By Garland Bills.
An amazing resource for historical information of earlier times is the Library of Congress’ ChroniclingAmerica.com online database of old newspapers. I was recently consulting it in search of information on another topic. Finding myself looking through the Friday, 13 November 1891 issue of Hillsboro’s Sierra County Advocate my attention was suddenly drawn to a blaring three-line headline under Kingston News:
Such a headline certainly demands that you read more. So here’s the story that follows the screaming headline:
A shocking accident happened at Kingston last evening, at the Brush Heap Mine. Richard Joy, and Wm. Hutchens were blown to pieces by the explosion of about fifteen sticks of giant powder. The explosion took place about 150 feet under ground. Frank Raborg and Frank Cox were near by and barely escaped with their lives. Raborg came near being suffocated with smoke. No two young men could be more missed around town and by their families. Neither were over twenty-one years of age. The accident has cast a gloom over the entire community and sympathy for the bereaved relatives is expressed on every hand. The funeral will occur to-day and will probably by the largest ever seen in Kingston. What makes the accident more particularly sad is the fact that the young men were the support of their mothers and sisters.
This deplorable news was reported with great sympathy by this weekly newspaper. But the story is followed up the next Friday, November 20, by a still more anguished report. A real tearjerker:
The early riser in Kingston is accustomed to see various lights from windows here and there in town. Some mother, sister or wife is cooking breakfast for the miner, who has to get out early to go on the day shift. Two of these lights are out, gone forever. Two miners lie side by side on the grave yard hill; two mothers no longer have need of an early light to get breakfast for their boys. There are none to take their placed, the lights have gone out forever. The pleasant faces of Richard Joy and William Hutchens are no longer seen going up street by the early morning light, with their dinner pails, and returning in the evening, stained with the dust of the mine, to sit down to such a supper as only a mother can set up to her boy. No one knows their last thoughts just before the fatal giant powder quenched the last spark of life, but no doubt it was of mother.
An additional bit of news came after three other brief news notes: “The two departed boy miners, Dick Joy and Billy Hutchens, were buried side by side in one grave. The funeral procession was the largest ever seen in Kingston.”
The reader may feel that the Sierra County Advocate appears to be a bulletin with heart, a newspaper with an abiding concern for the welfare of it’s local readers. But the reporting above can better be described as “crocodile tears.” In fact, the Advocate’s orientation, like that of most newspapers, leans heavily towards it’s more prosperous readers, not the poor working class exemplified by the two young men and their mothers and sisters. Their fathers, too, probably were local miners. But the only previous mention I could find of the two surnames is a seemingly dismissive note four months earlier (July 17) about the two boys: “Will Hutchins and Dick Joy, of the Brush Heap mine, extended their hunting expedition as far as Cold Springs last Sunday. Up to that time they had succeeded in killing six pigeons.”
Rather than reporting on its ordinary citizens, almost all of the local news is concerned with the affairs of the leading citizens and families – the prominent merchants, the big ranchers, and the mining superintendents and similar bigwigs. More significantly, the Advocate was a blatant booster of broader economic development, hyping the potential of Black Range mining to outside investors.
In this respect it is important to point out that in the same issue of the explosive news of November 13, the Advocate carried a separate editorial explanation:
The blowing up by giant powder of the two young miners Joy and Hutchens at Kingston last evening, is the first fatal accident that has happened in the mines of this county for nearly a year. Accidents are very rare indeed, and this fact makes the one chronicled in our Kingston department if anything all the more shocking.
The Advocate considers just two deaths reported in less than a year to be a good safety record. I note that the Kingston Cemetery brochure, a guide for visitors, mentions another unmarked grave for two other young men killed in a mining accident there in the late 1880s.
But maybe the safety record and reporting of deaths did not please the owners in Detroit, Michigan. Just a week after the second tearjerking report, the Advocate of November 27 carries the cryptic note, “We learn that Mr. A. J. Mitchell has received instructions from the Brush Heap mining company to assume the superintendency of its mine at Kingston. This would seem to indicate that Thom. S. O’Neil has resigned the superintendency of the property.” No investigative interpretation was provided.
Finally I need to mention that in addition to these bad news reports at the end of the year, the Advocate mentions the Brush Heap mining operation in earlier 1891 notes at least a dozen times, always in laudatory terms such as “turning out a little bonanza” and “filling the coffers.”
The newspaper’s concern for the working stiffs? Crocodile tears.