Unit VII: What, Then, Is This American? ca. 1865 - 1900

Question/Problem 4: What was the West like for miners, cattlemen, and homesteader?

Working in such temperatures was an ordeal only the hardiest could endure, and then for only brief periods. Yet somehow the ore was got out. Miners wearing nothing but breech-clothes and shoes pecked away at the faces of the slopes, their pick bundles a and drills wrapped in cloth that every few minutes had to be dipped in ice water. Huge quantities of ice were lowered down the shafts. In the summer of 1878 the daily allotment was ninety-five pounds per man; a total of more than two million pounds were used that year. One account tells of 'half-fainting men' who chewed bits of ice to cool their throats, and 'carried lumps in their clenched hands.' Only the introduction of power-operated Burleigh drills permitted the work to continue; to swing a pick o r use a hand drill would have been impossible. Even with such tools, production fell off to the point where it took four men to accomplish what ordinarily would have been done by one.

Exposed to such temperatures [wrote one visitor], and breathing the stagnant air, the men spent forty-five minutes of each hour beneath the nearest air-vent, going forward to their stations for successive brief periods and returning bathed in sweat and of ten bent over with cramps. The pain of these 'stomach knots' was intense; workmen so stricken were hurried to the surface and given rigorous massage treatment until the perspiration began to flow, whereupon they returned to their posts, seemingly as well as ever. There were occasional deaths, but on the whole the miners--picked men all--came through the ordeal well. Usually they spent no more than a week in the deepest parts of the mines: they were then transferred to workings nearer the surface, where upon they rapidly put on the weight they had sweated off in the inferno-like areas below.

From Jay Monaghan, ed., American West (New York: Bonanza Books, 1963), p. 160.