Authors: John Demont
You grew up fast in the coal mine. Dan J. McDonald, whose father, uncles and grandfathers all spent their lives underground, was fourteen in 1917 when he got a job as a trapper boy in the Dominion mine. His first day was an eye-opener:
Another young fellow and myself started work on the same day, I on the day shift and he on the night. The second day when I went out to work I heard a group of the drivers talking in subdued tones.
“Wasn’t it too bad about that boy last night?”
I asked what was wrong.
“That young fellow was killed.”
“Who was he,” I asked. And when I heard his name I tingled all over and didn’t think mining was such a good thing then. I didn’t want to go down, I was so frightened.
“Make up an excuse for me,” I said to the boys. “I don’t think I’ll go down today.”
“You’re yellow! You’re cowardly! We know why you’re leaving,” they shouted.
“I’ll show you if I’m yellow,” I said. And I went back. But I went through a thousand deaths that day while I was underground.
Boys like my grandfather entered a world that hadn’t changed much since the coming of the steam engine. Vertical shafts were still used to reach the coal; from there, the coal ended up in cars hauled by ponies across rails laid along the mine floor, and the cars were then coupled together into a train, or rake, that carried coal, men and equipment to and from the surface.
The Cape Breton coalfields presented an extra challenge: most of them lay under the ocean. The shaft of the Princess Colliery, where John William still worked, was sunk on land in 1873, but the miners were under salt water almost from the moment they walked through the entrance. By the time the colliery closed in 1975 the workings were two thousand feet under the ocean floor and extended three and a half miles from the shoreline. These, then, were no ordinary
coal mines. Splitting open dry land and digging out coal was hard enough. When the seams were underwater, the sea had an unnerving tendency to break in and flood the shaft. Furthermore, the longer the shaft, the harder it is to pump air down to the men and to move coal to the surface.
So the trapper boys, who controlled the airflow, remained as important as ever. Not that anyone wanted to stay stuck in that lowly job. The colliery offered a surprising amount of workplace mobility The next move up the pecking order might be as a loader, filling the boxes with freshly cut coal. Or as a driver, riding herd on the pit ponies that moved the boxes of coal from the seam to the bottom of the slope for transportation to the surface. With time, they might graduate to become breaker boys (removing stone and other impurities on the service) or other “company hands”—everything from the chain runners who kept the underground railway running, to the timber men who built and demolished the roof supports.
But the romance, along with the good money, was down at the coal face, where the miners toiled in teams who were mutually responsible for their “room” or “bord.” The hand pick was still the tool of choice in the early days of the twentieth century, recalled Sydney Mines collier Gordon MacGregor:
An old handpick miner he’d … lie on his side. He’d have to lie under a cut of coal. He’d dig a trench in the bottom of the seam. There could perhaps be seven feet above him. And he’d work his way until all you could see sticking out from under the mining, as they called it, was his heels. Solid coal was above him. He was taking a chance of being crushed. But the good miners would timber themselves—put timber up and they’d just pick away.
Once he’d hand-picked in far enough, recalled Tius Tutty, the miner used an auger to bore a hole in the coal above the cut. Then he stuffed the hole full of blasting powder in preparation for the blasting, or “shooting.”
When you had it all stemmed up you pulled the needle out and at that time you used what they called squibs—powder done up in paper, you know? You’d open up the end of it and tear a little piece off and you’d stick that in the hole. It would go right in the hole where you pulled the needle out. And you’d light it—with your lamp. Then you’d take off. You’d duck down. There was always an opening you could run to, because they had places for air to travel, you know? You’d sing out, “Fire!” There’d be only two men in the place anyhow. … You’d wait a few moments after that goes off in case there’d be some coal loose that’d fall and then after the smoke would drive out you’d go up and start loading your coal.
After the drivers and pit ponies took over, a miner might stop to drink tea and eat lunch from his can. Maybe he’d have a chew of Pictou Twist, a blackish strong tobacco popular in the mines, where no matches could be used to light a pipe or cigarette. Then he started all over again. Eight to ten tons of coal were considered a good day’s work. Someone working in a Pictou County mine in the early 1900s received forty-five cents per tonne. That worked out to $4.50 per day minus sixty cents to pay the loader, as well as the cost of the powder and sharpening the picks. For the same kind of shift a trapper boy would receive forty-five cents. A loader, who usually worked for two miners, was paid $1.20 in return for loading between fifteen and twenty 1,100-pound boxes.
