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 Calaveras Gold happen not only did the workingman suffer, but so did his family. In the most serious cases the usual response was to take up a collection for the widow and orphans.58 To men working underground, fire was the biggest fear, although fatal fires in metal mines were relatively scarce. In Calaveras the worst accident was a cave-in at the Utica that took  lives in . Forty years later  men were killed in a cave-in at the Calaveras Copper Mine in Copperopolis. Both were far less than the  lives lost in  in the Argonaut mine fire across the Mokelumne in Amador County, the deadliest single accident in California gold mining history.59 Rock falls were far more common, a greater contributor to mine fatalities as well as the leading cause of injuries in the three decades after . Just one incident in Calaveras illustrates the universal problem. John Drury, an experienced miner and foreman of a shaft crew, stood near the hanging wall in the Crystal mine at Angels Camp one morning in  ‘‘when a slab of slate of nearly three tons weight slid out of the wall. It caught Drury on the back of the legs, just above the knees, cutting one leg off and badly mangling the other.’’ He bled to death before he could be rescued.60 The annual reports of the U.S. Bureau of Mines after it was organized in  reflect these grim statistics.The death rate in California metals mines for that year was  out of , miners, or . per thousand. The rate steadily rose in the next four years, reaching . per thousand in . In that same year nonfatal injuries in California mines totaled ,, or  per thousand, higher than for the United States as a whole. By , with less than , miners still at work in California, the death rate had declined to ., with a total of , injuries. County data cannot be extrapolated from these state figures, but it is reasonable to assume Calaveras rates were comparable.61 Miners also suffered from a variety of debilitating occupational diseases, some well known such as tuberculosis, others less prominent but still serious. A  study by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, for example, found hookworm in . percent of Mother Lode miners. The most insidious killer, not well understood until well into the twentieth century, was silicosis, or ‘‘miner’s consumption.’’ Though medical research indicated by World War I that at least  percent of western miners were infected, the United States lagged far behind other industrialized nations in recognizing silicosis as an occupational disease.62 Despite the overwhelming body of evidence linking work-site hazards to employee illness, accident, and death, nineteenth-century corporate culture resisted any government encroachment on traditional property rights. Be- Preparing for Modern Mining  fore the Populist-Progressive Era, legislation regulating the workplace seemed antithetical to the spirit of free enterprise. If corporations and the public were slow to accept a larger government role in protecting workers’ health and safety, the courts were even slower. Mining corporations had powerful legal allies in the common-law doctrines of ‘‘assumed risk,’’ ‘‘fellow servant,’’ and ‘‘contributory negligence.’’ These limited corporate liability by placing the burden of responsibility on the employee in case something went wrong on the job.63 In the face of this collective resistance, efforts to improve mine working conditions made slow progress before World War I. Though often divided by ethnic, cultural, and language differences, those who worked underground knew they had more to gain by uniting in common effort against implacable forces of opposition than by standing alone. In the words of one labor historian , ‘‘the forces drawing miners together proved stronger than those dividing them.’’ Organized labor in the mining West had its first major success on the Comstock, where miners’ unions took the lead in promoting health and safety measures along with better wages and shorter hours. Comstock miners also helped themselves by promoting hospitals, raising money for disaster relief , establishing burial funds, and other measures. The Comstock precedent spread outward by the late s, but elsewhere labor gains were minimal and often accompanied by strikes and intermittent acts of violence. After more than a decade of internecine warfare, state governments reluctantly stepped in, prodded by labor lobbyists from the newly organized Western Federation of Miners (). The result was a sequence of measures that overrode common-law liability doctrines, imposed a state regulatory regime, required workers’ compensation, and gradually improved the health and safety...

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