Bloody Williamson (19 page)

What did it mean, this readiness for killing, with men grim enough to use the weapons in their hands?

Joe Leiter had his answer, which he gave to a reporter in Chicago on December 5, immediately after returning from Washington, where he had attended his sister’s wedding.

Judge Otis M. Humphrey had his answer, expressed in the federal courtroom in Springfield on August 15, 1904, when he refused to dissolve or modify the injunction he had previously granted.

And Leichleiter, summing up for both sides, came closer to expressing the conviction of the men who shivered through the winter of 1904–5 in their draughty tents than anyone else whose words are now to be found in the record.

Slowly, after the advent of the militia, Zeigler quieted down until the sound of shots fired in the night became a rare occurrence. Early in February 1905, the two militia companies were withdrawn, and no disturbance of any consequence followed their departure. Leiter’s troubles narrowed to the difficulty of keeping an adequate number of miners on the job, for the strikebreakers he imported continued to desert after short periods of work.

Then, on the early morning of April 3, came disaster. From the mine office Leiter’s mining engineer saw smoke rising from the hoisting and air shafts. Knowing that something was wrong, he started for the hoisting shaft on the run. Before he reached it there was a tremendous explosion. Smoke billowed hundreds of feet into the air, and debris in the form of shattered boards, riven railroad ties, and torn pieces of metal rained to the ground about the shaft heads.

The day shift, numbering nearly fifty, had gone down a short time before. None came up.

Women and children gathered, as they have so many times in the history of this industry which takes its toll of lives relentlessly, some weeping, some dumb and motionless, all knowing that from these shafts could come only dead bodies. The union at Zeigler offered to do what it could in rescue work, and locals in near-by towns followed its example. The company rejected all offers, and permitted only its own employees to enter the stockade. Even in disaster Leiter would have nothing to do with organized labor.

Several hours passed before a rescue party had even a slight chance to survive. Then William Atkinson, state inspector of mines for the district, John Graham, a mine examiner, and John Lindsay, Leiter’s assistant manager, descended the hoisting shaft in a bucket. A second party found their bodies, and barely escaped the deadly gas with their own lives. Not until evening could anyone enter the underground workings and survive. Those who went down saw a tangled mass of wreckage—mine
cars crushed against the working face, rails twisted, mules torn apart, human bodies or parts of human bodies buried under fallen rock or splattered against the sides of the entries. When all the bodies were counted—some were never found—and the mine records checked, it was established that fifty-one men, including the three of the first rescue-party, had lost their lives. In the records of Illinois mining before 1905 only one other catastrophe—the flooding of the Diamond Mine at Braidwood in 1883—had caused more casualties.

Although they refrained from making the charge directly, company officials contended that the explosion was the work of the striking miners. “We always claimed the mine was blown up by the miners,” Henry R. Platt testified years afterward, “and most of us who were there have a very firm conviction that that is what occurred.” To this contention the coroner’s jury gave some color when it attributed the disaster to a powder explosion—a verdict that implied guilt on the part of the union miners.

The secretary of the state mining-board, on the other hand, dismissed even the possibility that the disaster could have originated with the strikers. After describing Leiter’s protective measures—the stockade, searchlight, and armed guards—he asserted that it was impossible for anyone to approach the property without being detected and identified. “Notwithstanding this system of espionage the company’s officials are represented as contending that some time during the night preceding the explosion, some maliciously disposed people eluded the guards, scaled the stockade, descended the mine, and exploded the powder magazine. It would seem,” he concluded, “that a mere statement of the facts is sufficient to disprove such a contention without attempting any argument to further expose the patent weakness of such a defense.”