Yet the miners stuck it out. They stuck out the tedium. They stuck out the loneliness. They stuck out the darkness. (If a man’s lamp went out—and a breath of air would be enough to make that happen—he had to roam around in the dark to borrow another man’s light to get it relit.) They stuck out having to urinate and defecate wherever they worked, and having to eat their coal-tinged sandwiches and drink tea with grimy hands—washing before meals was unheard of—sitting on a pile of coal. The youngsters stuck out the harassment from the older workers, who painted the boy miners’ faces in the Springhill mines, and in the Pictou collieries jumped the youngsters and kicked and punched them. They stuck out the choking coal dust, the wetness, the cold and the heat.
They stuck out the fear of death and dismemberment. Let your attention wander—look away to talk to a co-worker, take a wrong turn and end up in the path of an oncoming balance box, fail to notice a coal chute—and just like that, life changed forever. Riding rakes would detach; coal boxes would run away; coal, stone, wooden pillars and even fossilized trees fell from the ceiling. The lucky ones were maimed. “Everything came down and I got caught,” recalled Huey D. MacIsaac, a promising baseball player before he entered the Inverness Mines. “I was the only one. I lost my arm and I got $57 a month for two years.… They couldn’t figure out how I was able to live. After that accident I couldn’t even carry a bucket of coal to throw on a fire.”
Vigilance alone wasn’t enough. So much of it was plain luck. The Cape Breton fields were nothing like the gassy Pictou County fields where, in 1873, 60 men died in a terrible explosion at the Drummond Mine. Mercifully, Cape Breton mines had little in common with the upheaval-prone Springhill Mines, also shot through with dangerous amounts of gas. There, on February 21, 1891, a pocket of airborne coal dust ignited and 125 men died from
the explosion or the poisonous gases it released, the highest body count in nineteenth-century Canadian mining history. “Sorrowful mothers and wives were to be seen everywhere, weeping and lamenting for those near and dear to them,” said a newspaper account the next day. “The majority of the bodies bear no marks of violence, death having apparently been caused by firedamp. Others are horribly mutilated and almost unrecognizable.” Of the 125 victims, 21 were under eighteen years of age. The youngest was twelve, and two were thirteen.
That same sort of grim ratio existed in the Cape Breton mines. In 1878 six men died in Sydney Mines when a naked light ignited gas, causing an explosion. Seventeen years later two workers died roughly the same way in the Dominion No. 1 mine. In 1899, eleven men lost their lives in the Caledonia colliery following an explosion and fire. Another five men died in 1903, after a gas explosion in the French slope of the No. 5 mine in Reserve. Four years later a coal box got loose in the Scotia No. 4 mine, a mile from the colliery town of Florence, crushing three men. Three more were scalded to death when a surface boiler exploded at one of the Glace Bay mines in 1907.
Con Hogan said there was nothing out of the ordinary when he went down for work in Dominion’s No. 12 colliery in New Waterford on July 25, 1917:
All of a sudden everything got right quiet and right hot. We heard a big bang, just like a big bump. And she let go with a bang. Well, she fired everything as far as she could fire. I was fired right through the trap door, the trap door on the lee. I didn’t know any more till they got me to the surface. I was still in a daze. My legs were broken. My head was broken. I had both eyelids cut right off, my whole face just hanging right down.
He spent a year in the hospital. His name at one point was added to the memorial for the sixty-five who died in the explosion. Later it was refinished, and his name removed.
The hearses even lined up on the western side of the island, where, a century later, subterranean death is the last thing on a traveller’s mind. Route 19 winds past cliffs, beaches and wide-open ocean, beyond rolling farmland and hills thick with hardwoods, along hamlets bearing two-hundred-year-old names traceable straight to the Scottish Highlands. I’ve spent a lot of time here, taking in the soaring old-country fiddle music, casting for salmon in the picture-perfect rivers, just ogling the spirit-lifting scenery. It took me ages to realize that coal had once ruled here too. Yet once I understood where to look, the signs were everywhere: in the ancient peatlands that burst through the coastal cliffs in Mabou; along the main drag of the seaside town of Inverness, where the coal company cottages still stand and William Penn Hussey once swaggered.
