10

Get the Men Out

Before Zeph had applied for the job of foreman at the Castle Gate mine, he was required to pass the state licensing exam, a written test that would have been a significant challenge for a man with a sixth-grade education. The job meant a significant raise in salary and a promotion in responsibility; most foremen supervised an average of a hundred men. In 1918, the US Bureau of Mines listed the following job qualifications:

Physical strength; good health; more than average ability; ability to handle men. He should have large practical experience and a general knowledge of coal-mining conditions as to methods, safety requirements, etc. He should have had experience as pusher, repairman and coalminer, or engineer, and be capable of reading mine maps and laying out work at coal mines. He should have a certificate of competency.

Maud, although never adept at sewing, cooking, or homemaking—she was always off reading when her mother tried to teach her these womanly arts—was confident in the tasks of the mind. She began tutoring Zeph, drilling him on the questions in the practice exam. This went smoothly at first, but then they reached an impasse.

“What is the first thing you would do, and what procedure do you follow, if the electricity stops and the fans go out?”

“Get the men out,” Zeph replied.

Maud must have teased her husband encouragingly, “Now wait a minute. You have a whole page, and all you said was, ‘Get the men out.’ Come on. What do you do first? Then finally, of course you get the men out.”

But Zeph had learned one thing from his father—a quality in Evan that was probably called obstinacy, but in Zeph took on the cast of conviction. “No, no. You don’t do anything else. You get the men out.” No matter how many times Maud quizzed him, his answer remained the same. She finally gave up and hoped that the question wouldn’t appear on the real exam.

But this question came up first, and Zeph wrote, doubtless in a cursive markedly less elegant than his wife’s, “Get the men out.”

The general inspector stopped him later that day to tell him, “Zeph, you created a bit of a sensation with your exam. You were the only one who said what we wanted everyone to do. Get the men out. We left that big blank so that people would fool around with it. But Zeph, you were the only one who said, ‘Get the men out.’”

Although he respected the wisdom of his wife, this was an answer Zeph knew from his experience in the mines, a world that Maud saw from only the outside. An inquisition into the explosion at Winter Quarters revealed that had the men run into the corridor leading to Mine No. 1 instead of Mine No. 4, their lives would have been spared. Evan Jr. and Frederick had died from gas, not from the explosion. Had the miners been instructed better, Zeph wouldn’t have lost his older brothers.

Zeph was well aware that as foreman, in addition to making hiring decisions, assigning rooms to the tonnage miners, and managing other daily activities, he was primarily responsible for the safety of his miners.

Among the photographs we have of the mining camps is one from 1924 after Zeph had been a foreman at Castle Gate for three years. Zeph, in a cap and tie, watches his crew compete in rescue exercises. Five young men angle back in a line, all wearing round helmets with fishbowl-like glass over the opening in the front. Underneath, near the mouth, two rubber tubes like walrus tusks attach the helmet to the oxygen tanks that the men carry on their chests. The man in the foreground has rolled-up white sleeves, revealing a young, wiry arm. His overalls are cuffed twice. He turns his helmet toward the camera, peering through one bulbous eye. “Co. ANNUAL FIELD DAY” is printed on a white banner strung along a brick building behind. The rescue equipment Zeph’s crew wears is a similar model to those the rescue crew wore in retrieving the bodies from Winter Quarters.

Once appointed foreman, Zeph refused to hire or promote the workers he supervised based on race or nationality, a fact that put him at odds with some of his Welsh friends and relatives, but earned him wide respect for fairness. The years following the 1922 strike continued to be bad ones for coal. Castle Gate No. 1 was closed due to a lack of orders for coal, and in March 1924, Zeph assigned all married miners to Castle Gate No. 2 to ensure that they would have wages to feed their families.

