essay about miners

Essay: 1848-1865: Gold Rush, Statehood, and the Western Movement

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 vastly accelerated changes that had been occurring since 1769. Already a meeting place for Mexicans, Russians, Americans, Europeans, and natives, the gold rush turned California into a truly global frontier where immigrants from every continent on earth now jostled. More than 300,000 gold seekers flooded California by 1850, bringing to the new American state an astonishing variety of languages, religions, and social customs. Many of these visitors had no interest in settling down in California, intending only to make their "pile" and return home with pockets full of gold. The arrival and departure of thousands of immigrants, the intensely multicultural nature of society, and the newness of American institutions made Gold Rush California a chaotic, confusing landscape for natives and newcomers alike.

Native Population Plummets

The disruptions of the Gold Rush proved devastating for California's native groups, already in demographic decline due to Spanish and Mexican intrusion. The state's native population plummeted from about 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 just 12 years later. As foreigners methodically mined, hunted, and logged native groups' most remote hiding places, natives began raiding mining camps for subsistence. This led to cycles of violence as American miners — supported by the state government — organized war parties and sometimes slaughtered entire native groups.

The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the state legislature in 1850, denied native Californians the right to testify in court and allowed white Americans and Californios to keep natives as indentured servants. "I do not like the white man because he is a liar and a thief," Isidora Filomena de Solano, a Patwin-speaking woman from the Bay Area, told an interviewer in 1874. She echoed the sentiments of many native Californians struggling to preserve traditional ways in the midst of holocaust.

Californios Lose Power, Land, and Privilege

The imposition of American government in California reversed the fortunes of elite Californios, who slowly lost their power, authority, and land. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US-Mexican War, had granted Californios full US citizenship and promised that their property would be "inviolably respected." But the informality of Mexican land grants made legal claims difficult when miners, squatters, and homesteaders overran Californios' lands.

Even when Californio families won legal title to their lands, many found themselves bankrupt from attorney's fees or taxes. The Peralta family lost all but 700 of their 49,000 acres in the East Bay to lawyers, taxes, squatters, and speculators. Eight Californios participated in the California constitutional convention of 1849, but over time their political power declined along with their land base.

White Americans vs. "Foreign Miners"

Californios feared losing their privileged status and being lumped in with the thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America who arrived in California during the Gold Rush. Mexicans and Chilenos were among the first foreigners to make it to California in 1848, and their proximity and mining expertise gave them an edge in the cutthroat competition of the mines.

Their early success led the California legislature to adopt a foreign miners’ license tax in 1850 aimed at "greasers," as all Latin Americans were called. When Latin American miners refused to pay the impossibly high tax ($20 per month), white Americans had an excuse to drive them out of rich mining areas. In the mining town of Sonora, Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians joined with French and German miners to protest the tax, only to be subdued by a hastily formed militia of white Americans.

Rumors began to spread throughout gold country about a swashbuckling Mexican bandit named Joaquín Murieta who was striking back against American injustices. The California legislature offered a huge reward and in 1853 a Texan named Harry Love produced the head of someone he insisted was Murieta. Whether Joaquín Murieta ever actually existed is unknown, but he was celebrated as a hero by many Latin Americans enraged by oppressive American policies.

Chinese Gold Seekers

Chinese gold seekers arrived in great numbers after 1851, and soon comprised about a fifth of the entire population in mining areas. Coming to the mines later than other groups, many Chinese immigrants earned a living by working claims abandoned by other miners. They also took jobs as cooks, launderers, merchants, and herbalists, hoping to return to China with a small fortune. However, low pay, discriminatory hiring practices, and the monthly foreign miners' license tax made this goal all but impossible.

In the face of intense prejudice, some Chinese Californians challenged American racism through the legal system and in the court of public opinion. Chinese community leaders petitioned Sacramento to overturn unfair laws and worked to gain the right to testify in court (finally granted in 1872). Norman Asing, a restaurant owner in San Francisco's booming Chinatown, wrote to California governor John Bigler in 1852, insisting, "We are not the degraded race you would make us."

