Workers who extract minerals from the earth. As an occupational group, miners in
America—both the coal miners east of the Mississippi and the hard-rock metals miners of
the Western states—have historically been faced by conditions of uncertainty and
antagonism both above and below ground. Within the mines themselves, the history of
American mining has been punctuated regularly by deaths and injuries due to cave-ins,
fires, and floods, and miners have gone to work each day never knowing when the ore
body or coal seam was going to bottom out and end their employment. On the surface,
miners have frequently done battle with management in the form of industrial action
designed to bring about improvements in working conditions. Finally, the health of the
industry as a whole, and thus the welfare and future of its workers, has historically
depended on the frequently unpredictable vicissitudes of market forces and metals prices.
Faced with these conditions, miners through their folklife expressions have traditionally
sought ways to imaginatively control their unpredictable work environments, to
commemorate the dead and criticize management antagonists, to celebrate their skills and
identities as miners, and to achieve and maintain a strong sense of solidarity and mutual
purpose.
A large body of folk beliefs, much of it having its origins in European mining
traditions, has traditionally governed behavior within the mines in an attempt either to
assure safety and success or to forestall accident and failure. These beliefs usually take
the form of omens—signs that predict that disaster is in the offing—or ritual behaviors
that are followed in order to either help bring about favorable outcomes or prevent
unfavorable ones. Thus, Upper Michigan miner Jim Hodge told folklorist Richard
M.Dorson in 1946 that he was once rebuked because he “walked in the Negaunee mine
once a-whistling,” that women were never allowed down the mine, and that “to kill a rat
in the mine is worse than murder” because they “know ahead when ground is breaking;
they can hear it.” In 1989 north Idaho mining man Bill Bondurant described that, prior to
a rockburst, “when the rock was working a little bit, you could hear ping, ping, ping; they
said that the tommy knockers—trolls—were warning you to get out of there.” He also
noted that “there used to be a superstition that you’d lose the vein if a woman looked on
the vein, but that’s—since women have worked in the mines—well, that superstition is
pretty well forgotten.”
Largely due to the efforts of folklorist George Korson (1899–1967), modern scholars
have available to them a large body of coal miners’ folksongs from the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Taken together, these songs provide a glimpse from the miners’
perspective of what their lives were like in the days when coal was still mined primarily
with pick and shovel. It was not uncommon for mine disasters to be commemorated in
folksong, and the songs both preserved the memory of the fallen miners and served as a
communal reminder of the tenuous nature of work underground. In 1869, for example,
110 workers died in a fire in the Avondale coal mine in Pennsylvania, a tragedy that was
quickly captured in a broadside ballad called “The Avondale Mine Disaster,” which Korson collected in the 1920s. Its thrust is both historic and elegiac, as two sample verses
show:
On the sixth day of September,
Eighteen hundred and sixty-nine,
Those miners all then got a call,
To go work in the mine;
But little did they think that day
That death would gloom the vale
Before they would return again from
The mines of Avondale.
Now to conclude, and make an end,
Their number I’ll pen down—
One hundred and ten of brave stout men
Were smothered underground;
They’re in their graves till the last day,
Their widows may bewail,
And the orphans’ cries they rend the skies
All round through Avondale!
While mining is still dangerous work, the impulse to remember the fallen in ballads has
largely died out in the late 20th century. When ninety-one miners died in a fire in the
Sunshine silver mine in Kellogg, Idaho, in 1972, they were commemorated in the form of
a monument sculpted by a former miner who had once worked in that mine.
While fully recognizing that their work is dangerous and debilitating, miners have
frequently blamed mine owners and management for the high toll that their work has
exacted in death and injury. Miners have traditionally seen owners as exploitative
antagonists anyway, given at various times and places to blacklisting union miners and
requiring that workers live in company houses, shop at company stores, and follow other
such restrictive practices. Biting stories circulated about prominent and self-important
owners like Marcus Daly, the copper magnate of Butte, Montana, who (so the story went)
died and entered heaven only to have God turn to his right and sarcastically say, “Come,
Jesus, get up and give Marcus your seat.” Korson collected many strike songs from the
balladeering 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as ballads describing and assessing the
activities of radical labor groups like Pennsylvania’s Molly Maguires. Widely shared
union-oriented “laborlore,” in folklorist Archie Green’s term, seems less common in the
latter part of the 20th century, or at least it is not as well represented in folklorists’
collections.