Castle Gate was a mine known for taking precautions. In 1892, a territorial inspector had visited and come away favorably impressed, claiming “that altogether this is a mine where no expense is spared to provide for the safety of its workers and methods that are in daily use here, which are not found in any other part of the mining world.” Castle Gate had a sprinkler system to keep coal dust down even before it was discovered to be flammable because it had been known for many years that coal dust caused black lung. To prevent deaths from cave-ins, shots were fired electrically when all miners were out of the mine. In 1924, Castle Gate received two more technological improvements: a machine that had been developed to undercut coal from the bottom and electric headlamps to replace the open-flame carbide lamps. On March 8, these electric lamps were still packed in boxes, waiting in the storehouse for the charging apparatus that had not yet arrived.

Zeph’s crew competing at Annual Field Day, 1924

For miners who had only been working one to two days a week, the eight-hour shift offered on March 8 in Mine No. 2 was considered a boon. Many residents of Castle Gate, however, felt uneasy about going to work that day. Fay Thacker reported having a strong feeling that he shouldn’t go in Mine No. 2. He went to the engineer who was making improvements in Mine No. 3 and asked for a job for himself and three of his friends. Otto MacDonald, a farmer to whom Fay and his wife gave shelter during the winter months, decided to wait a few days before returning to his farm and took advantage of the eight-hour shift offered in Mine No. 2. Benjamin Thomas was a butcher and the LDS bishop of Castle Gate. Throughout his life, he had commented to his family and friends about having been given strong spiritual warnings not to work in the mine. His shop closed when the town fell on hard times, so he worked at the tipple above ground. On March 8, the eight-hour shift was too enticing, so he decided to ignore his repeated premonitions and asked for a slip to go down. For no apparent reason, mine plumber Frank Mangone decided not to go to work. His wife asked him if he was sick. He replied, “I’m not sick. I’m just not going,” and spent the day with his children, who were thrilled to have their father home on a Saturday.

At six thirty in the morning the miners took the mantrip to their assigned rooms. The fireboss made his regular rounds in the mine with a miner’s safety lamp, the flame of which was encased in a cylinder of tightly woven mesh to prevent it from igniting the gases outside. When a flammable gas was present, a blue halo would form around the tip of the flame in the lamp, and the length of the halo determined if the levels were dangerous and the mine needed to be evacuated. That morning the fireboss found a pocket of gas in room number two, near the roof where coal had been shot down the night before. He climbed on top of the pile of blasted-out coal to investigate. His headlamp was blown out, so he stepped back down to relight his lamp from the flames of two workers loading the coal.

At the mouth of the mine, Zeph was called to the phone just as he was about to escort his good friend, mining inspector Jack Thorpe, into the tunnels. Zeph excused himself, and Thorpe entered the mine without him. On the telephone, Zeph heard only the first words of the local blacksmith, who called to talk about the repairs on Bill’s bike, when he heard a boom and the mountain shook. He ran to the entrance where, according to one man’s diary: “smoke and gas was coming from all three entries so thick that if a man walked up to the mouth of any … and stood there for two or three minutes he would have been overcome with gas.”

Later, it was determined that the fireboss ignited the methane from the roof when he relit his lamp. The initial blast split as it exited the room, with the main force blowing out toward the open air where Thorpe had just stepped inside the mine. His wife Eva had dreamt the night before about “a ball of fire that shot many streamers of fire to all her neighbors. When the last streamer of fire hit their house she screamed, ‘Jack you’re going to burn.’” A secondary gust rushed toward the interior of the mine, where it lost much of its force and merely blew out the lamps of the men working in the farthermost section. The air was full of coal dust from the explosion, as well as the dust that had accumulated during the days when the mine had lain idle. (According to tests by the US Bureau of Mines, Castle Gate produced the most flammable coal in the country.) When the miners in this section relit their carbide lamps, a second explosion ripped through the rooms just seconds after the first, killing the remainder of the 171 men in the mine. Twenty minutes later, a third boom caved in the main portal, blocking the first thirty feet. Not one of the miners escaped alive. Jack Thorpe was killed instantly; Zeph was saved only by a blacksmith’s phone call.

