Founded
in 1868, Carbon, Wyoming was an important coal mining town for the Union
Pacific Railroad company, who was racing to complete their transcontinental line. From the scattered ruins and size of the
cemetery, it would appear that Carbon was no larger than a couple
hundred residents, but at its height, it was probably over a thousand
people. Different sources report a few conflicting figures. Census
data from 1900 shows Carbon to be about 650 residents, but this was
well after its peak population. The 1900 Wyoming Business Directory
gives Carbon a round 1,000 residents, as does an 1894 fire insurance
map available through the Library of Congress. At its height, there
were seven different mines in operation, worked by roughly 600
miners, so it stands to reason that if women and children were added
to this number, the total population would be somewhere north of
1,500. Exact population figures from the late 1800s sources are
dubious—many of the miners were immigrants who constructed
“dugouts” in the hillsides, and were probably not counted in
official tallies. Whatever the figure, it is of little doubt that
Carbon was an important city in frontier Wyoming. Author Donald
Miller claims that it “grew to rival nearby Cheyenne.”
Photo by Nick Swartz |
The
town expanded quickly, and these dugout or stone structures were
built in lieu of wood, which is patently unavailable in the Shirley
Basin. As author Mary Lou Pence writes in Ghost Towns of
Wyoming that in early Carbon,
“reclining against the sage slopes, the stovepipes bobbed upward
and outward like inquisitive gopher heads.” Census data shows
many of the immigrants were first generation Americans, a large
portion of Finnish, Welsh, and Scottish descent. One crude,
hand-drawn map I obtained from the museum in nearby Hanna labels one
domicile as containing the “town's only negro.”
Coal
was the lifeblood of the town. The land around Carbon was leased by
Thomas Wardell in 1868 from the Union Pacific company. He then sold
the mined coal back to the Union Pacific. At Carbon's peak, 200 tons
of coal per day was being harvested. At six dollars per ton, the
buyback price set by the lessee, Wardell was one rich fellow by late
1800s standards (or by any standards). The Union Pacific did not
appreciate having to buy coal that was mined from land they owned,
and eventually ended Wardell's lease. From the town's founding,
conflict abounded. The Union Pacific felt it did not exert enough
control of Carbon's mineral interests, and the town's labor force was
at the mercy of greedy businessmen. This, combined with the
harshness of the landscape, Carbon's propensity for accidents and
fire, and lack of water, was an unsustainable cocktail. Labor
strikes were commonplace, the first occurring 1870, just a short two
years after the founding of the town. Strikes also occurred in 1871,
1873, and in 1874, when workers were suspended during the Union
Pacific's takeover of mining operations from Wyoming Coal Company.
Turbulently, mining continued through the 1890s, when the frustrated
Union Pacific shifted its coal interest to nearby Hanna, a
quintessential company town, where even the doctors were under employ
of the railroad. Like many Western towns, Carbon only lasted as long
as its extractable resources. Prophetically, the editor of the
Laramie Sentinel wrote
in an 1878 profile, “I find that the deposit of coal convenient for
mining in this immediate vicinity is likely to soon be exhausted...
In several localities in the neighborhood the mines are on fire and
the beds of coal are being gradually but surely consumed.” Thus
Carbon's reign was short-lived, but during its hurried life, it
provided history with a snapshot of the
mythical Old West.
Carbon in its short heyday (from Hanna Basin Museum) |
For
residents of Carbon, life was not easy. For most, it consisted of
long days mining coal, under constant threat of fire, explosion,
Indian attack or the wild weather of the plains. There are several
documented accidents, including horrific mining mishaps, gruesome
railroad fatalities, devastating fires, and crippling blizzards.
Local newspapers of the day, such as the Laramie Sentinel
and Laramie
Independent, abound with stories
of mining accidents, of “caves” occurring, and of men receiving
“fearful lacerations” and of being buried “under 20 or 30 tons
of rock and debris.” Medical treatment was crude—one miner died
“in consequence of a finger wound from a piece of rust iron.”
One man, recently laid off from the mine, drunkenly trespassed into a
mining site, “and without knowledge of the premises, walked into
the hole. His body was cold when found.” These frightful
accidents, it seems, were a bit commonplace, and coverage of them was
decidedly blunt. For example, here is an excerpt from an article
covering one such ghastly incident:
“This
morning at about half past ten o'clock two men, Fassett and Wilpenn,
were very badly injured by a premature explosion of a blast in one of
the mines of this place. Fassett's face and limbs are mutilated in a
fearful manner. It is thought now that both parties will recover...
Later reports state that both men will probably lose an eye, and
perhaps both.”
It
was truly a tough place. In one mining accident involving a German
immigrant, it is reported that the family was more concerned with the
victim's paycheck than the actual loss of a family member: “yet
hardly had the deceased been buried, before they were around to the
coal company's office to obtain the wages that were due Vollmert.”
