11
Leaving Carbon
Six months after the explosion in Castle Gate, the unity that had been developed by the collective tragedy was ripped apart. Strangers drove into the neighboring town of Helper and erected a cross on the hill. This was the first of the burning crosses in Carbon County, where the Ku Klux Klan began to recruit members. The Greeks, the Italians, and the Slavs in these communities formed spy networks to unhood Klan members and erected flaming circles on the hills in opposition to the crosses. My grandfather Robert was six at the time, and he mentioned these in the troubled recollections of his childhood: “I can’t remember precisely how old I was when I saw my first fiery cross burning a few hundred yards up the mountain to the rear of our house. I could barely discern the hooded Klan figures near it, but from the despairing look on my father’s face, as he too, watched, I sensed all the ugliness, bigotry, and hatred that the flaming cross carried.”
An Italian girl of about the same age, who is remembered in the historical record as Joe Barboglio’s daughter, interpreted the burning crosses similarly. However, to her they had a more personal application. She knew they meant that “there were people who hated us, and all the other foreign-born families.” That she is noted as “Joe Barboglio’s daughter” is significant. After the rough treatment of Italians in the 1903–4 strike, Joe Barboglio left Castle Gate and settled his family in Helper. He became a noteworthy member of that community and helped found the Helper State Bank.
In 1925, racial hatred hit a climax. Milton Burns, a company official, was allegedly killed by Robert Marshall, an African American miner. The June 15 incident is still a divisive issue in Carbon County, so even current historians retell the story with different slants, some emphasizing the culpability of Marshall and others focusing on the violent reaction of the community.
Milton Burns was the special agent for the Utah Fuel Company, assigned to keep the peace and enforce company policy. He was a native of the area, a former sheriff, the father of six children, and a man who was immensely popular with the locals. The children especially loved him because he would give them rides on his large gray horse as he made the rounds. It was commonly known, however, that Burns was a Klan member. Prior to the shooting, Marshall had had an argument with Burns and another company official and had “drawn his time” (quit and received his paycheck). Later that day, Marshall hid under a wagon bridge and confronted Burns as he was making his rounds of the company site. According to two small boys, the sole eyewitnesses to the case, when Burns tried to take Marshall’s rifle from him, Marshall shot him five times, stomped him in the face, and fled. Burns died the following evening and, according to some accounts, identified his killer. A forty-man posse was sent out after Marshall, who was discovered three days later in the shack he shared with another black miner. His housemate had turned him in for the $250 reward.
According to the 1925 Price, Utah, Sun Advocate, Marshall was considered a “bad actor,” having already put bullets into both a girl in Rolapp and another black man named Ras Jackson in Grand County. After apprehending Marshall, company officials drove him down to the Price Courthouse. There an angry mob of local citizens seized Marshall from the car and drove him, in a caravan one hundred cars long, three miles to “the hanging tree east of Price.” They strung Marshall up, lifting him thirty-five feet into the air, where he dangled for almost ten minutes until deputies arrived to cut him down. After a few minutes he revived, and someone suggested that he be shot, but the crowd yelled, “No! Let him suffer.” The deputies tried to put Marshall back into the police car, but he was wrested from their hold once more and hung again, this time being jerked around until he died from a broken neck.
A reporter from the Sun Advocate indicated that the crowd wasn’t the typical one you’d expect for a group of lynchers: “Your neighbors, your friends, the tradespeople with whom you are wont to barter day by day, public employees, folks prominent in church and social circles, and your real conception of a ‘mob’ might have undergone a radical turnover … No attempt at concealment was made by any member of the lynching party … [there was] quite a sprinkling of women—the wives and mothers of the good folks of the town. And, too, there were even some children.”
One man bragged about attending the lynching claiming, “It’s a proud day for me that I helped pull the rope.” Someone took pictures of the hanging and the crowd gathered around; these were reprinted as a package of postcards and sold door to door for twenty-five cents. Under pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Governor George Dern issued eleven warrants for the arrest of some of the most prominent citizens in Castle Gate for first degree murder. At the trial, over one hundred witnesses refused to identify them as the perpetrators, and all were released without charge.
