PART FOUR
Reckonings
“Hero No. 1”
13
THE CREAM OF ROUTT COUNTY
Oak Hills, 1915
The teachers worked Monday through Friday, and except for their morning duties at Sunday school and their preparations for the following week’s classes, they were free on the weekends. Sometimes Bob managed to get to Elkhead on Saturday, to take the teachers on excursions without Ferry. They went with him on one “all day jaunt” to his future anthracite coal mine in Elkhead. “Mother dear,” Ros wrote on September 2, “I am sitting under a pine tree with the most beautiful blue sky above—and a veritable grove of pines and quaking aspens about me. . . . We are having the best kind of a time. We rode all morning—now [Mr. P.] is interviewing the man who is in charge of the land while we sit and laze, until we eat our picnic lunch. The horses are grazing away nearby—and I wish you could see the whole scene—the little tent down between two hillsides covered with ferns and trees. We appreciate trees, after our sage brush.”
As they were luxuriating, Bob’s horse got loose, and when they noticed it was gone, they leaped up and began a frantic search, futilely calling and whistling. Perry got onto Dorothy’s horse, Pep. She had traded in Rogan, offering a bonus, which the buyer refused. Pep was a small sorrel, and Bob galloped off, finally catching his horse halfway back to the Harrisons’.
The following weekend, he invited them to his house in Oak Hills, telling them he’d give them a tour of the Moffat mine. They would be joined by his sister Charlotte and Portia Mansfield, and by two young women from Lexington, Kentucky, who were coming for a visit. Dorothy and Ferry had discovered that each had a friend there: Anne Holloway, whom Dorothy knew from Smith; and Dot Embry, a Vassar graduate, whom Ferry had met when he was in law school. He had been sporadically wooing Dot for a few years, but without any apparent ardor.
On their way to pick up Dot and Anne at the Oak Creek depot, they drove to Bob’s other property—a homestead in Twenty Mile Park, between Hayden and Oak Creek. It was set in a meadow of oat and wheat fields. Dorothy commented, “It is wonderful to see them break up sagebrush & change virgin land—into a fertile farm land.” Bob’s tiny shack was surrounded by “very high mountains all around which looked dark & cavernous as if they were peopled by gnomes, and I expected to see giants & ogres.” After Bob spent some time talking to his overseer, they got back into the Dodge and “tore up, down, & around those mountains at a perilous pace and just reached Oak Creek as the train pulled in.” Faced with three pairs of women, two of which contained “Dorothys,” Bob simplified matters by calling Dot and Anne “The Kentuckys,” and the teachers “The Auburns.” Ros described the weekend as a lopsided house party, “the ratio being 6 ladies to 1 gentleman.”
Bob’s low-slung frame house in Oak Hills, its back porch strewn with saddle blankets and other paraphernalia, was even more comfortable and up-to-date than Ferry’s cabin. It had electric lights, steam heat, a bathtub, and hot running water. Unwanted wildlife, though, shared it with him. Dorothy and Ros had learned from Marjorie Perry that during one of her recent visits, a pack rat had made off with one of her stockings, and she had to go home without it. Dorothy commented: “They are as big as cats, on dit, & called pack rats because they ‘pack off’ everything—that is cowboy slang for ‘carrying away.’ ” The women slept in three double beds in the living room. They were chary of using Bob’s blankets until he assured them that the previous guests had washed them. “Mr. Perry,” Dorothy wrote, stayed on “the piazza, talking to us all the time.”
The house stood on a bluff, overlooking an unsightly hamlet consisting of miners’ boardinghouses, company stores, blacksmith shops, repair shops, an electric generator plant, and several shacks. The mines were in a narrow gulch with steep slopes covered by gnarled scrub oak. The main line of the railroad ran through the gulch, with several switch tracks leading to and from the tipple.
In 1916 workdays for the miners depended on the availability of railroad cars and market orders, and the mine usually closed down in the spring, reopening in September or October, when the weather got cold and demand for coal picked up. When the mines were working, steam hissed from numerous machines, whistles blew signals, and bells announced moving equipment. As cars were loaded, the racket was magnified by the sounds of the tipple shakers and coal falling into place. Coal smoke belched from the generator plants, locomotives, and steam-powered equipment. The burning slag pile emitted a stinking smoke of its own, and the air was filled with hot cinders that occasionally flew into workers’ eyes. On a quiet Saturday afternoon, with the mines shut, Ros was able to focus on the “real grass terrace with lovely flower garden, whence came the sweet peas” for the county fair. Her determination to see the best of Oak Hills was the most overt indication so far that she was coming to reciprocate Bob Perry’s feelings. Still, she added: “Oak Creek and Oak Hills are merely mining towns and very rough,—not at all like Hayden.”
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Ros was right. The culture of Oak Creek and the company town of Oak Hills, built for the miners and providing everything from housing and mess halls to doctors, bore no resemblance to the folksy atmosphere of Hayden or the bustle of Steamboat Springs. She and Dorothy, though, weren’t privy to some of the more sordid characteristics of coal towns. Oak Creek—started by a disreputable operator named Sam Bell, who had been the sheriff and run the brothels in Cripple Creek—was built “to meet the needs of the men who dug the coal from the bowels of the earth and brought it to the surface for loading and shipping,” wrote Paul Bonnifield, a former miner and local historian. “These miners were a special breed and they needed a town suited to their style.” In addition to an Episcopalian church, respectable homes, and a log school outside town, Oak Creek had bars, gambling parlors, and brothels—or, as the church ladies later alluded to them over tea, “sporting houses.”
The residents were German, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, and African-American. The immigrant and African-American men, who had made their way west after the Civil War, worked in the mines. Their wives washed dishes, cleaned houses and commercial buildings, and in the summer picked lettuce and spinach on ranches in nearby Yampa. The immigrants formed their own clubs and gathered at one of the pool halls or gambling parlors after work. Italians (the most recent arrivals) and African-Americans lived in a neighborhood called Hickory Flats, near the tipple of the Pinnacle mine, owned by the Victor American Fuel Company. Hickory Flats consisted of dilapidated shacks coated with coal cinders and one-room cribs where prostitutes conducted business. It was known for stabbings and shootings, and the town marshal refused to go there after dark.
At times violent clashes arose. The local newspaper, the Oak Creek Times, gave matter-of-fact accounts of some incidents that occurred around the time Ros and Dorothy went to Colorado. “Man Beats Aged Miner: Murderous Foreigner Crunches Head of American”; “Mexican Meets Death by Severe Blow in Abdomen”; “Harry Gray . . . A Rope Rider, in Moment of Fear Plunges Sharp Instrument Through Heart of Routt County Boy.” Women, alone during work hours at their homesteads in the countryside or their houses in town, were easy prey. In June 1917 a young woman was attacked by a Greek friend of her Italian husband. When her husband returned unexpectedly and came upon the friend pressing his wife against the kitchen table, one hand over her mouth, the other tearing off her clothes, he blew the man’s brains out.
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 Rou
tt 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.
Nothing Daunted Page 16