A Year in a Coal-mine (in Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series )

MP3 Audio CD. TEN days after my graduation from Harvard I took my place as an
unskilled workman in one of the largest of the great soft-coal mines
that lie in the Middle West. It was with no thought of writing my
experiences that I chose my occupation, but with the intention of
learning by actual work the 'operating end' of the great industry, in
the hope that such practical knowledge as I should acquire would fit me
to follow the business successfully. That this mine was operated in
direct opposition to the local organization of union labor, and had won
considerable notoriety by successfully mining coal in spite of the most
active hostility, gave an added interest to the work. The physical
conditions of the mine were the most perfect that modern engineering has
devised: the 'workings' were entirely electrified; the latest inventions
in coal-mining machinery were everywhere employed, and every precaution
for the safety of the men was followed beyond the letter of the law.


I

It was half-past six on a July morning when the day-shift began
streaming out of the wash-house: some four hundred men,--white, black,
and of perhaps twenty-eight nationalities,--dressed in their tattered,
black, and greasy mine-clothes. The long stream wound out of the
wash-house door, past the power-house where the two big generators that
feed the arteries of the great mine all day long with its motive power
were screaming in a high, shrill rhythm of sound,--past the tall
skeleton structure of the tipple-tower, from which the light morning
breeze blew black clouds of coal-dust as it eddied around the skeleton
of structural iron-work,--to a small house at the mine-mouth, sheathed
in corrugated iron, where the broken line formed a column, and the men,
one by one, passed through a gate by a small window and gave their
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