scofieldmine

Scofield Mine Disaster

Coming up toward the end of the century, you find more and more people involved in coal mining, especially after the first big wave of European immigrants came out West. A great many settled in Utah down in Carbon County. That's a kind of place you wouldn't expect to find in the West. You'd expect to find a place like that in Pennsylvania or even in Kentucky. Here in the middle of Utah, in some very rugged and formidable territory, you find three separate Italian communities that still correspond to the geographic divisions of Italy - Milanese, Neapolitan, and Sicilian. They still fight each other. And you still find small pockets of Finns, Slavs, and other Eastern European communities. As you read through Utah history, most of which is written by Mormons, it doesn't say anything about these people. All you'll read is about Mormon history and a little bit about the French fur trappers.

I visited a little town called Scofield which is pretty much a ghost town now. I visited an old Finn who had been a miner. We talked for quite a while. He took me out and showed me the old Sunnyside #2 mine, and he told me how in 1900 that mine had exploded and the whole town came running down. It wasn't a very loud explosion, just a kind of shaking and rumble. They thought there had just been a rock fall, and they were prepared to assist the injured to the surface. When they got down there they found out the whole thing had blown up; 200 miners had been killed.

This old fellow took me and showed me the graveyard where there were rows of wooden markers. and he told me how they had to send to Colorado for the coffins because there weren't enough available around there. Many of the coffins were loaded on flat cars on a special train to take the miners who were to be buried elsewhere out of the valley. People in the town stood around on the hills and watched that train pull out. His remark was, "That was the longest and lonesomest train I ever saw."

I wrote the song mainly out of his conversation and retelling of the events. I guess it's more his song than it is name.

The thing about these mines, and it's Still true today with the mine disaster in Kellogg just recently. is that the mine operators have got to make money out of that mine. They make money by keeping the mines unsafe. You've got to have crews making the mines safe, digging ventilating shafts, cutting shoring. If you've got just a few people doing that, you can have more people working at the rock face, bringing the coal out. If you don't have enough people doing the safety work, you know those mines are going to collapse or blow up. That's what I mean by calling it deliberately unsafe for the sake of profit. It's the miners who give their lives so that the mine operators can live in luxury.

May the first was bright and clear,
Nineteen hundred was the year;
A great explosion rocked our town,
While the men were underground.

When we gathered at the slide,
We thought that just a few had died,
Fought our way in past the mine head,
Carried out two hundred dead.

When we brought them to the light,
It was a black and awful sight,
In one family there was nine
Lost inside that burning mine.

A miner's life is hard I know,
His world is dark and far below,
While he starve and goes in rags,
He's cheaper than the coal he digs.

A miner's life is hard I know,
His world is dark and far below,
While he starves and goes in rags,
He's cheaper than the coal he digs.

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