Unfortunately
children were not exempt from these coaling accidents. To prevent
build-up of toxic and volatile gas in the mines, crude ventilation
systems were devised wherein doors would be opened and closed
intermittently to clear the mine of vapors with aide of the
prevailing winds. Since men were needed for the more demanding jobs
“young boys” operated the ventilation systems, according to
Donald Miller. Ventilation was of the utmost importance, as
headlamps at this point in time were essentially oil-powered,
open-flame candle sombreros. Once a child reached adolescence, he
was given the dubious honor of working as a “spragger.” A
spragger, as Miller explains, shoved “pointed wooden poles into the
spokes of ore cars” to decelerate them as they entered the mine,
while other teenagers were responsible for quickly removing the
“sprags” from the moving cars when they needed to pick up speed.
You can imagine that a twenty-year-old man with no burn scars and ten
fingers was a rare find in Carbon. All told, 41 miners died in
underneath Carbon in its history, according to the Hanna Basin
Museum, an average of a little more than one per year. Carbon was
spared any huge single mining catastrophe, but the city of Hanna,
where many Carbonites were forced to settle after Carbon was
abandoned, suffered horrific losses from two separate mining
explosions in 1903 and 1908, the first killing 169 miners, the
second, 59. On my first visit to Carbon's cemetery, I noted the
presence of a headstone with the haunting inscription: “Died in
Hanna Explosion. June 30, 1903. Age 19 Yrs. 11 Ms.
Railroad
accidents were equally as frequent. News reports were littered with
reports of heads being severed, limbs being thrashed, and brakemen
losing control. Journalists covered these misfortunes in the same
matter-of-fact manner, sparing no gruesome detail, which has a way of
shedding light on the ruggedness and what their lives must have
consisted of. One blunt headline in the Rawlins Sentinel
in 1879 reads simply: “LOST A
THUMB.” One 1873 Laramie Independent article
about a train wreck survivor states “the fact that he was pressed
between the track and the ash pan goes to show that a man may, in a
pinch, take up a very small space.” Some even made light of
gruesome like this Independent article
about a man who was dragged 20 feet by a train:
“everyone
present thought him fearfully mangled, from the condition of his
clothing, and no one ventured to touch him, so nothing was done until
the arrival of Doctor Harris. On examination, he discovered that the
clothing was about all that was damaged, and that Mr. Charles Cameron
[the victim] could be thoroughly renovated at B. Hellman's clothing
store.”
From the 1900 Wyoming Business Directory, an ad for Carbon's 600-seat opera house |
When
its citizens weren't being dragged by trains or crushed underneath
tons of coal, they had other hazards to contend with, namely fire,
the elements, and Indians. Indian raids were somewhat common, and
the newspapers, it seems, loved stories of “Bad Indians,” and
sought to paint a sinister portrait of Native Americans when at all
possible. One Rawlins Sentinel article, about Utes setting
fires to white property closed by asking, “is it not time the
government took those red devils in hand?” One article stated,
“from all appearances a general Indian outbreak may be
anticipated,” as if “Indian” were some kind of plague that
could sweep through an elementary school like chicken pox. Most
actual raids involved the theft of livestock and took place away from
the city itself. Some resulted in ranchers being “cruelly beat”
or sometimes killed. Though hysteria over Indian encounters abounded,
it appears, in Carbon anyway, the threat of Indians was largely hype,
and residents were far more likely to lose a limb or two, or a head,
by way of their own industrial doing.
Fires
were common in Carbon, and because the city's water had to be pumped
in from a well two miles away, there was often little to do but
congregate with the townsfolk and watch the show. In 1873 a shoe
shop was set ablaze, according to the Rawlins Sentinel, who,
of course, covered the story with their signature frankness, “the
building was nearly destroyed when the fire was discovered, and
nothing was saved. A young German man was burned up in the
building.” Two larger fires devastated Carbon, the second so badly
that it helped set in motion the permanent abandonment of the town.
According to the Wyoming Almanac, this 1890 fire was started
when a lodger at the Scranton House Hotel, Carbon's largest, knocked
over a kerosene lamp while skirmishing with bed bugs. It destroyed
almost the whole central business district of Carbon. Ironically,
what still stands today are the walls of the stone domiciles that
belonged to the cities poorer residents. Because wood was scarce, it
was something of a status symbol, but patently more prone to fire and
time. So it is the city's working class residents who have the last
laugh.
