One of my favourite email messages last week came from a woman that I have not met.
Rohanna Gibson is a geologist in Kimberley, and she wrote to tell me about a presentation on mining in the Kootenays that she will be making at the Creston Museum next Thursday (see story elsewhere in this issue).
After responding to Gibson’s message I checked out her web site, eastkootenayminingheritage.wordpress.com and, as I scrolled through the home page, I saw a photo I have seen before. It’s a picture from the Fernie Museum of a train arriving, with a throng of people looking on.
“Fernie Mine Disaster” says the writing at the bottom of the photo. It was apparently taken following an explosion in the Coal Creek mine, just a few miles from Fernie, in 1902. That disaster claimed 128 lives.
My own family history in the Kootenays doesn’t start until shortly after World War I, when my grandfathers arrived from England and found work in the mines around Michel and Natal, towns now long gone. Grandpa Bath was a Geordie, and Pop Eckersley was a Lanc—they both grew up in coal mining families. I still never make the drive past Sparwood without thinking about the coal soot-blackened houses that my mom and dad had lived in as kids, and where many of my aunts and uncles and their families lived until the towns were eventually razed in the 1960s.
My dad’s family moved around quite a bit in his early years. He often reminisced about escaping, with his mother, in the back of a dry cleaner’s delivery truck, from Corbin, where a miners’ strike became a scene of riots. The little mining village near the Alberta village was cordoned off by police to prevent union supporters from across Western Canada from joining the fray. Mom Eckersley and her little boy were spirited out to safety, hidden among the racks of dry cleaned clothes, while Pop stayed behind.
Dad’s first job, after he quit school in the eighth grade, was working with the horse teams that pulled cars of coal out of that infamous Coal Creek mine.
In my youth, I spent most of my summers in Fernie, staying in the West Fernie home of my paternal grandparents. Pop didn’t have a car by then, but my mom’s brother, Uncle Ron, would pick me up on Tuesday and Thursday evenings to go fly-fishing. We often went up Lizard Creek, near where the ski hill is now, but my favourite destination was Coal Creek. We would drive along the coal dust-covered road that connected Fernie with the old Coal Creek townsite. Much of the mining infrastructure was still evident and, high up on one mountain, wisps of smoke could be seen, evidence of a fire deep inside that smouldered for decades. We fished, I am sure, every inch of that creek over the years, with Uncle Ron packing me on his back when we had to cross the rushing waters. I suspect he spent as much time freeing up my dry flies from tree branches than he did fishing, but he never complained.
One of my favourite memories is when he picked me up in a dump truck so that I could go with him to make coal deliveries to homes in the Fernie area. My grandmother wasn’t happy when I came home covered in soot, but I thought it was the coolest thing we could do.
Pop Eckersley didn’t always work in the mines. His dad had a portable sawmill and he eventually took it over, but he did end up back in the mines near Sparwood before he retired. I can still picture him walking out of the house early in the morning, lunch bucket tucked under his arm as he headed to the highway, where a Dickens bus would pick up miners and take them to work.
My Grandpa Bath, mom’s dad, never did escape the mines. By the time he retired he had developed emphysema (“black lung” as it was called by everyone but the medical community and government) and later I would stand beside his hospital bed, listening to his desperate gasps for air that came from behind his oxygen mask. He didn’t last the night.
I have written before about a time as a high schooler when I once broached the idea of going to work in the coal mines for a summer job. I am not sure I ever got an angrier response from my dad. “No son of mine…” he roared.
In his later years, dad become an avid amateur historian, amassing a large collection of information and photos about the mining communities in the Fernie area, and I still have much of that collection. It is a connection to my own history, and of my grandfathers’ and father’s and uncles’ work in dangerous, health-destroying conditions, all so they could raise families who wouldn’t have to do the same thing.