African Americans Look for Equality and Gold

More than 2,000 African Americans traveled to California by 1852, lured by reports that the California frontier offered a rough-and-tumble egalitarianism along with its gold deposits. Like most gold seekers, they were bitterly disappointed by what they found.

California entered the United States as a free state in 1850, but the lack of government oversight allowed slavery to flourish in certain regions. The state legislature passed a fugitive slave law in 1852, making it illegal for enslaved African Americans to flee their masters within the state's supposedly free borders. All African Americans in California, born free or formerly enslaved, thereafter lived under a constant threat of arrest. They were also barred from testifying in court or sending their children to public schools.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, an African American abolitionist who had spent years lecturing with Frederick Douglass, helped organize the First State Convention of Colored Citizens of California in 1855 to fight for suffrage and equal rights. African Americans won the right to testify in California in 1863 but the right to vote came only with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.

Cross-Cultural Cooperation

Although discrimination and violence were rampant, Gold Rush California was also a place of cross-cultural communication and cooperation. Canadian merchant William Perkins described the mining town of Sonora in 1849: "Here were to be seen people of every nation in all varieties of costume, and speaking 50 different languages, and yet all mixing together amicably and socially." In mining camps and in the crowded streets of San Francisco, previously isolated groups came into contact for the first time. Race, language, religion, and class separated Californians but proximity forced groups to accommodate as well as compete. Multiracial even before it was a state, California would be continuously shaped by its diversity.

Bancroft Library. The California Gold Rush

Oakland Museum of California. Gold Rush!: California’s Untold Stories

PBS. The Gold Rush

The Sacramento Bee . Gold Rush Sesquicentennial

In the Library

Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1997.

Starr, Kevin, and Richard J. Orsi, eds. Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

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"1848-1865: Gold Rush, Statehood, and the Western Movement" was written by Joshua Paddison and the University of California in 2005 as part of the California Cultures project.

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The Long Life of the Nacirema

An article that turned an exoticizing anthropological lens on US citizens in 1956 began as an academic in-joke but turned into an indictment of the discipline.

In 1956, the journal American Anthropologist published a short paper by University of Michigan anthropologist Horace Miner titled “ Body Ritual Among the Nacirema ,” detailing the habits of this “North American group.” Among the “exotic customs” it explores are the use of household shrines containing charm-boxes filled with magical potions and visits to a “holy-mouth-man.”

It doesn’t take long for a reader of the paper to recognize the people in question—“Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward. The joke article spread quickly, with other journals publishing excerpts. Writing more than 50 years after its original publication , literature scholar Mark Burde notes that it remained among the most-downloaded anthropology papers.

Yet it was only through chance that the article was published to begin with. Miner initially submitted a version of it to a general-interest publication. In that context, Burde suggests, its satire would have appeared to be directed at the cultural conventions that fill such magazines with ads for breath mints and deodorant soap. He notes lines such as “were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that…their friends [would] desert them.”

When that publication rejected the article, Miner instead submitted it to American Anthropologist. There, the outgoing editor-in-chief initially rejected it, but his successor, Walter Goldschmidt, eventually decided to publish it.

Burde writes that many readers have viewed the paper as a challenge to the basic functioning of anthropology, showing how academic outsiders misunderstand the cultures they claim to chronicle. Some have pointed in particular to the paper’s final paragraph. Here Miner questions how the Nacirema “have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves” and then quotes a 1925 essay by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski: “Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization.”

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Many readers have suggested that this ending exposed Malinowski’s prejudices and, more generally, the judgment implicit in ethnographers’ identification of cultures as “primitive” or “civilized.” But Burde writes that this was likely not Miner’s intent since he had approvingly cited the same quotation in the past. Instead, he seems to have been more focused on encouraging readers to recognize the way seemingly exotic “far-away” cultures are thoroughly normal to their members.