It wasn’t until 1998 on what locals called “a day of reconciliation” that Marshall was given a funeral service and a proper burial. In 1925, the African American residents of Carbon County, numbering just over a hundred, had taken up a collection to bury Marshall, but they lacked the funds to put up a gravestone. The plaque erected in 1998 reads: “Robert Marshall: Lynched June 18, 1925, A Victim of Intolerance. May God forgive.” Marshall was the last man to be lynched in the American West.
Zeph knew many of the men who had been involved in the lynching, and he was fundamentally disturbed by the collective air of approval surrounding what local residents considered to be an act of “justice.” Zeph had consoled the miners during the strike of 1922 and wept over their corpses in the explosion of 1924. As a foreman he had always exhibited fairness and compassion, leading his workers by example. The lynching of Marshall signified that his efforts of tolerance had not tempered the rash and rough character of the mining town he had served for four years. Since the explosion, Maud had been pressuring Zeph to leave—she couldn’t bear the thought of him dying in the mine—and now Zeph had his own reasons to move on. In the fall of 1925, Zeph and Maud packed up their belongings. With their three small boys, they drove past the two monumental walls of the Castle Gate to Provo, never to return to Carbon County again.
In Provo, they bought a small farm (part of Maud’s scheme), but Zeph could never make it profitable. He applied at Geneva Steel, a company where the coke from Castle Gate was used to fire the steel furnaces, but he was unable to get work because his skills were so specialized for coal mining. Maud and Zeph took in boarders, both of them doing the cooking and washing dishes. A year later, Zeph was offered a job developing a small mine in Coos Bay, Oregon. Maud cried over the prospect of leaving Provo, but she decided to support her husband in the work he knew best. Zeph assured her that his return to mining would only be temporary.
In Oregon the mines were more primitive. Everything was modernized and electric in the Castle Gate mine, but Zeph’s Oregon mine was run primarily by manual labor. Located fourteen miles outside of the nearest town, it could only be reached by an unimproved road that disappeared in the rainy season. The coal was of lower quality and had to be carried out of the mines by mules.
Zeph loved mules almost as much as he loved people. Sensing this, his mules would follow him around like dogs, waiting to be patted or rubbing up against him. But Zeph was no pushover. Mules can be difficult to manage, and if they misbehaved, Zeph would whack them with something that made a loud noise or twist a rope around their noses to get their attention. My grandfather Bob remembered a particular mule named Barney, who was small but smart and often was the lead mule pulling the cars out of the mine. One day, Barney was groaning and jerking, struggling to start the car of ten tons of coal. The boys yelled, “Come on, Barney,” trying to encourage the little mule. Zeph walked up and hit him.
Miner and mule in Coos Bay, Oregon mine
My grandpa reprimanded his father, saying, “Oh, Dad, that poor thing’s trying.”
Zeph stuck his hand between Barney’s neck and the harness to show that the mule wasn’t even touching it. Knowing the jig was up, Barney leaned up against the collar and pulled the coal out. My grandfather observed that the mules never resented Zeph for his discipline because he was fair. Although this assertion is hard to justify, Zeph did ensure that the men who worked for him treated the mules humanely. One man who worked for Zeph always pestered the mules and jabbed them in the ribs. One day he was throwing lumps of coal at a mule because it stopped pulling a car. The animal had intentionally halted in the narrowest passageway of the mine, waiting for the miner. When the man sidled by to yank the mule forward, it leaned against him, pressing the man’s body against the wall of the mine with all of its 1,200 pounds. Zeph heard the man’s screams, and when he walked into the room, the mule let up. The man slumped to the ground. Zeph assessed the situation and reprimanded the miner instead of the mule: “Don’t nag him every time you go by. If there’s something he needs to do, you see that he does it.”
Bob, Bill, Maud, Zeph, and Boyd in family picture, Coos Bay, Oregon, circa 1936
Zeph’s mine was never very successful; during the Depression, demands for coal were low, and the family was much more financially strained than they had been in Castle Gate. Because they always planned to return to Provo, Zeph built only a simple cabin for the family in Oregon, and all their fine furnishings remained in storage in Utah. Once it became apparent that the move to Coos Bay was permanent, Maud gave all her nice things to her sister. She summoned her energies and made the most of their situation. She helped organize a branch of the LDS Church in Coos Bay and taught Sunday school in her cabin. She started a book group among the people in the town, and they read the classics together. Most were poorly educated and unfamiliar with books, but many gained a respect for fine literature as Maud dramatized it out loud.