One of the remaining stone walls in Carbon (photo by Nick Swartz) |
My wife Diana in quiet contemplation |
Escaping
the elements was a constant necessity in Carbon, as well as the rest
of the state. With no trees and a constant wind, it was often
difficult to even get structures to stand upright. Donald Miller
notes that there were four churches in Carbon, one of which blew down
three times before being completed. Talk about devotion. Winters
were brutal. Because Americans' sense of the West is derived from
Hollywood, people do not realize that in Wyoming winter lasts eight
months and temperatures can, with regularity, plummet to 30 below
zero. One Laramie Independent letter-to-the-editor from 1873 reads,
“the weather is excessively cold tonight. The mercury has punched
the top clear out of our thermometer and started up the other side of
the house.” Another story in 1869 recounts the tragic tale of two
rail workers, who, in the grips of a blizzard, failed to hear an
approaching train and were struck and snagged, “one in the driving
wheel of the engine and literally torn to pieces... the other was
caught below the pilot of the engine and similarly ground up.”
Considering
their circumstances, it is no wonder many of Carbon's residents
turned to booze. Alcoholism was rampant on the frontier, and Carbon
was no exception. By 1875, there was a temperance society in town
called the Sons of Temperance. A letter-to-the-editor from 1875
stated that in Carbon “a good hotel is much needed, and a sober
shoemaker would get rich here. In the past our shoemakers have
invariably wet their leather too much.” Fights were common. There
were numerous saloons. Men were known to get “drunk enough to be
ugly and quarrelsome” as one newspaper reported.
There
were, however, some bright spots that shown through the coal dust.
There were artists—a married couple, the Silvises, “excell[ed] as
artists, and receive[d] visitors daily.” There was also music.
The Sons of Temperance hosted events where the Carbon String Band
would perform. There was also a singing school for children. When I
visited the Hanna Basin Museum, I was shown several artifacts of the
musical history of both Carbon and Hanna. The curator, a sweet old
lady named Nancy Anderson, showed me around and explained that in
these lonely coal towns, music provided an escape from bleakness.
My research sources are sharply biased in favor of death and
destruction— newspapers do not report if someone had a cheerful day
and nothing bad happened to him. Headlines do not read: Still
Have Both Thumbs. Life surely had bright spots for these people.
The fact that they were in such a wild, dangerous place and managed
to construct a functioning city and a new way of life must have
provided some solace. Business Directory records show that there was
a 600-seat opera house in town, where much of the town probably
congregated to hear the bands or kids' choir concerts. There was a
successful school, run by a devoted teacher and talented artist named
Mr. Hilton. There was a billiard hall and numerous churches, some of
which have foundations still standing. The people would have had to
be close to one another. I can see no other way for such a place to
have thrived. The horrific events that I have quoted from the
newspapers always contained a follow-up obituary or described how the
whole town was given a day off to mourn. One article from 1871
reports the safe birth of quadruplets in Carbon to a happy new mother
named Mooney. The odds of quadruplets being born and safely
delivered in a town of 1,000 in 1871 must have been astronomical.
But Carbon was an unlikely place. The city's most unlikely resident:
a cockatoo owned by a local shop owner. The bird was it seems,
something of a rascal, as he could be found “pulling pins out of
garments, drawing nails out of shingles on the roof, and kissing the
ladies and children in a very tender manner.”
So
there was a certain duality to Carbon—gloomy, dangerous, bleak,
lifeless, yet wild, exuberant, communal, and industrious. One final
quote from a Laramie Sentinel correspondent describing Carbon
sums up the curious and conflicting nature of the town:
“the little window gardens were there, with beautiful young flowers
making the air fragrant with perfume, and pretty cages of
domesticated singing birds made music all around. I wish I could
have noted the fact that this cheerfulness was general in the town,
but it is not. It is confined to a few families.”
By
the turn of the twentieth century, mining in Carbon had largely
ceased, and the Union Pacific, frustrated by the constant tension
between laborers and management, and facing a dwindling supply of
coal, moved their mining operations to Hanna. By 1908, Carbon's
population was down to 15 souls, and the town contained only one
business: John Milliken's “Saloon and Ice Dealer.” Even the
Carbon State Bank had moved to Hanna. Like so many other towns in
the West, the tide of capitalism had turned, and Carbon was left to
fallow.
Like Carbon, this poor antelope did not make it. (photo: Nick Swartz) |
Sunset at the Carbon cemetery (photo: Nick Swartz) |
Sources:
Meschter, Daniel Y. 1970. A Carbon County Chronology.
Self-published, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Miller, Donald C. 1977. Ghost Towns of Wyoming. Boulder, CO:Pruett Publishing
Pence,
Mary Lou and Homsher, Lola M. 1956. The Ghost Towns of Wyoming. New York: Hastings
House Publishers.
Roberts,Philip J.; Roberts, David L.; Roberts, Steven L. 1989. Wyoming
Almanac. Seattle,
WA and Laramie, WY: Skyline West Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment