Review by Martha Quillen
History – April 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Coal People – Life in Southern Colorado’s Company Towns, 1890 – 1930
by Rick J. Clyne
Published in 1999 by The Colorado Historical Society
ISBN 0-87081-599-7
IF COAL PEOPLE were a movie, it would probably glean a “Mixed Bag” rating, or perhaps one thumb up and one thumb down.
The subject seems to be a natural. What was life like in Colorado’s coal towns and camps? What were the company stores like? The schools? The houses? Most of us have heard of Ludlow and may have spent time in Trinidad and Walsenburg and perhaps even driven through Primero and Segundo — which are all fairly sleepy little mountain towns now. But what were they like at the turn of the last century when they were small but bustling, a part of a thriving industry, a magnet for immigrants looking for work?
Unfortunately, in answering those questions author Rick Clyne settles upon a theme that proves somewhat irritating. First, he assumes that we all believe that such places offered their citizens an appallingly oppressive, unremittingly dreary life, and then he tries to prove that such an assumption is wrong.
“Historians have frequently portrayed the company store as a nefarious vehicle of corporate oppression…” he writes. “But evidence indicates that the relationship between the miner and the company store in southern Colorado’s coalfields did not readily conform to this model of deliberate economic enslavement.”
But the author partially refutes this contention elsewhere when he writes, “The company had a difficult time operating in the black throughout the decade, turning a profit only on the strength of its real-estate and fuel departments. The real-estate department managed all of the land rented or leased by CC&I, including all of the buildings and dwellings in the coal camps and in Pueblo.” As the writer continues, it becomes obvious that the company actually controlled almost everything — for the benefit of the company.
The company charged for housing and for heating coal, and it operated the stores. It ran the schools, and even some preschools, and provided children’s social activities — while quite obviously and deliberately attempting to replace traditional ethnic beliefs and values with a modern American work ethic. The company discouraged the use of alcohol (although not very successfully), and fired and evicted workers for being suspected union sympathizers. The company often failed to provide clean water or adequate sewage disposal for company housing, and pretty much ignored state law when it came to mine safety.
Yet the author insists that coal-camp living was far better than the reader had hitherto thought. In doing so, he sometimes contradicts himself in the course of one page. For instance, he writes, “The company provided homes for miners and their families, and by the turn of the century much of this corporate-owned housing was comfortable, sturdy, and reasonably priced.” But in the next paragraph he says the 1947 U.S. Coal Mines Administration’s “Boone Report” found that “rents were often excessive compared to local conditions…”
No doubt the author is right when he contends that sometimes the housing was very good, and sometimes the store’s prices were fair, and sometimes the company offered exceptionally good schools…. But oftimes the company also failed to deliver adequate housing, sewage disposal, water, or perhaps most importantly mine safety standards, as the author points out again and again.
All this makes Clyne’s theme not only irritating, but also pretty weird. This recurring insistence that the coal camps and towns were actually better than we thought — when he seems to be proving that they were downright autocratic and generally unjust — comes between the reader and the information.
THE THING IS, although most of us are familiar with the excesses of the Rockefellers and of the national guard at Ludlow in early Colorado, I don’t think many of us believed that these towns were actually akin to Nazi concentration camps. Although it seems to surprise the author, I doubt many readers will be surprised to find out that people in the coal camps and towns had dances, and picnics, and went hunting together, and invited people over for dinner.
Also, some of the author’s contentions struck me as wholly ludicrous. For example, in trying to evaluate the company’s balance between “corporate benevolence and corporate control,” he claims that the company had to supervise education, provide social organizations, and regulate laws.
“Given the camps’ rugged, isolated setting, such an arrangement was necessary; there was simply no other entity present to wield legal authority and enforce order,” the author concludes. And yet hundreds upon thousands of non-company towns have managed to establish legal and social provisions.
REPEATEDLY, Clyne refers to the camps around Trinidad and Walsenburg as extremely isolated, and yet they clearly were not isolated by the standards of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were on roads, and near railroad stations. Although immigrant workers may not have had cars, they could generally walk to a nearby town and sometimes even a railway station if need be (and presuming the National Guard wasn’t preventing their exit).
These camps were in no way as isolated or cut off as goldrush-era camps. Despite Clyne’s tendency to picture the coal mines as forbiddingly isolated, most of Colorado’s coal towns were not as remote or cut-off as many of the twentieth century farms and logging camps that also drew immigrants. Much of the isolation Clyne cites was deliberately imposed by a company that owned the stores, the houses, the streets and the public utilities — a company that presumably wanted a monopoly.
So I’m not quite sure what to say about this book. Much of it is exasperating, but it also has a lot of interesting information and features numerous amusing quotes from coal camp dwellers. These quotes, however, were primarily gleaned from two oral histories collected earlier.
This book was reworked from Clyne’s master thesis, and he does an admirable job in making the language non-academic and accessible. But I think in converting the material into a book, Clyne should have spent more time talking to the “coal people.” There are still old coal miners and their children living in Trinidad and Walsenburg and nearby towns, and Clyne should have gotten a better personal picture of what their lives were like. In the end Clyne says, “In some ways the lives of coal-camp residents seem unfamiliar, even unfathomable to us.” Yet I suspect these lives will not seem unfamiliar to many of this book’s readers.
Coal People would have been a much better book if Clyne had concentrated more on telling the story of the miners and their families, and less on trying to decide whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor practices were better or worse than some historians would contend.
As it is, Coal People is an O.K. book, a mere 104 pages long, that’s well-designed, fairly easy to follow and has some very nice pictures. But with a little more care it could have been a great book. Although our readers may be interested in much of the information in Coal People, the subject deserves better treatment.
–Martha Quillen