Courtesy of Western Mining and Railroad Museum

Townspeople waiting for rescuers after Castle Gate explosion, 1924

After the sound of the explosion, a whistle shrieked out into the town to indicate there had been an accident. A man working in the mining office across from the Thomas’s home ran up to the door and told Maud, “Zeph’s okay.” Bobby stepped out on the porch. He was five years old and didn’t entirely understand what had happened, but he remembered more clearly than any other image of his early years the women running past his house to the mine, crying and screaming.

Rescue efforts started immediately. Engines from the Price and Helper fire stations sprayed water into the mine to put out fires, but their efforts were useless. Rescue teams put on forty-pound packs containing oxygen and breathing apparatuses—goggles had replaced the astronautlike helmet Zeph had worn for mine-safety training. From the blast of the explosion, eight-inch thick water pipes were “turned out like straws.” The sprinkler system, which was supposed to prevent coal dust from igniting, spewed into the mine from the twisted pipes, filling some parts with up to ten feet of water. Thomas Hilton and three other men entered the mine first to turn off the water to prevent any injured men from drowning. They carried in a rope to serve as a lifeline. One hundred yards in and halfway to the valve, Hilton began to feel dizzy and ran for the outside. Near the entrance, his legs buckled and he fell unconscious. Zeph and the general manager, Mr. Littlejohn, put handkerchiefs over their faces and dragged Hilton out. They carried him to the Castle Gate cemetery, not far from the entrance, and propped him up on a tombstone until he regained consciousness.

Rescue crews arrived from all over Carbon County. Even a coal mine in Wyoming volunteered to send in a rescue crew. Miners from Peerless, Winter Quarters, Standardsville, Sunnyside, and Castle Gate were divided into three shifts of eight crews each, which entered the mine on a rotating basis as the previous group’s oxygen supplies were spent. Salt Lake residents and pet store owners donated forty-three canaries to help detect the presence of afterdamp, the carbon monoxide gas that had killed 123 miners at Winter Quarters. The rescuers would descend down the corridors of the mines where fires still burned and rocks and debris obstructed their path. In front of their masks, they would hold a canary cage, and once the bird fell from its roost, the miners knew they were in danger and would not press on. The public, reading the news of the disaster, were assured that the birds would “recover under treatment.”

One of the rescuers, George Wilson, captain of the Standardsville team and a seasoned miner, was killed in the rescue efforts when the mask of one of his crewmen malfunctioned. Wilson carried the man to safety, but the miner’s flailing arms knocked off Wilson’s nose clip. Five minutes later, Wilson died from inhaling the poisonous gas, adding another mining casualty to a family who had lost three sons and a father in the Winter Quarters explosion.

Rescue efforts persisted around the clock, and at one in the morning on March 9, the first body was carried out of the mine. By the next day, twenty-six dead men had been retrieved. Because they had all been killed by the explosion instead of gas, many were burned and mutilated beyond recognition. A local newspaper described the scene: “As sweating miners with lamp-lit caps emerged from the tunnel with their comrades’ bodies, up above them on the road, a hundred yards away, this morning stood for a time a group of wailing women, wives of alien [foreign] miners who lifted their appeals for mercy to the heavens. ‘O dolor mia, o dolor mia,’ cried Italians, while Austrians and Serbians wept out their grief in their own tongues. It became necessary to send them home; their unrestrained sorrow was too contagious.”

Zeph (far left) with Castle Gate rescue crew, 1924

Store owner Aton Dupin, a Croatian immigrant who spoke English with a southern accent, had worked in the Castle Gate mine prior to opening his shop. He volunteered to load the bodies into his delivery truck, driving them to the amusement hall, where they were laid out to be identified. After performing this service, he fell ill for the first time in his life, recognizing his comrades among the dismembered corpses. The women were advised not to ask to see the bodies of their husbands, sons, and fathers, but to remember instead how they saw them last. Some still insisted. A newspaper reported: “All day Tuesday and Wednesday hundreds of people visited the morgue. In the amusement hall the dance floor … is filled with caskets of various shades and colors. Many of the women have become hysterical and have had to be led away from the caskets of husbands and sons as they have been permitted in some instances to look at the faces of their loved ones. After Wednesday, the company doctor forbade any further viewing of the dead beyond purposes of identification to protect the sanity of the living.”