In general, Burde argues, readers came to see the article as more subversive than Miner had originally intended. That was partly thanks to shifts in scholarship in the 1960s that drew attention to anthropologists as interested parties with their own subject positions and experiences rather than purely objective observers. Burde suggests that part of what has made the Nacirema a durable concept is the way it straddles the line between academic in-joke and radical critique, delivering “a Montaigneseque message in a Woody Allen-esque package.”

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Mining extracts useful materials from the earth. Although mining provides many valuable minerals, it can also harm people and the environment.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Earth Science, Geology

Open-Pit Copper Mine

Throughout history, minerals, like copper, have been extracted from the earth for human use. It is still mined in places like this open-pit mine outside of Silver City, New Mexico, in the United States.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Mining is the process of extracting useful materials from the earth. Some examples of substances that are mined include coal, gold, or iron ore . Iron ore is the material from which the metal iron is produced.

The process of mining dates back to prehistoric times. Prehistoric people first mined flint, which was ideal for tools and weapons since it breaks into shards with sharp edges. The mining of gold and copper also dates back to prehistoric times.

These profitable substances that are mined from the earth are called minerals . A mineral is typically an inorganic substance that has a specific chemical composition and crystal structure. The minerals are valuable in their pure form, but in the earth they are mixed with other, unwanted rocks and minerals . This mix of rock and minerals is usually carried away from the mine together, then later processed and refined to isolate the desired mineral .

The two major categories of modern mining include surface mining and underground mining. In surface mining, the ground is blasted so that ores near Earth’s surface can be removed and carried to refineries to extract the minerals. Surface mining can be destructive to the surrounding landscape, leaving huge open pits behind. In underground mining, ores are removed from deep within the earth. Miners blast tunnels into the rock to reach the ore deposits. This process can lead to accidents that trap miners underground.

Along with accidents, a career in mining can also be dangerous since it can lead to health problems. Breathing in dust particles produced by mining can lead to lung disease. One of the most common forms is black lung disease, which is caused when coal miners breathe in coal dust. Many other types of mining produce silica dust, which causes a disease similar to black lung disease. These are incurable diseases that cause breathing impairment and can be fatal.

The mining process can also harm the environment in other ways. Mining creates a type of water pollution known as acid mine drainage . First, mining exposes sulfides in the soil. When the rainwater or streams dissolves the sulfides, they form acids . This acidic water damages aquatic plants and animals. Along with acid mine drainage , the disposal of mine waste can also cause severe water pollution from toxic metals. The toxic metals commonly found in mine waste, such as arsenic and mercury, are harmful to the health of people and wildlife if they are released into nearby streams.

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Mining and Its Impact on the Environment Essay

Introduction, effects of mining on the environment, copper mining, reference list.

Mining is an economic activity capable of supporting the developmental goals of countries and societies. It also ensures that different metals, petroleum, and coal are available to different consumers or companies. Unfortunately, this practice entails excavation or substantial interference of the natural environment. The negative impacts of mining can be recorded at the global, regional, and local levels. A proper understanding of such implications can make it possible for policymakers and corporations to implement appropriate measures. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the effects of mining on the environment.

Ways Mining Impact on the Environment

Miners use different methods to extract various compounds depending on where they are found. The first common procedure is open cast, whereby people scrap away rocks and other materials on the earth’s surface to expose the targeted products. The second method is underground mining, and it allows workers to get deeper materials and deposits. Both procedures are subdivided further depending on the nature of the targeted minerals and the available resources (Minerals Council of Australia 2019). Despite their striking differences in procedures, the common denominator is that they both tend to have negative impacts on the natural environment.

