At the turn of the century I found myself deeply immersed in a bit of research that involved the now thirteen year old Hillcrest Memorial Monument. It fell to me back then to compile the mine accident statistics for the commemorative pillows that surround this massive piece of granite. Every single man lost in the coal mines in Canada is worthy of a place at Hillcrest but space constraints limited this oh so important list to three men or more.
The compilation of the statistics was daunting to say the least and reached from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island. Nova Scotia’s statistics are now listed on a website that has all 2,584 men lost up to 1992 when the unthinkable Westray disaster reared its ugly head. That database is 169 pages long, 50 men to a page and lists each and every miner’s name, the date, the mine location and the cause.
It is a list that is heartbreaking to make one’s way through and a reminder that there was a terrible toll taken of men in the early days of underground coal mining. In Nova Scotia’s case the stats start in 1838. In the case of British Columbia the data was compiled from the annual ministry of mines reports that date back to 1874 when coal mining began in earnest around the Nanaimo area. The reports are all on line and vary in size from 38 pages to a whopping 579 pages per year. They make for a fascinating read and cover not just coal mining but all mineral activity in BC with interesting pictures taken by area inspectors of new and on- going mine development.
So when all was said and done in 1999 I submitted my best compilation to Remco Memorials for inscription onto the pillows. I knew at the time it was likely that I had missed some important dates and it was not long before some of them surfaced. In attendance at the dedication that day at the monument was Cumberland’s mayor Bill Montcrief Jr. who on reviewing the pillow statistics pointed out a couple of omissions. It was painful as a researcher to hear this but at the time the resources available to me were limited. Now with the internet there are databases like those mentioned above that have allowed me to continue my refinement.
Having said that, I can tell you that the list of missed dates of three men or more now lies at 16 events and may grow. It is the intention of the Hillcrest Centennial Planning Committee to include these missed stats into the pillow configuration so that at the 100th anniversary celebration they will have been added.
As a researcher, visiting each one of these losses was a painful task. There was a time a few years ago though that I had a stunning reminder that Canada is not alone in this legacy of coal mine disasters. Every country that discovered coal resources has suffered staggering losses in their early development and some countries like China continue to mount statistics that are outrageous.
For me the reminder that we are not alone came in 1998 at the dedication of a book entitled: “The Forgotten Side of the Border”, a compilation of stories from the Elk Valley and the Crowsnest Pass that took us back to the early days and in the process showed us all the interconnectedness that these areas share. At the book’s dedication in Fernie editor Wayne Norton announced to the gathering that over 200 men had died in Coal Creek in May 1902.
I assumed he meant Coal Creek outside of Fernie and promptly raised my hand to correct him about the stat, which was 128 men. Before I could he finished the sentence by saying Coal Creek, Kentucky. It was then that I recognized there was a world outside of ours that had gone down the same horrific road.
This first missed statistic that will be rectified at the Hillcrest pillows happened at the Wellington Colliery in Nanaimo on April 17, 1879 when seven men died in an explosion. When I went to the net to reach deeper into this story I did not specify what country and Google came up with yet another reminder that the mine names can be the same but the country can be different. So for “Wellington Disaster 1879” one of the items that Google offered was a disaster in February in Kaitangata on the southern island of New Zealand. It seems that coal was discovered there in 1844 in the outcrops by the sea but it was 25 years before the first viable mines were opened. Ten years later 34 men and boys between the ages of 14 and 69 walked into the Kaitangata Mine after acting fire boss Joseph Bearsmore had checked for firedamp (methane) with the mine’s only Davey Safety Lamp. There was a huge explosion later that morning and none of them came out alive. The assumption that New Zealand mines were more stable than their Home Country was disastrously wrong. The Home Country of the British Isles already had its legacy with instances like Landhill near Barnsley in Yorkshire where 189 deaths were recorded in 1857, at Shankhouse Colliery in 1867 in Northumberland where 200 miners died and in 1878 where an incredible 271 men were lost in a mine at Abercarne in Wales.
There is another database I have been working with and that is the “List of Fatalities in Coal Mines of Alberta, 1904 to 1963” compiled by the UMWA. It strikes a lot closer to home as the statistics have an inordinate number of Pass miners within its 19 pages. Throughout the list I discovered seven missed incidents of three men or more that included mines like Bankhead in Banff, the H.W. McNeill Mine in Canmore and places like Yellowhead Coal in Jasper and the Thomas Coal Co. in Nacmine.
As an aside I worked my way through the 1257 names on a mine by mine basis and totaled the losses for the Pass mines for this period. Of all the numbers I have compiled so far these ones weigh the heaviest. To the best of my knowledge they are as follows: West Canadian Collieries Bellevue (WCC) - 82 men, WCC Blairmore -25 men, International Mine Coleman -55 men, McGillivray Mine Coleman – 57 men, Hillcrest Mines – 229men, Frank Mine – 20 men, Mohawk Mine – 9 men, Leitch Collieries – 4 men, Maple Leaf and Lille mines 2 each, Tent Mountain, Grassy Mountain and Vicary Mine -1each. Vicary is probably higher as 1962 is the cut-off date. In total during that 59 year period the UMWA recorded in the Pass we lost 487 men to mining the coal! That is roughly one third of Alberta’s total fatalities. Incredible and heartbreaking.
