Immigration and Coal Mining (Adapted from “Chinese Immigrants in Colorado’s Mining Industry 1860-1890” by Logan French)

The mining industry is a fundamental element of Colorado’s history in the late nineteenth-century and played an irreplaceable role in the economic and industrial development of the United States at the time. The tremendous boom of both metal and coal mining “contributed immeasurably to state, national, and international development.” In 1890 the state held 413,000 people, of whom 5,800 worked mining metals with thousands more involved in coal production. Metal mining alone, which primarily entailed gold, silver, copper, and lead, was valued at $29,380,639 according to the U.S. Geological Survey in 1923. Essential to Colorado’s mining industry was the presence of numerous immigrant groups primarily from Europe, South America, and Asia. Immigrants found in the mines of Colorado a unique borderland, governed by mining companies and filled with other ethnicities. As the government and companies “lacked the will or power to constrain fluid ideas and institutions, energies and populations,” migrants retained forms of agency to structure their own lives within mining communities. 

Following the Civil War, economic interests refocused on Colorado’s hidden resources that had first drawn attention in the 1858 Pikes Peak Gold Rush. Where mining before the Civil War had previously been predominantly placer mining which involves separating ores from sediment often on river beds, new discoveries encouraged the use of hardrock mining which extracts ores directly from veins buried in the mountains. Hardrock mining required two steps: extraction of ore-rich rocks from underground, and the separation of precious metals from the ore. Both steps were incredibly difficult but technical advancements in the late 1860’s–notably smelters and blast furnaces–meant that by the 1870’s, mining became extremely productive and profitable. Fueling the new smelters, blast furnaces, and mines involved in extracting and processing precious metals as well as the railroads used for transporting was coal. Pioneered by William Jackson Palmer, Colorado’s coal industry would experience rapid growth in the 1870’s to meet the needs of the burgeoning mining industry as well as the nation as a whole. With technological advances solving technical constraints, the industry was only held back by a need for labor. Luckily for Colorado, the “combined might of railroads and coal mines first eroded, and then destroyed, the isolation that had so vexed inhabitants of frontier Colorado.” Now that Colorado was incorporated into the nation through the railroad, the mining industry turned towards national and international labor to work in the mines. 

The most important factor that drew immigrant populations to remote Colorado mines was the “high-paying work in jobs that were essentially open to anyone willing to take them.” First drawn to the mines were immigrants with past experience mining. Working in metal or coal mining, these immigrants were predominantly white and generally British, Irish, Belgian, French, German, and Polish. Other immigrants, arriving in smaller numbers, yet still bringing varieties of prior experience with mining included Italians, Hungarians, Serbs, Russians, Bohemians, Poles, and more. Hispanos were also present in Colorado mines and consisted of experienced and inexperienced labor. These ethnic laborers were all present by 1890 but their arrival was the result of a slow process of personal connections or advertisements from newspapers or unions throughout the nation. Personal connection networks consisted of communications from those in Colorado, encouraging friends or family from elsewhere in the nation or Old World to come to the region. Newspapers such as the Denver Mirror in 1874 placed ads “To Immigrants” advertising homes and ranches to those willing to immigrate to the then territory. While numerous immigrants would find their way to Colorado throughout the 1870’s and on at the encouragement of immigrants in Colorado and Coloradoans themselves, not all immigrants were welcomed the same. The Dolores News in May, 1880 identified the great waves of immigrants to the state but opposed the arrival of immigrants “with barely means enough to defray their expenses to the nearest mining camp, without the slightest idea of mining, or in fact any work to be done in the mines or new towns.” While the mines often worked to blur ethnic divisions between European immigrants, even the unskilled, opposition to the arrival of unskilled immigrants to the mines or other industries was raised by those outside the mine towns throughout the state. Despite their antipathy towards some immigrants, the realities of the frontier demanded labor that Colorado’s fledgling population could not provide. While immigration from Europe gradually increased, Coloradoans turned towards the west coast to meet their labor demands. 