Three separate investigations, in fact, agreed in attributing the explosion to gas. Immediately after the catastrophe Governor Deneen directed the state inspectors of mines and the members of the state mining-board—ten men in all—to visit the
Zeigler mine and report their findings to him. They found that the mine had been generating marsh gas, that the ventilation had been reduced far below the safety point, that powder had been stored in the mine in violation of the law, and that no inspection had been made for several days prior to the explosion. Just enough air was being pumped into the mine to make the marsh gas highly explosive. A miner’s lamp touched off the first blast; a few seconds later the powder—forty-one kegs in all—blew up. These findings were confirmed in every particular by detailed investigations, also made at Governor Deneen’s request, by James Taylor, one of the state inspectors of mines, and John G. Massie, a man of long experience in coal mining. The secretary of the state mining-board summarized all the findings succinctly and fairly when he wrote: “The explosion was the result of gas, which, on account of the impaired condition of the ventilating apparatus, had been allowed to accumulate in excessively dangerous quantities.”

Although badly damaged, the mine was put into working condition in three months. By that time—early July 1905—Leiter had recruited a new labor force. Heretofore he had relied principally upon European immigrants—most of the men killed in the explosion of April 3 were Hungarians—but now he turned to Negroes, importing them from districts in Kentucky where work was slack. The union made little effort to interfere with his operations, but he dared not relax his vigilance. The searchlight probed the surrounding country nightly, and between a hundred and a hundred and fifty guards and deputies made sure that no unauthorized person entered the stockade.

Production mounted, and the Zeigler Coal Company finally achieved the output of which it was capable. In 1906 it brought 238,654 tons of coal to the surface; in 1907, 321,285 tons; in 1908, 522,722 tons. In 1906 it ranked twenty-eighth among the mines of the state; in 1908 only three mines stood above it.

Then, with operations going smoothly and with the future full of promise, disaster struck again. On the night of November 4,
1908, fire broke out in the hoisting shaft. In spite of all that could be done, it spread throughout the night. The next morning the management agreed with the state mining-inspector for the district that the mine should be sealed for ninety days. In that time the fire would exhaust all underground oxygen and die.

Sixty-six days later—on January 10, 1909—State Mine Inspector W. S. Burris was hurriedly called to Zeigler. Earlier that day there had been an explosion, and only one man of twenty-seven underground at the time had escaped with his life. There had been no noise, no violent eruption—only smoke drifting lazily from the hoisting shaft. When a party went down to investigate they found twenty-six bodies and one man still alive. Leiter, in Zeigler at the time, took charge of the rescue operations; his bride of seven weeks served coffee and sandwiches to the rescue teams and tried to console the wives and relatives of the men who had lost their lives.

Mine Inspector Burris quickly discovered that the mine had not been kept sealed. Holes had been drilled to the underground galleries and water, steam, and sulphur forced through them in an effort to put out the fire. Then, on January 10, a crew of men went below to clean up fallen rock, build brattices, and clean out gas. But opening the mine to let the men down also admitted air that, the inspector surmised, rekindled the smoldering fire. That ignited the gas which had accumulated, and the explosion followed.

Burris immediately called in the inspectors of three other districts. They agreed that the mine must be sealed until it was certain that the underground fire had gone out. Accordingly, on January 11 he posted the following notice:

The Zeigler management protested the closing notice. At the superintendent’s request, Burris arranged for a meeting of the state mine-inspectors and mining board, and invited Leiter and his company officials to attend. None appeared. The inspectors and board members approved the closing order.

The company kept the mine sealed for three weeks. Then it sent repair crews into the workings, each man equipped with a gas helmet. On February 9, 1909, with sixteen men below, there was a sudden explosion. Three died instantly; the others, working near the main shaft, escaped. Again air had fanned the dormant fire into flame and touched off an explosion.

Word of this latest tragedy reached Leiter in Chicago, where he was recuperating from an operation. A month earlier he had met the death of twenty-six men with defiance: he would neither close his mine, he said, nor retire from the management. But this latest loss of life was too much. As soon as he could, he went to Washington to see his mother. He found her badly worried. As he recalled their conversation later, “she said she was getting old and she didn’t want to be worried any more by the expectation of getting a telegram any time that the mine had blown up and that I had blown up with it.… She said if I didn’t make an arrangement to get somebody else to run the property she was going to foreclose on it and sell it out to somebody else.”

Leiter quit.

The next year, when the Bell and Zoller Mining Company took over the operation of the Zeigler mine on a royalty basis, every
miner on the payroll belonged to the United Mine Workers of America.
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May 1923–February 1924