Early Days
Deep in the mountains
above Ramsey,
Virginia, five miles east of Norton, is a place called
the Nettle
Patch.
The only thing that is noteworthy about the Nettle
Patch today is the
"eternal
flame" that spouts out of the ground, burning off
subterranean leakage
of natural gas. I guess that was probably the only
noteworthy thing
about
the Nettle Patch at the turn of the century, too--but
at that time the
community seemed to me the focal point of the
universe, and more. It
was
Shangri-La.
The leading citizen of the
Nettle
Patch in those days was a short, broad shouldered
fellow with dark
brown
hair, a full mustache, and twinkling blue eyes. He was
Patton Nickels,
one of my maternal grandfather's three brothers
--absolutely the finest
uncle a child could have, possessed of that rare
ability to communicate
with people of all ages and dispositions, each at his
own level.
My earliest and fondest memories are of
being
regaled by Uncle Patton's stories during long winter
evenings around
the
fire place in his mountain home. Story-telling was
always a popular
pursuit
in my mother's family, and has carried over into the
O"Neill clan. But
the finest story teller that ever I heard was Uncle
Patton Nickels.
Patton and Minnie Nickels
1908
------
------
------
It was at the Nettle
Patch "blab
school" that I received my precious little bit of
formal education
(until
years later when I enrolled in a series of
correspondence courses). The
school was a one-room shack, with an old wood stove
for heat and no
plumbing
whatsoever.
Of the nine students in
our
one-room school, six of us were related: John, Vera,
Tad, and I were
joined
by Uncle Patton's son David, and his daughter Tildie.
We didn't learn a hell of a lot, but at
least
we escaped 'the curse of the Appalachians' --
illiteracy.
The year was
1907. A tall,
scholarly stranger from Big Stone Gap appeared at our
house one
late-summer
day. He wanted to engage my father's team of horses
for a two-day
excursion
to the High Knob country above Norton.
I was nine years old,
thick
-necked and husky and already an experienced woodsman
and good hand
with
horses. The gentleman offered to hire me to go along
as his driver, and
I eagerly accepted. Two other men went along on the
trip, though I
cannot
recall today who they were.
The stranger had little in
the
way of camping equipment, but brought along a
typewriter on which he
pecked
away a good deal of the time. I recall that he was
very fond of wild
chestnuts,
either roasted or boiled. He was impressed with the
size and quality of
the High Knob chestnuts, and took home a sackful.
The man's name didn't mean
anything
to me in 1907, though it should have; he was John Fox,
Jr., the finest
novelist my part of the country has produced. His
"Trail of the
Lonesome
Pine" and "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come" are
the finest
chronicles
ever written about life in the Southern Appalachians.
When the
Clinchfield Coal
Company began operations in Dante, Virginia, in 1909,
my father got the
job of grading the roads. It was a big job, and
necessitated the moving
of our family from Norton to Dante.
Pop went on to Dante
and
established a home, then sent for the rest of the
family. John and I
walked
the 55 miles on our bare feet, driving the family milk
cow before us. I
remember spending one night at a farmhouse on Sandy
Ridge. It wasn't
unusual
in those days for travelers to be taken in and fed and
given a place to
sleep, even if they were total strangers. It was a
regular thing at our
house, and we experienced the same type of hospitality
when we were on
the road.
When we reached
Dante,
Pop bought me my first good pair of shoes.
Unfortunately, I had picked
up severe stone bruise on one of my feet during the
trip. By the time
my
foot healed, I had outgrown the shoes. And cold
weather was just coming
on! There was little chance of the shoes going to
waste, though.
Between
the time of my birth in 1898 and our move to Dante in
1909, five more
little
O'Neills had checked in: Stallard (who was to be
known all his
life
as "Curly"), Sam, Tom, Kate, and Paul, in that order.
Still to come
were
Jim, Joe, Etta, and Felix (who was rarely called
Felix, except by our
mother;
everyone else knows him as "Pete")
While I'm naming
them
off, let me include those who out-ranked me on the
family totem pole:
Vera,
John, and Clara (whom we always called "Tad". That
adds up to thirteen,
and all of us except Joe lived to reach adulthood and
bring children of
our own into the world.
Both John and I
had long
since completed all the schooling we were going to get
by the time we
moved
to Dante. We were big husky boys (John was 15, I was
11), anxious to
earn
a man's wages. We had no trouble finding employment in
that bustling
new
coal camp --John carrying water, and I serving as an
apprentice cook in
a boarding house kitchen.
The boss of the camp was a
strapping
Irishman named Bill Hurley, an old friend of our
father and a man I
best
remember for his tremendously broad shoulders and
elegant brown
mustache.
Most of the laborers
at
the Dante camp were foreigners---Italians, Hungarians,
and Turks, who
came
in already indebted to the coal company for the cost
of their
transportation
from Europe. It was obvious that many of those poor
people had been
recruited
for the voyage to this "land of the free" with grand
promises of milk
and
honey, and then cruelly betrayed once they got here.
Whatever
conditions
they lived under in Europe, it couldn't have been much
worse than what
awaited them in Dante.