Firstly, surface mining usually requires that machines and individuals clear forests and vegetation cover. This means that the integrity of the natural land will be obliterated within a short period. Permanent scars will always be left due to this kind of mining. Secondly, the affected land will be exposed to the problem of soil erosion because the topmost soil is loosened. This problem results in flooding, contamination of the following water in rivers, and sedimentation of dams. Thirdly, any form of mining is capable of causing both noise and air pollution (Minerals Council of Australia 2019). The use of heavy machines and blasts explains why this is the case.

Fourthly, other forms of mining result in increased volumes of rocks and soil that are brought to the earth’s surface. Some of them tend to be toxic and capable of polluting water and air. Fifthly, underground mines tend to result in subsidence after collapsing. This means that forests and other materials covering the earth’s surface will be affected. Sixthly, different firms of mining are known to reduce the natural water table. For example, around 500,000,000 cubic meters of water tend to be pumped out of underground mines in Germany annually (Mensah et al., 2015). This is also the same case in other countries across the globe. Seventhly, different mining activities have been observed to produce dangerous greenhouse gases that continue to trigger new problems, including climate change and global warming.

Remediating Mine Sites

The problem of mining by the fact that many people or companies will tend to abandon their sites after the existing minerals are depleted. This malpractice is usually common since it is costly to clean up such areas and minimize their negative impacts on the natural environment. The first strategy for remediating mine sites is that of reclamation. This method entails the removal of both environmental and physical hazards in the region (Motoori, McLellan & Tezuka 2018). This will then be followed by planting diverse plant species. The second approach is the installation of soil cover. When pursuing this method, participants and companies should mimic the original natural setting and consider the drainage patterns. They can also consider the possible or expected land reuse choices.

The third remediation strategy for mine sites entails the use of treatment systems. This method is essential when the identified area is contaminated with metals and acidic materials that pose significant health risks to human beings and aquatic life (Mensah et al., 2015). Those involved can consider the need to construct dams and contain such water. Finally, mining companies can implement powerful cleanup processes and reuse or restore the affected sites. The ultimate objective is to ensure that every ugly site is improved and designed in such a way that it reduces its potential implications on the natural environment. From this analysis, it is evident that the nature of the mining method, the topography of the site, and the anticipated future uses of the region can inform the most appropriate remediation approach. Additionally, the selected method should address the negative impacts on the environment and promote sustainability.

Lessening Impact

Mining is a common practice that continues to meet the demands of the current global economy. With its negative implications, companies and other key stakeholders can identify various initiatives that will minimize every anticipated negative impact. Motoori, McLellan, and Tezuka (2018) encourage mining corporations to diversify their models and consider the importance of recycling existing materials or metals. This approach is sustainable and capable of reducing the dangers of mining. Governments can also formulate and implement powerful policies that compel different companies to engage in desirable practices, minimize pollution, and reduce noise pollution. Such guidelines will make sure that every company remains responsible for remediating their sites. Mensah et al. 2015) also support the introduction of laws that compel organizations to conduct environmental impact assessment analyses before starting their activities. This model will encourage them to identify regions or sites that will have minimal effects on the surrounding population or aquatic life. The concept of green mining has emerged as a powerful technology that is capable of lessening the negative implications of mining. This means that all activities will be sustainable and eventually meet the diverse needs of all stakeholders, including community members. Finally, new laws are essential to compelling companies to shut down and reclaim sites that are no longer in use.

Extraction from the Ore Body

Copper mining is a complex process since it is found in more stable forms, such as oxide and sulfide ores. These elements are obtained after the overburden has been removed. Corporations complete a 3-step process or procedure before obtaining pure copper. This is usually called ore concentration, and it follows these stages: froth flotation, roasting, and leaching (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 201). During froth flotation, sulfide ores are crushed to form small particles and then mixed with large quantities of water. Ionic collectors are introduced to ensure that CuS becomes hydrophobic in nature. The introduction of frothing agent results in the agitation and aeration of the slurry (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). This means that the ore containing copper will float to the surface. All tailings will sink to the bottom of the solution. The refined material can then be skimmed and removed.