Maud did not see Zeph for many days. Occupied with coordinating rescue efforts and identifying the dead, he did not return home until after March 18, when all 171 bodies of the miners were removed from the mine, totaling 172 dead with the addition of George Wilson. The women whose men were not killed in the explosion joined forces with the Red Cross to cook meals for the rescue workers and the grieving families.

The final tally of the dead listed seventy-six American-born (including two African Americans listed as “Negros”), forty-nine Greeks, twenty-two Italians, eight Japanese, seven English, two Scots, and one Belgian. Of those, 114 miners were married, and they left behind 417 dependents. Nobody blamed my great-grandfather for his decision to give the work to the married men. Regardless, Zeph felt responsible and volunteered to resign his position, a decision supported by Maud, who wanted to leave the dangers of the coalfield. When reporting his decision to his superiors, he committed to getting the mine back in working order, which was at least a year’s project—the coal-cutting machines had been ripped apart by the blast; an eight-hundred-pound steel door had been blown a half mile across the canyon; roof timbers and rails sailed as high as five thousand feet; and the coal along the tunnels had been coked by the extreme temperatures.

Courtesy of Western Mining and Railroad Museum

Caskets in Castle Gate Community Hall, 1924

Religious and secular leaders from the surrounding communities flocked to attend the funerals. They included Utah Governor Charles Mabey, Archbishop Peter Fumason-Bondi (an apostolic delegate from Washington State), Bishop Joseph S. Glass of Salt Lake City, Italian Consul Fortunato Anselmo, and President Heber J. Grant, the prophet, or head, of the LDS Church. President Grant had traveled from Salt Lake City, and he stayed with Zeph and Maud. For the Mormons of this small town, a visit by the prophet would be regarded as a significant event. He was a leader as respected in the LDS ranks as the Pope is among Catholics. My grand-father remembers him, a man of small stature, standing in the living room with tears running down his face. He had been out among the women and knew nothing he could say would comfort them.

Since the Winter Quarters explosion, workmen’s compensation laws had been put into place, which included state-provided death insurance. The Utah Fuel Company was independently insured, and it covered the funeral costs, in addition to sixteen-dollar weekly stipends to widows for a period of six years. Governor Charles Mabey designated a committee to distribute the $132,445 that had been raised by public donations. After the disaster, life was particularly hard for the Greek, Italian, and African American widows, who were not assimilated into general society. According to Greek culture, women’s and men’s spheres were separate, with many Greek women not venturing far beyond the home. By custom, widows did not remarry, and several of those from Castle Gate used the money given to them to return to their native country. Most of the Italian widows who stayed in Carbon County took new husbands; the two who remained single ran a bootlegging business to survive. Making ends meet was even more of a struggle for one African American widow who was not legally married and was granted compensation funds only after the issuance of a court order.

According to one historian: “With immigrants from the Balkans and Mediterranean initial discrimination was strong but of relatively short duration and never so violent as that experienced by Blacks. Public opinion kept these new immigrants out of certain areas of towns and cities and frowned on intermarriage.” The African American miners who had entered Utah as strikebreakers in 1922 were discriminated against not only for their color, but also for taking over other miners’ jobs. One exception was Prince Alexander, who had come to Carbon County in 1914 and was among those killed in the Castle Gate explosion. He was an educated man, formerly a preacher, and had impeccable manners, which initially drew the mockery of his fellow miners. But in the flu pandemic of 1919, Prince nursed the sick in Castle Gate, gaining a reputation as a savior to many in the camp. After the March 8 disaster, he was buried in the Castle Gate cemetery next to miners of other ethnicities. The two men listed as Negroes in the newspaper’s enumeration of the dead were Ed Willis and Archie Henderson; In death, Prince Alexander had become assimilated into the general category of American. His coworkers might have considered this an honor that Prince had somehow transcended his race. Although the racism inherent in such a sentiment is evident, Prince was a man who was able to look beyond the prejudices of others and help them look beyond their own. Likely, my great-grandfather Zeph knew him, and I hope he admired Prince, as I do.