Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster
By Karen Tintori
Atria, 273 pages, $25
It was a day like any other day, a day of rising before dawn and trudging off to work and maybe wondering, during the course of the almost inconceivably arduous physical labor their work entailed, just what the point of it all was. Sure, there was the paycheck, but life ought to be more than paychecks, yes? More, certainly, than just the endless repetition of tasks by which coal was blasted, heaped and hauled from the Earth’s black insides to its sunny surfaces. The men who worked in the Cherry Mine–young and old, immigrant and native, good and bad–had dreams, dreams for themselves and for their children, and it is the dreams on ordinary days that probably define us more than our grandly self-conscious pronouncements about life goals.
Just after lunch on this day, as Karen Tintori chronicles in her rigorously researched book, “Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster,” a bale of hay caught fire. That was odd: Hay typically doesn’t burn. But kerosene apparently had dripped steadily onto the bale, rendering it intensely flammable. Licking at the wooden timbers by which the shafts were braced, the mine fire on Nov. 13, 1909, in the small town of Cherry, some 100 miles southwest of Chicago, gradually expanded into a deadly inferno, cornering dozens of miners at their work sites. Others died of smoke inhalation while scrambling for poorly marked exits.
The final toll of 259 killed–which left in its wake 160 widows and 470 children–makes the Cherry Mine disaster the deadliest coal-mine fire in the nation’s history; among coal-mining disasters in general it ranks third.
Tintori, whose grandfather survived the Cherry Mine fire, worked on the book for more than a decade. Its release on the heels of the recent near-catastrophe outside Somerset, Pa., where nine miners were rescued after being trapped for almost 80 hours, is an accidental piece of luck for Tintori. It makes her story of events from nearly a century ago sound as up to date as a CNN bulletin.
And what a story it is. Embedded in the narrative of the Cherry Mine fire are tales of quiet heroism and disgusting cowardice, of excruciating pain, of miraculous rescues–21 living miners were discovered and hoisted to the surface after a week in the smoldering mine–and of the ordeals not only of the trapped miners but also their widows and children, left stunned and hungry as a cold winter approached.
Many things were altered by the fierce heat of the flames on that awful day; among them, Tintori says, was the enforcement of mine safety rules. The federal government stepped in, taking over what had been a state function. Thereafter, child-labor laws were strictly enforced, and the concept of worker’s compensation was established.
But the human stories of the Cherry Mine are what captivate, as Tintori well understands. She thumbed through historical records and interviewed descendants of victims and survivors to provide a thorough and impressively detailed portrait of a historical period and an event that, while lacking the instant name recognition of those famous disasters known by a single word such as Titanic and Hindenburg, still was a horrifying tragedy. Tintori has rescued this near-forgotten catastrophe from obscurity, reifying one of the most significant lessons learned from, among other catastrophes, the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001: Ordinary people can, in time of crisis, display the most extraordinary courage and resolve.
A man named John Brown, for instance, yelled a crucial warning to his colleagues as the fire swept through a corridor, enabling several to escape. When it came time for Brown to join a group being hauled topside by a cage, he refused. ” ‘I won’t go until every man is out of this mine,’ ” Tintori quotes him as telling his comrades. She adds: “He never made it out alive.”
Elsewhere, a ragged band of trapped miners became concerned that workers who survived might feel guilty one day about making it out. So these miners, eyeball-to-eyeball with death, wrote this note: ” ‘We, the undersigned, do not blame anyone for the accident that has happened to pen us in here, and we believe that everybody has done all in their power to relieve us. . . .’ “
Such anecdotes–somehow, calling them anecdotes seems almost disrespectful–endow “Trapped” with a grave, austere, scrupulous beauty. Tintori never overstates her case. She doesn’t have to; the notes left by the trapped miners, some of whom survived and some of whom didn’t, are more eloquent than the output of a dozen lyric poets on their best days. “I have nothing more to say,” a miner wrote calmly to his wife, “only that to educate my dear child the best you can, and when he grows you may tell him that he had an honest father. Would like to say hoping to see you again but must say good bye forever, last kisses from your Antenore.”