The next stage is that of roasting, whereby the collected copper is baked. The purpose of this activity is to minimize the quantities of sulfur. Such a procedure results in sulfur dioxide, As, and Sb (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). This leaves a fine mixture of copper and other impurities. The next phase of the ore concentration method is that of leaching. Different Compounds are used to solubilize the compound, such as H2SO4 and HCI. The leachate will then be deposited at the bottom and purified.

Smelting is the second stage that experts use to remove copper from its original ore. This approach produces iron and copper sulfides. Exothermic processes are completed to remove SiO2 and FeSiO3 slag (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). According to this equation, oxygen is introduced to produce pure copper and sulfur dioxide:

CuO + CuS = Cu(s) + SO2

The final phase is called refinement. The collected Cu is used as anodes and cathodes, whereby they are immersed in H2SO4 and CuSO4. During this process, copper will be deposited on the cathode while the anode will dissolve in the compound. All impurities will settle at the bottom (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). From this analysis, it is notable that a simple process is considered to collect pure copper from its ore body.

How Copper Mining Impacts the Environment

Copper mining is a complex procedure that requires the completion of several steps if a pure metallic compound is to be obtained. This means that it is capable of presenting complicated impacts on the natural environment. Copper mining can take different forms depending on the location of the identified ores and the policies put in place in the selected country (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). Nonetheless, the entire process will have detrimental effects on the surrounding environment. Due to the intensity of operations and involvement of heavy machinery, this process results in land degradation. The affected regions will have huge mine sites that disorient the original integrity of the environment.

Since copper is one of the most valuable metals in the world today due to its key uses, many companies continue to mine it in different countries. This practice has triggered the predicament of deforestation (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). Additionally, rainwater collects in abandoned mine sites or existing ones, thereby leaking into nearby rivers, boreholes, or aquifers. This means that more people are at risk of being poisoned by this compound.

Air pollution is another common problem that individuals living near copper mines report frequently. This challenge is attributable to the use of heavy blasting materials and machinery. The dust usually contains hazardous chemicals that have negative health impacts on communities and animals. Some of the common ailments observed in most of the affected regions include asthma, silicosis, and tuberculosis (Mensah et al., 2015). This challenge arises from the toxic nature of high levels of copper. These problems explain why companies and stakeholders in the mining industry should implement superior appropriate measures and strategies to overcome them. Such a practice will ensure that they meet the needs of the affected individuals and make it easier for them to pursue their aims.

Copper processing can have significant negative implications on the integrity of the environment. For instance, the procedure is capable of producing tailings and overburden that have the potential to contaminate different surroundings. According to Mensah et al. (2015), some residual copper is left in the environment since around 85 percent of the compound is obtained through the refining process. This means that it will pose health problems to people and aquatic life. Other metals are present in the produced tailings, such as iron and molybdenum. During the separation process, hazardous chemicals and gases will be released, such as sulfur dioxide. This is a hazardous compound that is capable of resulting in acidic rain, thereby increasing the chances of environmental degradation.

There are several examples that explain why copper is capable of causing negative impacts on the natural environment. For example, Queenstown in Tasmania has been recording large volumes of acidic rain (Mensah et al., 2015). This is also the same case for El Teniente Mine in Chile. Recycling and reusing copper can be an evidence-based approach for minimizing these consequences and maintaining the integrity of the environment.

Farmlands that are polluted with this metal compound will have far-reaching impacts on both animals and human beings. This is the case since the absorption of copper in the body can have detrimental health outcomes. This form of poisoning can disorient the normal functions of body organs and put the individual at risk of various conditions. People living in areas that are known to produce copper continue to face these negative impacts (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). Such challenges explain why a superior model is needed to overcome this problem and ensure that more people lead high-quality lives and eventually achieve their potential.

