livestock reduction was a policy instituted to prevent overgrazing and to encourage land conservation. It had, however, a more immediate rationale: to prevent silt buildup behind the newly opened Hoover Dam. In its precipitous descent from the Colorado Rockies, the Colorado River carried so much sediment that the dam engineers were afraid the dam would silt up before they could build the already planned second dam upstream, at Glen Canyon. During the depths of the Depression, in what seemed incomprehensible to the Navajo families, tens of thousands of Navajo sheep and goats were shot and burned, devastating the families who owned them. “Bought, shot and left to rot,” said former Navajo tribal chairman Peter MacDonald, who was a child in that section of the reservation in the 1930s and whose family was one of those deeply affected. The hundreds of once prosperous, but now impoverished, Navajo families never recovered. The Navajo Tribal Council told Boyden, “No thanks.”
Undeterred, Boyden left Window Rock and continued west on Route 264, heading toward Keams Canyon and the Hopi Indian Agency, where the Hopi lived in eleven separate pueblo villages at the southern tip of Black Mesa. There, long peninsulas of sandstone cliffs jut out into the flat desert floor like the ocean headlands they once were. The layers that compose Black Mesa slope at such an angle that water from the aquifer flows out in springs at the edge of the cliffs. Each Hopi village was located with a spring for water, and each village—Walpi, Hano, Mishnognovi, Shipaulaove, Shungopovi, Oraibi, Hotevilla, Bakabi, and Moenkopi—also developed with separate leadership traditions, priests, and political cultures. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs continued to deal with the Hopi as a tribe, their history was more like the separate pueblo villages of New Mexico.
“It is well to remember,” wrote Harold Colton, the director of the Museum of Northern Arizona, in a 1939 land-use report,
that the Hopi Tribe exists only in the eyes of the Indian Bureau and the general public. The Hopi themselves do not think of themselves in terms of a tribe. They owe allegiance only to the village in which they live and, with a couple of exceptions, the villages are as independent of one another as certain Rio Grand pueblos like Santo Domingo, Sia, Cochiti and Acoma, which are bound together by culture and language. There is no political unity. It is, therefore, necessary to deal with each village separately. The Indian Bureau after sixty years of struggle is just learning this fact.
Unfortunately, the BIA had not learned. In Keams Canyon the Hopi Indian agent, H. E. O’Harra, was still hoping for a centralized Hopi tribal council. He gave Boyden the bad news and good news. The good news was that the Hopi certainly had a good land-claims case. The bad news was that they had no functional tribal council with authority to hire him. Even though Hopi voters had voted in 1936 to adopt a constitution and elect a Hopi tribal council, 70 percent of the voters had stayed home. Consequently, the council that had been recognized by the BIA was ignored by the majority of Hopi and had not met for more than a decade.
Agent O’Harra suggested that Boyden visit several of the Hopi villages, like Hotevilla, where some of the more “progressive” Hopi lived. Perhaps Boyden could interest them in a land-claims case.* Soon Boyden was traveling through the villages, meeting with some of the progressive, Christianized Hopi, who had a history of cooperating with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Among the most prominent was Emory Sekaquaptewa, who had been educated in Indian boarding schools, spoke excellent English, and was in favor of a modern tribal government. As his son, and future Hopi tribal chairman, Abbott Sekaquaptewa said, “My father was a driving force to get the tribe back to functioning in the 1940s. . . . The BIA people told him that what [he] really needed to do was organize the Tribal Council. They said that is the only entity that the federal government would listen to.”
Abbott’s father gathered together some members of the disbanded tribal council to hear Boyden’s explanation about the special commission set up in Washington to hear Indian land claims. Boyden told them about his success with the Ute Indians and how it paved the way for other Indian tribes to make a claim for lost land. He warned that the deadline to file a case was only months away and they would have to act quickly. Abbott Sekaquaptewa said, “Boyden went through the villages, holding meetings and talking to people about the Indian Land Claims Commission. He explained that the filing deadline was pretty close and if they wanted to file a claim they needed to act now. He got the support of some village leaders in addition to the disbanded tribal council . . . and an oral contract was entered into with the tribe.”
A letter signed by the Hopi traditional priests that appeared in a local Gallup newspaper and was forwarded to Senator Goldwater said that Boyden simply wrote up a contract and had the assembled people agree to it by voice vote. “We have explained plainly,” wrote Dan Katchongva for the traditional priests, “how the so-called tribal council approved the resolution which attorney John S. Boyden drew up on the spot. . . . This was done without consulting the Hopi people. The majority of the Hopis are against him as a lawyer.” Another letter written by Hopi Caleb Johnson added that there were only four legitimate members of the tribal council: “On top of all this the chairman of the tribal council is a man who does not have a good record and has been convicted of a felony in a federal court.”
Boyden himself knew his oral contract would not hold up for long if there was a legal challenge, so he moved quickly to transform the contract into an official written document and the tribal council members into an official council. Because all the new tribal council members were unelected, he arranged for all sixteen Hopi men to travel to Salt Lake City to be officially sworn in by a federal judge. A famous photograph taken in a Salt Lake City courtroom shows half the Hopi members in sunlight and half in shadow, half in traditional dress, half in white shirts and ties. Boyden is sitting on the dark side, his face half in shadow. The calendar on the wall reads July 12, 1951.
Land claims were not a straightforward issue among the Hopi villages. As Harold Colton wrote in his land-use re
port, “Several recent efforts to settle the boundary, such as the meeting at Washington, failed because the Hopi made the boundary a religious question and demanded all of northeast Arizona from the Little Colorado to the Four Corners.” In other words, the Hopi had a different view of the land they were entitled to because they included all their religious shrines rather than settlements. (Some of these shrines extend into Mexico.)
John Boyden would change that. The boundary issue with the Navajo had been a subject since the government had relocated (by military force) the Navajo from northern New Mexico onto a reservation in eastern New Mexico, almost at the Texas border. After the Civil War, in 1868, the US Army and the Navajo signed a treaty that released the Navajo to a small reservation that straddled the Arizona–New Mexico border and was too small for the number of people to be supported. Some extended families spread out into the interior of Black Mesa in sheepherding camps composed of multigenerational families. The Hopi lived in the cliff-top villages but dry farmed and grazed livestock in the dry washes many miles distant. The Hopi traded corn and vegetables for Navajo mutton. But conflicts arose when Navajo goats and sheep trampled Hopi crops or Navajo families spread out onto lands that the Hopi had farmed. A reservation boundary between the Hopi and the Navajo had never been settled, although many efforts had been made.
Among the many things that John Boyden did not tell his Hopi clients about the Ute case was that no actual land was ever returned. The $32 million settlement granted to the Ute Indians (of both Utah and Colorado) was for 1.5 million acres of lands taken by signed treaty but never paid for. Reimbursement was based on the price of land at the time it was taken in the 1880s, not on present market value, and the government placed many strings on how the Indians’ money was disbursed—the Ute needed a business plan to explain how they were going to use the settlement money, while the lawyers got their fees immediately.