The boys spent most of their time outside of school working with their father. After the coal was mined and carried out by mules, Zeph and his sons would take the coal into town in a dump truck that had no brakes. Usually there was little traffic in the fourteen miles between the mine and Coos Bay, but once in a while the police would stop cars in the middle of the road. On one such occasion, Zeph had to drag the truck along the guard rail to slow it down, only stopping when he ran into the back of somebody’s bumper. The truck was not dependable in other ways, and it would occasionally dump its load in the middle of town. The boys, prepared with shovels, would jump out, jam pieces of wood under the tires to stop the truck, and shovel the coal back in—a humiliating experience because the local teenagers attended the same school.
Bill, Bobby, and Boyd also helped their mother at home with the sweeping and heavy cleaning, as she had a bad heart. Under her encouragement, they maintained good grades, finishing high school with honors. Bob graduated in 1936, but he didn’t have enough money for college, so he worked in a woodshop for the next three years. The Thomas family held a council and decided that Boyd would work to support Bill and Bob while they were getting an education. Both sons enjoyed a year at the University of Oregon, but they returned when Maud died of kidney failure in 1939.
By this time, Zeph had developed bronchial asthma from working in the mines for thirty-eight years, and Bob determined the only way to keep him alive was to relocate to a higher and drier climate. Bob dropped out of school and moved to St. George, Utah, where he set up a cabinetmaking shop to support his father. Despite the change to a less humid environment, Zeph’s spirits never improved. His illness prevented him from working, and his idleness left him despondent. He understood the sacrifice Bob was making to care for him, and he missed Maud.
After a year, Bob closed the shop. Wood was scarce due to the war effort. Bob moved back to Oregon and began working in the shipyards, saving money for college. His father joined him there later until Zeph passed away in 1943 at the age of fifty.
Zeph’s sons shipped his body back to St. George, where Maud was buried, and told their relatives that their father had died of a broken heart. According to my father, “Zeph and Maud were always more successful as a combination: Maud couldn’t sew, so Zeph would read a pattern and cut the fabric, and she would sew a straight line where he directed her.” Despite her bad health, Maud’s vitality is what brought energy to a household supported by rigorous and oftentimes discouraging labor.
A crowd of rough looking men attended Zeph’s funeral, and among them were those who had been at odds with Zeph during his lifetime. One estranged brother whom Zeph had not heard from in thirty years traveled from California to pay his respects to the brother he claimed had “terrorized” his life: “I would be having a really great time, and here [Zeph] would dance by and say, ‘Watch it!’ He was acutely aware of anything even bordering on impropriety … However, he didn’t expect of me what he demanded of himself.” A miner whom Zeph had fired from the Castle Gate mine showed up, telling Bill, Bob, and Boyd that Zeph was the finest man he had ever known. That particular miner had had a reputation for being reckless. In charge of pulling pillars (columns left behind in the room and pillar method of mining), he had been more concerned about making money than with safety. After he removed pillars that Zeph had instructed to leave alone, Zeph sent him on his way, because the man was endangering not only his own life, but also the lives of others. The miner wanted Zeph’s boys to know that their father “had been kind to him at a time when he didn’t deserve kindness.”
Zeph and Maud, circa 1933
My grandpa was in charge of delivering the last address over his father’s grave. He must have thought about his mother, Maud, and the many speeches she had been asked to give over the years. Bob had barely a year of college under his belt and was only twenty-five years old, but he had inherited his mother’s love of literature. I imagine Bob’s comments bore the mark of Maud’s style: “When we say that ‘Dad was quiet’ we have said nothing, yet everything. No pretense or hypocrisy rested easy in his company, for he was without guile. True to himself, he was false to no man. He accepted no compromise with truth, yet had acquired a quiet tolerance which made his respect a thing to be cherished. ‘Praise from the Emperor,’ Mother called it—even as children Dad’s few words of praise were long remembered. He expected everyone to do his best, and those who worked and lived with him tried just a little harder in his presence.”