The above discussion has identified mining as a major economic activity that supports the performance and integrity of many factories, countries, and companies. However, this practice continues to affect the natural environment and making it incapable of supporting future populations. Mining activities result in deforestation, land obliteration, air pollution, acidic rain, and health hazards. The separation of copper from its parent ore is a procedure that has been observed to result in numerous negative impacts on the environment and human beings. These insights should, therefore, become powerful ideas for encouraging governments and policymakers to implement superior guidelines that will ensure that miners minimize these negativities by remediating sites.

Mensah, AK, Mahiri, IO, Owusu, O, Mireku, OD, Wireko, I & Kissi, EA 2015, ‘Environmental impacts of mining: a study of mining communities in Ghana’, Applied Ecology and Environmental Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 81-94.

Minerals Council of Australia 2019, Australian minerals , Web.

Motoori, R, McLellan, BC & Tezuka, T 2018, ‘Environmental implications of resource security strategies for critical minerals: a case study of copper in Japan’, Minerals, vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 558-586.

Sikamo, J, Mwanza, A & Mweemba, C 2016, ‘Copper mining in Zambia – history and future’, The Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 491-496.

Yaras, A & Arslanoglu, H 2017, ‘Leaching behaviour of low-grade copper ore in the presence of organic acid’, Canadian Metallurgical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 319-327.

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Going Back to Blair Mountain

The largest armed labor uprising in american history is finally getting the remembrance it deserves.

In September 1921, as part of the largest armed labor uprising in American history, members of the Red Neck Army surrendered their arms to the U.S. Army. While the battle stayed alive in miners’ families, the stories being “passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches,” it has largely been forgotten in collective memory, writes Kenzie New Walker. Courtesy of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, collection of Kenneth King.

by Kenzie New Walker | September 1, 2022

For most people, the memory of the largest armed labor uprising in American history is unknown, buried beneath the dirt of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain alongside bullet casings and relics of coal camp life. In miners’ families, the stories stayed alive, passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches. But until the 21st century, there were no monuments, museums, or markers of the West Virginia mine wars, a seminal American story of how labor unions came to be.

In late August 1921, some 15,000 mineworkers and allies banded together across racial, gender, religious, and ethnic lines and marched south from the town of Marmet, West Virginia. They were determined to free jailed miners who, for decades, had been trying to unionize the southern West Virginia coalfields. Some of the marchers dressed in military uniforms—many were World War I veterans—while others wore blue-jean overalls. All tied red bandanas around their necks to distinguish friend from foe. Known as the “Red Neck Army,” they were highly organized and armed to the teeth.

The miners never reached their intended destination. Instead, beginning on August 31, they clashed with coal company deputies, mine guards, and the state militia over five and half days of combat at Blair Mountain. It was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War—and it ended only when the U.S. Army intervened. While the number of fatalities remains largely unknown (estimates range from 16 to over 100), we do know that it was the second time in American history the government planned to bomb its own citizens—only three months after the first, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre.

Those five and a half days were a generation in coming. The majority of West Virginians had gone from living and working on their own land to being totally dependent on out-of-state coal mining companies, who controlled and owned entire towns. The work was unrelenting and exploitative: Coal companies often paid miners in “scrip”—a currency only redeemable at the company store—by the tonnage of coal they hand loaded from the mountains. The conditions underground subjected workers to roof falls and gas explosions, both of which were often catastrophic. For workers and their families, these companies became landlords, employers, and overseers.

In addition to hiring West Virginians displaced from farms, the coal companies recruited immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the South. Companies housed them in tight but segregated communities, aiming to use prejudice and racial barriers to prevent unionization. But their strategies backfired. Unionization efforts, including the Red Neck Army, broke those barriers partly out of necessity and partly as a source of strength. Striking workers moved into desegregated canvas tent colonies after being evicted from their company-owned homes.

