Published by The British Columbia Provincial Museum
Victoria, British Columbia
(Writing about the Lakeside Coal Mine in the Spring of 1934)
Although this was a lignite mine it differed from many of the prairie mines in that the company had some industrial contracts which enabled the mine to work fairly steadily in the summer months. The majority of the work force was married, some having their homes in Wabamun and others had houses of sorts near the mine. Although it was a small operation, it had an air of permanence about it. Here families had their homes and children attended the village school. It looked like a place where one could plant roots.
The mine was entered by a level tunnel in the side of a hill. A steam plant provided power to operate the winch which hauled trips of coal out of the tunnel. A screening plant and a bath house, where the miners showered and changed clothes, completed the surface installations. A spur-track, connected to the main line, provided the means to ship coal in car-load lots to the market
The seam had a unique geological formation. It was nine feet thick and level, there being no dips or inclines of any consequence. Instead of being overlaid by shales and sandstones as most coal seams, the strata next to the seams was composed of gravel beds forty to eighty feet thick. To maintain a stable roof only seven feet of the seam was mined. Shortly before I had arrived at the mine a workman had been killed by a cave-in and eyewitnesses said there wasn't a bruise on him, he had been smothered to death by fine gravel and sand. It was most important to keep the two feet of coal at the roof well timbered; if this shell was broken, the sand and gravel above would run like water.
The system of mining was the room-and-pillar method or pillar-and-stall method; again the coal was produced by hand. This was the fourth mine I had worked in Canada and none had any face machinery to aid in coal production. With hand labour so cheap, and able to satisfy the market, mine owners had no need to spend capital to mechanize their mines. The rate of pay was fifty cents per ton. Nothing was paid for timbering or laying track; this work was included in the tonnage rate. By working hard, a miner could average five dollars a day, and working four and five days a week provided a comfortable living. My total overhead was only a dollar a day board and a dollar a week for the bunkhouse. The most important point was that the mine worked in summer and that meant I could stay in one place. I was tired of the hit-and-miss kind of life I had been living and yearned to belong somewhere.