UTAH

The Cost of Coal: the 1924 Great Castle Disaster

George Binette highlights a bloody centenary.

The flame of a carbide lamp goes out – a fire boss, effectively a mine safety inspector, strikes a match to relight the lamp, only to spark the first of three explosions that rocked the Castle Gate coal mine in Carbon County, some 90 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah shortly after 8.00am local time on 8th March 1924. All 171 men working that morning’s shift died, along with the leader of the would-be rescue team, who perished from carbon monoxide poisoning.

A subsequent investigation determined the explosions had stemmed from a build-up of coal dust, which had not been properly watered down at the end of the previous shift. There is some evidence that mine management had ignored previous warnings and failed to implement a state inspector’s recommendations. The extraordinary force of the blasts projected debris including a mining cart and telephone poles for up to a mile from the mine’s entrance. Nine days would pass before all the bodies emerged from the devastation. Identification of many of the dead had to rely on recognition of clothing items, given the horrific mutilation of their bodies.

The make-up of that morning’s shift illustrated the ethnic diversity of the mining workforce. Of the 172 killed the majority had been born outside the United States: 50 were originally from Greece, 25 came from Italy, 46 from Britain, mostly England though 12 were from Wales, four from Japan and a few others from what is now the former Yugoslavia. The 76 US-born miners were predominantly white but included at least two African-Americans. The youngest victim was just 15; the oldest aged 73.

Near to the Castle Gate complex, operated by the Utah Fuel Company, and also in Carbon County a disaster 24 years before had claimed the lives of 200 men and teenage boys at the Winter Quarters mine in Scofield. At the time, the Scofield disaster was the single worst catastrophe to hit the US mining industry. The March 1924 Castle Gate explosions exacted what was then the third highest death toll of any mining disaster nationally. The disaster now ranks as the tenth worst in the history of US mining.

In the US left’s folklore, Utah is undoubtedly most notorious for the execution of the Swedish-born International Workers of the World militant – and songwriter – Joe Hill in 1915. Prior to his arrest and subsequent execution, following his wrongful conviction for the murder of a local police officer, Hill had been working as a labourer at a mine outside Park City, Utah (now home of a ski resort and the Sundance Film Festival).

While not a key centre of union activism, Utah did witness several battles to defend pay rates and later to win recognition for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The horrors of the Scofield disaster in 1900 spurred an initial union drive early in the century. There were subsequent efforts to unionise the Utah coalfields in 1917. By 1920, more than 2,000 miners belonged to the UMWA across eight mines including Castle Gate. A significant proportion of those killed on 8th March 1924, particularly among those of Greek heritage, had probably joined a national strike in 1922-23, which at one stage involved at least 650,000 miners across the US.

That strike did claw back wage cuts imposed by the mining company bosses, but ultimately failed to win union recognition at Castle Gate across the Utah coalfields. This only came early in the New Deal years and with mass unionisation came improvements in pay and working conditions.

The coal industry’s fortunes oscillated dramatically post-1945 with sharp retrenchment between the late 1950s and early ‘70s, followed by a sharp upturn after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and record production levels in the early Reagan years. The decline of “King Coal” in Utah resumed in the 1990s, however, and Carbon County’s last mine, Dugout Canyon, closed in 2019.

George Binette is Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer and writes in a personal capacity.

Image: Monument for the Castle Gate mine disaster. https://www.flickr.com/photos/donbrr/21617606784. Creator: Don Barrett. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.