The only quibble one might have with Tintori’s approach–aside from an unfortunate tendency to rely on cliches, such as “fell on deaf ears” (of which she seems especially fond) and “with every fiber of his being”–is that it is a little too scrubbed of sentiment, the narrative a little too lean and chiseled. She seems determined to let the facts speak for themselves. Facts are perfectly willing to do that, of course, but sometimes they require a bit of assistance, a shading, an elaboration. Reading this book, one realizes why fictional accounts of factual events often seem more satisfying; there is a sense of fullness about fiction that blunt, unadorned facts–particularly facts about a harrowing event–cannot match. Compare Kathleen Cambor’s splendid novel “In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden” (2001), which spins a convincing fictional world out of the hard central fact of the Johnstown Flood in 1889, to straightforwardly factual accounts of that disaster to see the difference. Tintori, of course, was writing history, not a novel, but still might have benefited from an ever-so-slight relaxation of her tightly controlled narrative. Fact is fine, as far as it goes; but sometimes it doesn’t seem to go far enough. There is a region beyond fact, a land of nuance and implication and echo only reached by a certain authorial audacity. The very best historians occasionally sojourn there; they go back to their facts quickly enough, but they have a slightly different color of dust on their boots when they do.
“Trapped” is filled with such absorbing, surprising details and riveting scenes, however, that even Tintori’s rather pedestrian prose style can’t seriously harm it. The word “miner” often is erroneously used, she points out; a miner is a highly skilled worker who dislodges the coal by hand or by blasting; those who load the coal are laborers. She describes the smell of a mine, its pungent mix of “gunpowder residue, oil, manure [from the mules used in transport], and damp earth.” She details how the trapped miners, desperately hungry, stripped pieces from the overhead timbers and chewed them until they were soft enough to swallow; and how the thirst was even worse than the hunger.
Yet there was a fate even worse than hunger or thirst: being caught in the terrible fire that raged through the mine “like some screaming orange locomotive spewing smoke,” Tintori writes. She doesn’t flinch from gruesome descriptions of its effects. “Many were mummified and disintegrated the moment they reached fresh air,” she writes of victims hauled from the mine. “Horrified relatives in the midst of identifying loved ones saw noses crumble from their faces and their heads and limbs fall off.” Grotesque, to be sure, but also surely necessary for a full appreciation of the survivors’ emotional burdens.
Tintori covers the aftermath of the disaster, the accusations and the inquisitions, with admirable balance, but her sympathies obviously cling to the miners, as individuals and as a group. What becomes abundantly clear in Tintori’s account is her steadfast respect for these men, many of whom were immigrants from places such as Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Scotland and Italy (her grandfather hailed from Fanano, Italy) and who made their living by the strength of their backs and the strength of their dreams. The dreams of ordinary days have remained intact through the generations, it seems, even under the extraordinary pressure of a ghastly tragedy.
Other books that tell stories of coal mines and mining towns
In Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times” (1854), the coal mine at the edge of town is a menacing force, swallowing up the hopes and dreams–not to mention the life–of poor, sweet Stephen Blackpool, who stumbles into the grimy hole nicknamed the Old Hell Shaft. “I have fallen into the pit,” murmurs the mortally wounded Blackpool (with the words regularized from Dickens’ dialect spelling), “that has been . . . crueler than battle.”
But the quintessential novel about coal mining must be “Germinal,” Emile Zola’s 1885 tale based on a real French mining disaster. Like Dickens, Zola depicts the coal mine as a malevolent entity, “an evil crouching beast [that] . . . curled still more tightly and breathed more heavily, as if troubled by its painful digestion of human flesh.”
Other coal-mining-related books include:
– “How Green Was My Valley” (1939), Richard Llewellyn’s sentimental but still deeply satisfying tale of a mining community in South Wales, later a successful movie. “I have often stood outside the door looking down the Valley,” the narrator recalls, “seeing in my mind all the men coming up black with dust.”
– “Sons and Lovers” (1913), D.H. Lawrence’s novel about a young man’s coming of age in a British mining town. “Six mines like six black studs on the countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway,” wrote Lawrence of the land of his birth, which he grew to loathe for its provincialism and pettiness.
– “Storming Heaven” (1987), Denise Giardiana’s vivid, colloquial novel about the struggle to unionize coal miners in southern West Virginia in the early 20th Century.
– “The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the Survivors of One of the Worst Disasters in Coal-Mining History Brought Suit Against the Coal Company–and Won” (1977), Gerald Stern’s stirring, non-fiction, David-versus-Goliath tale of forcing coal companies to take responsibility for a 1972 flood that claimed the lives of 125 West Virginians.
– “Rocket Boys” (1998), Homer Hickam’s description of his youth in Coalwood, W.Va., which glows with evocative scenes in the coal mines in which his father labored. Hickam’s story, which centers on his dreams of leaving West Virginia to be a NASA engineer, was turned into the movie “October Sky.” Hickam has written two sequels: “The Coalwood Way” and “Sky of Stone.”
— Julia Keller
