The days were long, but money mattered,

fifty cents a day helped keep us all fed,

so schooling wasn’t really a question.

 

I was nine when this picture was taken,

and, yeah, I really smoked that pipe,

carried that pickaxe, the whole thing.

 

My day started before the sun was fully up,

so I went from darkness to darkness,

no different than the pit ponies I loved.

 

Back and forth, cleaning up after them,

sniffing the air for gas, carrying dynamite,

the work was hard, but not like the miners’.

 

At eighteen, I joined the Marines, hard work

I’d trained for since I was a little pit boy,

earned my way up through the ranks fast.

 

In ‘24, somebody got careless, so bad

everyone on that shift was blown apart,

just like that mortar did me in the Belleau.

(after the circa-1900 photograph captioned,
“Unidentified child, probably at Castle Gate,
Finlander — 9 years old. He worked in the
Castle Gate Mine near the turn of the century.
He carried explosives and searched for “Bad
Air” and cleaned entries from animal debris
and loose coal.”, in the collection of the Utah
State Historical Society; and after the 1946
song lyrics, “Dark as a Dungeon,” by Merle
Travis)