The immigrants lived in
wood-and-tarpaper
shacks, sleeping twenty and thrity to a room. They
endured the most
unsanitary
conditions imaginable. There was no plumbing, no
flooring, and little
protection,
from the elements. Because of the attempts of many to
"skip their
transportation"
and strike out for parts unknown, the "furriners" were
kept in
compounds
which if they were in existence today, would be called
concentration
camps.
Mining safety was
unknown
at that time, and in the inexperience of the immigrant
laborers made
things
even worse. Many native-born miners quit their jobs
and went hungry
rather
than enter the mine with them. It was like playing
Russian roulette.
There
were already enough hazards in coal mining, they
reasoned, without
adding
human time bombs.
Dave, age 11 at the mouth of
No. 52 Mine at Dante
(Note the pistol in his hand!)
John and I, being
friends and
proteges of Bill Hurley, had pretty much the run of
the camp. And,
being
high-spirited boys, we were also mean as hell. I
recall one time when
we
laid a fine wire across the path that ran from the
Italian living
quarters
to the community spring. We waited for a grouchy old
Italian named "Fat
Tony" to come back from the spring, almost a half-mile
away. At last he
came, puffing and sweating, carrying a five-gallon
pail of water in
each
hand. We strectched the wire taut--and down went poor
Tony, in a tangle
of flying buckets and ten gallons of cold water!
Fat Tony might never
have
known what caused him to fall, had John and I been
able to restrain our
giggling. He chased us all the way home, and only the
Old Man's
intervention
saved us from whatever terrible, Old-Country
retribution he had in
store
for us.
Yes, there are
times
when a pugnacious, red-faced, two-fisted Irish father
is the finest
assest
a growing boy can have!
-----
-----
A wild, fun-loving
motorman named
Clint Trent got drunk in Dante's Little Italy one
evening in the fall
of
1910. He cursed and leaned on people and made such an
all-around ass of
himself that his hosts finally decided not to give him
any more wine
until
he straighted up a bit. That, of course, caused an
argument, and the
argument
soon erupted into a fight. Trent pulled a pistol out
of his coat and
started
shooting at every Italian in sight. Before the smoke
cleared, he had
killed
four men and wounded a fifth.
The immigrant
compounds
were policed by the Baldwin Phleps Detective Agency.
Al Baldwin, the
senior
officer of the organization, was in Dante when word of
the shooting
swept
through the town. He set out immediately to
investigate, riding a bay
horse
through the camp and up to the gate of the Italian
compound.
"Don't go down
there,
Mr. Baldwin," somebody said. "The dagoes are all riled
up. They've got
Trent holed up, and they're going to lynch him.
They'll kill anybody
that
gets in their way!"
Baldwin rode his
horse
down into the compound, alone, and when he came out a
few minutes later
he had Clint Trent on the saddle behind him.
Trent stood trial
and
got 20 years for the murders. Years later, after his
release from
prison,
he went on another rampage. He was whooping it up in
the town of St.
Paul
when that town's chief of police went to arrest him.
Trent resisted
arrest,
and the officer shot him dead. (The officer's name was
Fleming. He was
the father of my friend of later years, Wise County
Sheriff Harold
Fleming.)
-----
It wasn't long
before my
brother John, fourteen years old and independent as
hell (this was his
outstanding charateristic, one to which you'll notice
that I refer from
time to time), was doing a man's work and earning a
man's pay. He
remained
a miner throughout his working life, until he became
permanently
disabled
while still a young man as the result of a series of
crippling injuries
suffered in the mines.
Late in his rookie
year
of mining, John was paired with a giant Negro known
variously as "Big
Jim"
or "Nigger Jim" in the No. 52 mine at Dante. The Negro
ran a
coal-cutting
machine, and John was his motor man. The two of them
took such pride in
their work, went at it so hard, and worked so well as
a team, that they
cut half again as much coal every day as the next-best
team on the hill.
And then one night
it
ended. John and his partner were working alone, a mile
underground.
There
was a slate fall. Big Jim was pinned down, his legs
and lower torso
crushed.
John came out of the
mine
for help. It was dead winter, and there was ten inches
of fresh snow on
the ground. We found some heavy jacks in the snow, and
soon a rescue
team
of seven white men and two white boys was on its way
down into No. 52
to
free Nigger Jim.
Jim was still
conscious
when we got to him. I held his head off the wet, cold
floor while the
jacks
were set.
The pain must have
been
almost unbearable, but Jim made no sound. His teeth
were clenched like
a vise, and I could tell from the look in his eyes
that he knew he was
done for. He had seen men caught in slate falls
before.
Once Jim asked, "How
soon
....?"
We told him it
wouldn't
be too long.
He said, " I hopes
it
won't be too long."
A few mintues after
the
jacks relieved his body of the several tons of
pressure, Big jim was
dead.
It was John who
carried
the news of Jim's death to his widow. I heard him say
years afterward
that
it was the saddest duty he ever performed.
The widow was left
with
six young children, and not a penny of insurance or
other compensation
from mining company. John handed over to her a small
colelction he had
taken up among the miners. It included every cent of
cash that John
O'Neill
owned, and all he could borrow.
