What isn't shown is that most of those ponies in the earlier days were worked by boys, not adults. My father started working in the mines in SW. PA when he was 9 years old picking up coal that fell off the charts for 3 cents a day. My grandfather made 9 cents a day. Over a few years he was driving singles, then teams. He got fired from one mine when the team got away from him and ran into the vent fan and killed them.
From his stories, the ponies were not treated all that well. No better than the young boys . Most died underground, never seeing the light of day from when they were taken underground. Sometime in the late 20's it became illegal to work small boys underground. By then, my father was older and stayed in the mines. He worked his way up to dynamite shooter.
Sometime after the third cave in, when they dug him out, he vowed to never go back underground again. This was about 1945. After several years he got a job with US Steel as an apprentice machinist. He worked another 25+ years on that. I remember as young boy that we had small family mine where three families mined a 2 foot coal seam. Us boys would put the coal in burlap sacks and drag it outside. This was barely a 3 foot tall drift and the work was on our hands and needs. He passed away at 93 with severe Blacklung. One thing he was always upset about was that I spent about 30 years underground, 3 months out of every year.
Last edited by saddlesore; 02/26/18.
