Why I Write About Vancouver Island Coal Mining
I just can’t get away from Vancouver Island’s rich history of coal mining, it seems.
I read about it, think about it, write about it and give every weekend I can to exploring abandoned minesites of the South Wellington and Nanaimo areas.
Last weekend, it was a day with Jennifer at the old PCCM (Pacific Coast Coal Mines) townsite, at South Wellington. God knows, we’ve been there before, but at this time of year, with the fire hazard being what it is and access to much of the Island’s forest lands restricted, we have little choice but to ‘recycle’ some of our digs from the past.
As it happens, a well-used hiking trail cuts right across the century-old townsite.
I have to wonder how many hikers take notice of, and give thought to, some of the rusted rubble that bottle diggers have unearthed over the years.
Many of these ‘artifacts’ such as old stove parts, graniteware cooking and coffee pots, have been suspended from tree branches for all to see. Most conspicuous, by far, is the newly fenced-off sinkhole where part of the old mine has caved in. A conspicuous sign warns passersby of this threat from our historic past.
Such sinks are common in this area; so much so as to give the uninformed the impression that South Wellington is inhabited by a race of invisible but giant moles or gophers.
The reality is that you’re walking atop not one but at least four abandoned coal mines in this immediate area, whose miles of underground tunneling have begun to settle in recent years, sometimes to the chagrin of the E&N Railway whose tracks cross immediately above all of them.
If this sounds scary, it really isn’t.
If it were, there’d be no City of Nanaimo which straddles a miles-wide maze of subterranean passages, most of which are likely flooded. Only a few years ago, Hecate Street opened up and it tooks months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to fill it back in.
There are some vacant lots in Greater Nanaimo, some of them in the very midst of popular subdivisions, that are vacant because construction is forbidden because of their hidden but known dangers.
We didn’t have much luck at the PCC townsite which has been picked over since the 1970s; just a 1920s beer or ale bottle, a stash of drill cores, a horse shoe and a dime for hours of scratching in hard ground and in clinging salal.
But, as they say, a great time was had by all!
In the course of scanning my voluminous files on Vancouver Island coal mines, I came acros this column I wrote for the Harbour City Star (now gone) in 2000. The mine in question is in the ‘other’ Wellington, the one north and west of downtown Nanaimo.
In this piece I tried to capture some of the drama that attended coal mining in the (so-called) good old days. For all my writings to date, however, and those of other historians, few people seem to know much about the underground industry that provided jobs for 10s of thousands of miners, and income for their families, for almost a century.
Which, to me, is a colossal tragedy and which explains my compelling drive to record as much about the Island’s coal mining history as I possibly can.
Here then, is my blast from the past, that column from 2000 that I entitled, Coal Mining Was a Black and Bloody Business…
“A gloom like unto a funeral pall” descended upon Nanaimo and region early Thursday, April 17, 1879 upon news of another mining accident.
This time it was the turn of Dunsmuir, Diggle & Co.’s Wellington Colliery to experience tragedy. In the worst Island colliery mishap to date, 11 miners (“seven white men and four Chinese”) died in an explosion.
The tragedy began Tuesday upon discovery of a fire at the No. 10 level. For 48 hours miners attempted to extinguish it and, at one point, thought they had it contained. By 6:00 a.m. Thursday when the shifts changed, the mine had been cleared of smoke.
Only 10 minutes later, an explosion filled it with lethal choke-damp.
An odourless, invisible and lethal mixture of nitrogren, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, it’s also known as black-damp and is highly volatile.
Uninjured miners fought to carry their wounded comrades to safety. The first bodies recovered were those of 61-year-old William Rennie, a victim of head injuries, and 14-year-old (yes, he was just 14 years old!) apprentice machinist (and second generation) Robert Gough. He’d been manning the pump at the entrance to No. 10 level; as he showed no signs of physical injury it was surmised that he’d been gassed.
Poor Andrew Scott was brought out alive but suffering from both head injuries and choke-damp. The body of a Chinese miner identified only as “Fatty” was also removed.
The grim recovery operation continued:
Appollis Damey, aged 30 and single, the victim of head injuries and burns about the lower body; John Hoskins, 30, who’d succumbed to choke-damp; Edward Campbell, married with several children, who’d died on his 61st birthday; two more Chinese bodies, names not given, one of them “burned to a cinder;” and, finally, John Dixon, father of six.
That left a single Chinese miner unaccounted for whose body wouldn’t be recovered until nine months later.
Dixon, “a miner of great experience,” had two Chinese assistants and was in charge of the mine’s ventilation system. All three were found beyond a canvas curtain which had been erected to prevent gas escaping from the fire area. Initially, management couldn’t explain why they’d ventured beyond the firewall to what appeared to be the point of detonation.
The scenes at the pithead had been enough to “melt to tears the hardest heart,”
reported the Nanaimo Free Press, with “wives wailing for their husbands, and parents for their chidlren, and the children for their parents”.
The newspaper, while beseeching its readers to withold judgment as to the cause of the blast until a formal inquiry could be held, seems to have suspected ventilation manager Dixon’s crew of some horrendous error or oversight but ingenuously made the plea:
“Let the inquiry be a thorough and searching one, so that the guilty one, if he be alive, may be brought to justice.”
The actual culprit, if one could accept the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, was that one of Dixon’s Chinese assistants who, unable to read English, had ignited gas when he passed beyond the canvas drape—and a large warning sign—with an open-flame lamp. John Dixon had been caught at the flashpoint while checking for the presence of gas or while ordering the his men out of the danger zone.
Whatever the cause, whoever was to blame, the damage was done.
The pioneering Wellington Colliery would resume operations and help to make the Dunsmuirs the wealthiest family in the province.
And the dying underground would continue sporadically, for more than half a century and hundreds of lives…
Still wonder why I find the story of coal mining so fascinating? As a storyteller, I couldn’t ask for more real-life drama to write about.
And I shall continue to do so as long as I am able!