In the dangerous and remote borderlands of the Colorado mountains, immigrants pursued “familiarity and comfort in ethnic subcommunities, maintaining the customs and lifestyles of their native culture.” Faced with tremendous threat to life from the nature of work within the mines, most European immigrants or other white male miners and colliers “lived in relative harmony, bolstering each other in their larger struggle for survival and economic prosperity.” While ethnic animosities did create some conflict, multiethnic laborers – immigrant or not – generally created cooperative and supportive communities. Everyday, miners entered mines facing incredible danger from hazards that would cause vast and indiscriminate devastation. In such environments, the only option was a uniquely indiscriminate cooperation that crossed lines of age and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity. Miners shared obligations to teach the inexperienced be they children or new immigrants because ineptitude in the mines meant disaster, making cooperation a matter of survival. Within these communities, however, “stark cultural differences fueled the fires of racism” against non-white miners including Hispanos but especially Asian miners. While the dangers and filth of minework could blur the distinctions between ethnicities, mining towns offered no such distortion.

Daily Life in Coal Communities

Broadly speaking, two characteristics separate coal mining from experiences in other industries: extreme ethnic diversity and inescapable and lethal danger. These characteristics create distinct communities of inter-ethnic support and cooperation in the face of grueling labor. While cohesion existed alongside racial animosities, life in the coal camps demanded survival above all else. 

Men went to work in the early morning, carrying pails filled with lunch on their way to the mines, eager for the trudge back home, caked with coal dust and sweat bearing the same pail often filled with beer. Entering into what historian Thomas Andrews terms “Subterranean Crucibles,” miners labored in a deeply alien environment, trapped underground facing death at every turn and tunnel. Armed with picks and dynamite, miners dug tunnels hundreds of feet into Colorado’s mountains, branching off to chase the thick coal seams they uncovered. Main tunnels or “haulage ways,” served as the main avenue for the mine, an underground highway for trains loaded with men and coal, pulled by mules. In the tunnels branching off of the haulage way were cavernous rooms where large pockets of coal were removed leaving only a few pillars of stone to support the rock overhead. Laid out in a grid, rooms and pillars gradually resembled subterranean city blocks as men, mules, and coal moved throughout the mine. In the rooms, coal miners picked and blasted at walls of coal, carefully expanding the room and loading the coal they broke loose into trains to be hauled out, all while taking care to maintain the pillars, avoid falling rocks, deadly gasses, accidental explosions, and other dangers that could take their lives in an instant. 

Coal mining followed tiers of skilled labor that brought boys and men further into the mines. Outside the entrances, young boys or inexperienced arrivals separated the coal from bits of rock as they were pulled out of the mines. Once they were around 13 or 14 years old, boys would work to open and close doors within the mines, carefully controlling the flow of air throughout the mine, a crucial job that could have disastrous consequences if they were not careful. Slightly older, more experienced boys drove the mules that pulled trains of coal and men throughout these underground cities. Eventually, as boys or new arrivals grew to understand life underground and could read the signs of danger in the mines, particularly falling rock, they joined the most experienced miners in digging coal out of the rooms. If they survived long enough without injury or death, they would gradually become experts themselves, passing knowledge to waves of new arrivals. 

For most young boys, life within the mines is what lay ahead of them. While labor laws imposed an age limit of 14, these were often ignored and young boys could accompany their experienced fathers inside the mines, assisting their work until they could work independently themselves. Children growing up balanced chores with school work, however, school for most ended at eight grade. While the boys went to the mines, young girls would work to help with chores and labor in the camp, occasionally assisting at the company store while most often assisting their mothers with their labor.

While miners worked to earn wages to support their families, it was their wives and women in the camp who performed every other labor, often working longer hours than the men with less opportunities for social contact. Women supported large households in coal mining towns where 45% of households were 4-6 people and 25% were 7-11. A typical day for a woman entailed long hours of housekeeping chores (made even more arduous by the ever present coal dust), and preparing food. In a time before laundry machines, women had to manually wash grimy clothing manually using water they had to carry long distances from a well or river. When preparing meals, it was also to the women to produce most of the food themselves. While the company store offered flour, sugar, and coffee, most other food was procured by the women directly as they fished and hunted for meat and maintained gardens for fresh produce.