After the start-up capital was in place, Hussey rolled up his sleeves and got busy making the mine at the Big River seam commercially viable. According to J.L. MacDougall’s history, that involved dredging a channel to let the coal boats in, then building piers and a narrow-gauge railway to the harbour. Hussey imported a steam engine to pull the coal cars. He built houses for the miners, who numbered three hundred by 1899, when he decided to dissolve the company. “It is said,” wrote MacDougall, “that Hussey screened a cool million out of Broad Cove.”
The yarn wasn’t over yet. William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, two of the greatest names in Canada’s great age of rail, somehow heard about Broad Cove’s seams. They built a rail line from Broad Cove to the coastline in a place called Point Tupper, near the Strait of Canso. Then they incorporated the Inverness Railway and Coal Company and proceeded to open new mines.
More housing—duplexes known as the Red Rows, and stand-alone houses for management—followed, to accommodate the miners flocking to Inverness, as the town was christened in 1904.
At one point there were so many newcomers arriving that a section of town became known as Belgium Town, in honour of the three to four hundred families from that country who had shown up to work the seams. From a standing start, Inverness ballooned to three thousand people—mostly Scots, but also French, Irish and a smattering of Russians to go with the Belgians—in a few short years. By the time MacDougall sat down to put pen to paper the town had electric lighting, an “excellent” water system and a “competent” fire brigade. It boasted three large hotels, two barbershops, at least two butchers, a “flourishing branch of the Royal Bank of Canada,” a “moving pictures theatre,” a town hall and labour temple—both described as “imposing”—a “commodious” brick building that served as post office, customs house and telegraph office, and six school buildings. There were bands and sports fields, including a cricket pitch, to give the miners a bit of good clean fun after a week of twelve-hour shifts with just a single day off.
Other outlets materialized for the men. It was estimated that some forty saloons ran along the road leading to the No. 2 mine, which immensely displeased MacDougall: “Liquor is the deadly enemy of all men engaged in deep thinking or perilous practical pursuits,” he wrote.
Take the miner for example.… He is lowered in a rake through a yawning artificial passage into the deep, dark, and rumbling bowels of the earth. He has to work with pick and shovel, and with dangerous explosives. For him there is no liberty, no air, no room, no moon, no sun, no day: all is one weird, long and lingering night. For him no birds are singing; no
flowers are blooming, no glad voices of innocent children to cheer his burdened soul. Every moment he is under ground his life is in jeopardy. When he returns again to light the reaction is so severe and sudden that it is dangerous for him to expose himself to the ordinary influence of the streets. He must avoid all incentives to violent excitement. What he needs is fresh air, wholesome food, comfortable rest, and the kind care of a well-kept home. The same is true also, of sailors, soldiers, intensive farmers, and strenuous mental toilers whose work presses acutely on mind or body, or on both. These are the men who carry the world on their shoulders.
A few kilometres south of there, Port Hood, with a population of about one thousand—215 of them miners—was smaller and not quite as raucous. In 1906, when a company called the Port Hood and Richmond Railway Coal Company bought the area’s defunct mine, it exhibited all the characteristics of the textbook boom town—new houses and stores appeared, doctor and lawyer shingles materialized and “a general prosperity took place throughout the district,” according to one account. How depressingly short it was. Two years later, on February 7, 1908, an explosion shot through the Port Hood mine. Ten men died, their skulls crushed and their bodies so burned and broken that they were unidentifiable. The funeral procession was nearly two kilometres long. Inside the church, the caskets formed a line from the front to the back of the room. “Never before in the history of Port Hood has a spectacle so sad been witnessed,” declared the
Sydney Daily Post
after the funeral. Four of the dead were Bulgarians, so fresh to the province that no one even knew their first names. If that wasn’t pathetic enough, on June 22, 1911, a mine on the main seam flooded with ocean water. Just like that, Port Hood’s run of luck was over. The
miners left, searching for work elsewhere. Soon the town was destitute enough that its electricity was cut off, not to be reconnected until 1938.