You hear among
young folk
singers today sing happy work songs about "mule
drivesr" and
"mule-skinners."
I sometimes wonder if any of them know what driving a
mule is really
like,
and if they'd still sing so merrily if they knew.
My first job was
carrying
water on the Interstate Railroad grade at Josephine,
about a half-mile
from our old home near Norton. That was my
introduction to mule
driving.
It wasn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds in the
songs.
Underground coal
cars,
at that time, were pulled by mules. The driver who
carried the largest
whip and who used it the most forcefully was regarded
as the best
driver.
Drivers generally were jealous of each other and the
ones I knew
considered
themselves a cut above the miners who dug for coal.
The animals
worked
every day, usually about twelve hours. They had a
terrible, repulsive
odor
about them. Their necks and shoulders seemed always to
be raw around
their
collars, and their hind quarters bore great welts and
scars from blows
administered with the whip or the "butt stick."
Mules are noted for
their
stubborness, but few were as stubborn (and none as
cruel) as the men
who
drove them. If a man wasn't brutal when he started the
job, he soon
learned
to be. There may have been exceptions, but I can't
recall any.
The whip wielded by
a
mule driver was about ten feet in over-all length. It
was made of
plaided
leather, tapered from a maxium diameter of
two-and-a-half to three
inches
in the middle down to about one inch on the ends. On
the "cracker" end
of the whip was a piece of rawhide about
three-quarters of an inch wide
and fourteen inches long; and on the end of that, a
piece of twisted
seagrass
about the thickness of a lead pencil and twelve inches
in length.
Mule drivers prided
themselves
on their skill and power with their whips. They could
tear a man (or a
mule) to pieces with one. The one distinguishing
characteristic common
to all mule drivers was a "red-eyed" appearance. This
was not from
drinking
(though it might have very well been in most cases),
but from the
effects
of having mud slung into their eyes by their mule's
hooves.
I came to learn
quite
a bit about mules, and how to care for them and work
them. In 1911, at
the age of thirteen, I became a mule driver.
My career as a
mule driver
lasted just a few months. It was hard, cruel,
dangerous work. In those
days, we used the "drift mouth" method of mining coal.
It was also
called
"deep mining." A network of tunnels followed veins of
coal deep into a
mountainside, sometimes for several miles.
It was later
that
the "strip mining" technique came along, with the
bulldozers and giant
cranes literally "stripping" the earth bare and
destroying forever many
large sections of the Appalachians.
The mule I drove was
called
Old Red. He was a fine, strong animal. I thought
of Old Red as my
partner in the mining business, rather than a beast of
burden. And I
think
he appreciated it. In fact, I'm sure he did. He
rarely, if ever balked
on me. I frequently led Old Red down into the shallow
water of Powell's
River beneath the Josephine Bridge and scrubbed him
down with strong
lye
soap-- a practice which the veteran drivers viewed
with scorn. But they
couldn't deny that Old Red was the best-looking,
best-smelling mule in
the community.
The hours I worked
were
roughly 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. I had to spend an hour each
morning feeding,
currying,
and harnessing my mule, and two hours in the evening
unharnessing,
rubbing
down, and feeding him.
One morning I was
hauling
"Bowser" Farmer and three other miners into the mine
on my car. As we
approached
their work area, I began to slue the car over the
parting to the left,
off the main line. In less time than it takes to tell
it, a sudden rock
fall buried Old Red and narrowly missed killing us
all. The poor mule,
my pet and my proud companion, never knew what hit
him. It was probably
the "closest call" I ever had in a coal mine--and a
terrifying
experience
for a thirteen-year-old.
Only about eight
feet
seprerated a mule from his car, and I was sitting out
on the bumper
when
that hundred tons of rock crushed Old Red. One second
he was there,
responding
to my commands--and then suddenly, he was buried and
gone forever, in
less
time than it takes to scream.
There was nothing to
do
but cut the traces, drop back a few feet, and cut a
new entry. Another
mule was hitched to my car. Everything was back to
normal. We had to
get
that coal.
If I wasn't already
a
man, I became one that day.
One of the
things
a man
learns to live with in a coal mine is the presence of
the huge rats
that
roam through the tunnels, living off food scraps and
whatever plant or
animal life one finds there.
Coal mine rats
are
long, lean, mean rescals, black or dark gray in color.
I've seen them
tear
the lid off a metal dinner bucket to get at food. They
won't attack a
man,
of course--at least not as long as he's moving around
and able to
defend
himself. But I wouldn't recommend sleeping next to
one; they're big
enough
and plenty vicious enough to take off an ear lobe or
the end of your
nose
in one bite.
Old-time miners,
like
old-time sailors aboard ship, are superstitious about
killing rats--and
for much the same reason. They believe that when a
cave-in is eminent,
rats can sense it and will instinctively head for the
surface.
So the old coal
miner
looks upon Brother Rat as a necessary, if nasty,
friend. And it is a
fact,
so I've been told by numerous people who should know,
that many mine
disasters
have been immediately preceded by a great outpouring
of rats.
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