Digging a Hole to Heaven: Coal Miner Boys by S. D. Nelson (review)

Conall has already advanced in the hierarchy of his Pennsylvania coal mine, starting as a breaker boy sifting coal from debris, and now leading a mule, Angel, that hauls carloads of coal to the lift that takes it out of the mine. It’s filthy work, but he’s proud to follow his older brother Danny and his father, who is recovering from a mining injury and relies on his sons to help support the family. “One day, without warning, a great shudder wrenched the insides of the mountain”; a cave-in has trapped miners, including Danny, behind a huge pile of rubble, and Conall and Angel join the rescue effort. This fictional tale, drawn to typify a child miner’s work experience at the turn of the last century, has a happy ending, but Nelson structures his narrative to apprise readers that all too many were not. Nearly every spread of Conall’s story, illustrated in textured acrylics that convey the eerily illuminated gloom of the mines, is matched by an historical photograph of a child miner from the early 1900s and a paragraph that describes the perilous industry and decades of attempts to regulate it. Four double-columned pages of historical notes draw together many threads of labor history, from the swift adoption of coal-powered engines in the Industrial Revolution, to child labor laws, mine safety legislation, animal rights concerns, labor unions, and the current role of coal among industrializing nations. A timeline, source notes, bibliography, and brief index (which usefully covers the endnotes as well as the text) make this a versatile work that can be appreciated as a short piece of historical fiction or as a starting point for understanding the grimy underside of the Gilded Age.