By 1921, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which formed in 1890, had organized much of the coalfields in West Virginia and elsewhere with the promise of better working conditions and a better life. However, in the southern counties of the Mountain State, such as the areas around Blair Mountain, the coal operators and hired mine guards employed harsh countertactics to keep the miners from unionizing, including the murders of union-supporting police chief Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers. Hatfield and Chambers’ murders in early August sparked pro-union rallies throughout southern West Virginia, which ultimately led to the Red Neck Army’s armed march.

After the end of the physical battle, a legal battle began that put over 500 miners on trial for a variety of charges, including murder and treason, and crippled the UMWA. Mineworkers in southern West Virginia would have to wait to join until the right to organize was written into federal law as part of the New Deal. In the mid-1930s, they finally gained the better wages, safer working conditions, and other benefits and protections they had been fighting for over decades.

Blair Mountain faded in West Virginians’ and Americans’ collective memory. Politicians strategized to stamp it out of textbooks and public discourse, while miners—many of whom had been on trial—swore themselves to secrecy for fear of retribution.

In 2013, a ragtag group of Appalachians—mineworkers, educators, townspeople, activists, and descendants of Red Neck Army members—came together and shared a table at the UMWA Local 1440 hall in Matewan, West Virginia, 47 miles from Blair Mountain. The folks who gathered were determined to ensure that this history would be celebrated, remembered, and shared for generations to come.

This was the first board meeting of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which opened two years later in downtown Matewan. I started work at the Mine Wars Museum as its first part-time executive director in 2018. As the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of union mineworkers, it is an honor to preserve and share the history and legacy of my ancestors and those who stood with them for labor justice.

One of the exhibits at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Courtesy of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, photo by Roger May.

One of the museum’s key initiatives is to bring visibility to the sites of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Today, Blair Mountain’s twin-peaked ridge stands tall and quiet. Despite the mountain’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, you can drive through the miners’ marching route and over Blair Mountain without realizing you’re there. But that won’t be the case for much longer.

On the heels of the Battle of Blair Mountain Centennial and with funding from Philadelphia’s Monument Lab, in 2022 we launched Courage in the Hollers: Mapping the Miners’ Struggle for a Union . We’re taking the museum beyond its four walls and holding community meetings along the miners’ 50-mile route to resurface the stories of the Mine Wars and working people—past and present—in public.

This Labor Day, steel silhouettes of 10 men and women, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, marching toward Blair Mountain, are being erected in Marmet, where the Red Neck Army’s route began, and Clothier, just 12 miles from where the battle raged. The silhouettes are not of the original miners but of local community members—honoring the history that fuels our shared hope for the region and working people across America. As much as it pays homage to the past, it’s a vision for the future.

We held our Courage in the Hollers kickoff meeting in Clothier in a small building that started as a school, then became a church, and is now a union hall. One attendee wondered out loud about Monument Lab’s backing: “Why does someone in Philadelphia care so much about coal miners?”

The simple question struck me. Local residents know this history has been ignored—it is absent from the landscape, their textbooks, public records, and gathering places. But they haven’t forgotten.

Neither have the local archeologists who have spent decades unearthing and preserving artifacts, and the miners’ descendants, more and more of whom are sharing their stories publicly. New accounts of the battle are surfacing for the first time as the monuments and markers to labor make their homes in Clothier and Marmet. Meanwhile, many people are still fighting for the rights and standards the Red Neck Army marched in support of—from miners in Alabama entering their 17th month on strike to unionizing workers at Starbucks and Amazon.

Though the history of those who fought at Blair Mountain is now 101 years old, it is also as alive as ever.

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They Just Dig: On Writing, Coal Mining, and Fear

The hard work of excavating trauma.

“Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

–Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugar #48: “Write Like a Motherfucker”

I come from coal miners: men who lost fingers and arms, the man whose bones were crushed under a rolling coal cart, the one who lived through a leg-cracking explosion, the many whose lungs turned black from decades of dusty inhalations or whose livers buckled under the weight of the after-work rotgut that momentarily knocked out the dread.

I have always known that coal mining is harder than writing.