Not all of miners’ folklore, however, has been geared toward coping with death,
contingency, and confrontation. An equally strong strain of miners’ folklore has focused
on celebrating their skills and occupational identity, demonstrating a great deal of pride
and faith in themselves and their work. In Western mining camps, hand-drilling contests
were for many years a high point of communal Fourth of July celebrations, even after
machine drills had taken over the task of boring holes in rock to accept dynamite charges.
Korson collected many examples of ballads praising the hard work and indomitable spirit
of the coal miner, such as “The Miner Lad”:
Nay, don’t despise the miner lad,
Who burrows like the mole;
Buried alive, from morn to night,
To delve for household coal—
Nay, miner lad, ne’er blush for it,
Though black thy face be as the pit!
As honorable thy calling is
As that of hero lords;
They owe to the poor miner lad
The ore that steels their swords—
And perils too, as fierce as theirs
In limb and life, the miner shares!
Despite (or, indeed, because of) the difficult conditions under which they have worked,
miners have traditionally maintained a sense of communal strength, purpose, and
commitment, perhaps related to the traditional attitude that north Idaho mining man Bob
Anderson has characterized by saying “Yeah, hope springs eternal, especially in the
mining. It’s always one foot to a million dollars—the next foot.”
Within the workplace, miners have traditionally used several linguistic means to
express and maintain a sense of group identity and solidarity. For example, it is common
practice in the mining industry for miners to know and refer to each other almost
exclusively through nicknames, such as the colleagues about whom Bill Bondurant and
Bob Anderson reminisced: Milk Bottle, Rooster-Goose, Screaming Gene, Biffo, DumDum, Little Man, and Red Fred. (Anderson said that many of the names inscribed on the
Sunshine miners’ memorial are meaningless to him because they are the fallen miners’
full names, not their nicknames; he never knew them by their full names.) Such names
bind the workers in a mine into a club of sorts, a close-knit fraternity that is separate from
the larger world and within which one’s most meaningful social identity lies. Beyond the
confines of individual mines or communities, miners as a group also share an
occupational vocabulary, a set of terms describing their workplace and equipment that
outsiders will not understand and that also serves to create and reinforce group cohesion.
To an Eastern coal miner, for example, the fine particles resulting from drilling are “bug
dust,” while waste material is “gob.” This vocabulary may have regional variations: The
“cage” that carries miners down the shaft in Eastern coal mines is just as likely to be
called a “skip” in the Western mountains. Still, this vocabulary is another means through
which miners create and proclaim a sense of identity.
Above ground, miners’ folklife has also tended to focus on communal situations and
gatherings in which talk and song came easily. Korson has written of how ballads were a
common part of life in taverns, stores, and other foci of community life in Pennsylvania’s
coal country. On the Western mining frontier, the saloon was usually one of the first
buildings erected, and it quickly became the undisputed social center of the town. By
geological necessity, mining has been carried out largely in remote mountainous areas;
physically isolated, struggling daily with recalcitrant rock and profitminded management,
miners have perhaps more than other occupational groups been drawn together into
mutually supportive communities, and their folklore has consistently reflected this
orientation. While mining areas are no longer as isolated as they once were, and while the
industry is in decline in many areas of the country, miners continue to feel and express
the pride, cohesiveness, and traditional attitudes that have characterized them from the
beginning.
Kent C.Ryden
References
Dorson, Richard M. 1952. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper
Penimula. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Green, Archie. 1972. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
——. 1993. Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Hart, Patricia, and Ivar Nelson. 1984. Mining Town: The Photographic Record of T.N.Barnard and
Nellie Stockbridge from the Coeur d’Alenes. Seattle: University of Washington Press; Boise:
Idaho State Historical Society.
Korson, George. 1938. Minstrels of the Mine Patch: Songs and Stories of the Anthracite Industry.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
——. 1943. Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
——. 1960. Black Rock: Mining Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Preston, Dennis Richard. 1975. Bituminous Coal Mining Vocabulary of the Eastern United States.
University, AL: American Dialect Society.
Ryden, Kent C. 1993. Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
West, Elliott. 1979. The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.