Most of the men in my family who died in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill anthracite region have arteriosclerosis on their death certificates—unless they died by suicide or mine accident or, just once, miner’s asthma, 30 yrs.— because until the 1930s the medical establishment denied that the inhalation of coal dust was unhealthy. Doctors insisted it could ward off tuberculosis.

My grandpa worked as a laborer for a bootleg mine when he was young, helping to provide for his family after his miner dad died, but he didn’t make mining a career. He was part of Eisenhower’s flight crew during World War II, then worked for Pan Am as a flight engineer until his retirement. My dad got to choose his career as a fish biologist. I choose to write about my life and teach other writers how to do the same.

I’ve started writing about coal mining. I’ve read thousands of pages about it. I’ve thought about the Dear Sugar quote I’ve seen posted on Facebook so many times that I forgot that it wasn’t an anonymous aphorism. When I found the source and reread the column, Sugar’s powerful advice to a fellow Elissa-writer resonated. I, too, find myself blocked by an ego that demands unattainable greatness. But that’s not the only bulwark I erect between myself and a finished draft.

When I read and write about my family and their work, I think of what Sugar said about coal mining, extract her lines like a chunk of anthracite from a coal face, and project my own meaning onto the words.

I think about how writing is not as hard as coal mining when interviewers and other askers want to know how hard it was for me to write my first book. I’m afraid to say that it was hard, so I usually don’t. If I do say it was hard, I pile on the evidence: in the beginning, I went from smoking casually to smoking more than a pack a day, waking up nicotine-starved and walking-pneumonia-sick. I could only write drunk, stuffed with potato skins. I had panic attacks and hid in the bowels of my closet. I wanted the physical pain of crumpled lungs and weeping liver to outstrip the emotional pain of remembering being raped and defiled.

It was hard work: not just the transmutation of memory into prose, but also the work of reacting to loosened memories I’d hidden from myself. I almost never remembered these things during my writing hours, when I was prepared to be an open seam. I remembered when I was trying to hold it together, in the classroom, riding the bus, watering a cactus and accidentally drowning it when my skull became an echo chamber for that long-forgotten thing the rapist used to say to me when he was trying to convince me that I wanted it.

It was work I keep wanting to call excavation. I keep wanting to say that the memories were buried. I know this is not how remembering works, but I need to label that feeling that I’m digging my hand into my brain and pushing until my fingertips are sliced by tiny jagged rocks.

Anthracite mining was “the most dangerous job of the day,” according to Donald L. Miller and Richard E. Sharpless, authors of The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise, and Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields. Mine workers risked being buried under falling coal, sliced by the loosened anthracite’s razor edges, blasted by faulty fuses, poisoned by underground gases, and crushed under heavy coal cars. With every day they escaped sudden death, they neared the inevitable death by smothering that would come from years of inhaled coal dust particles that the body can’t expel. Anthracosis. Miner’s asthma. Black lung.

“They simply dig,” Strayed wrote. But they didn’t. Anthracite miners would routinely strike, defy authority, repeat that “A miner is his own boss,” and walk out when they decided the day’s work was done. And the digging was never simple: every move was a decision that could result in death. The miners took pride in propping the roof with wooden beams, in the drilling of holes, in the preparation of explosives, in the blasting, and in the picking of loosened coal. This was a set of decisions and actions they thought of as craft.

I feel badly about this metaphor I’m trying to build, because I know I shouldn’t liken mining to writing. But I come from resistance to authority, a tradition the men picked up when they began work as boys who picked slate from coal until their fingers bled. I come from people who are proud to do work well and who built an oral tradition around their loathing of this calling.

Proud as they were, mine workers did talk a lot about how hard their work was. They stood around in the shit-and-exhalation-stinking mines and talked about it. They drank rotgut at the saloon and talked about it. They told stories about it. They sang about it. They passed ballads across generations. George Korson writes in Black Rock: Mining Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch that on the side of a coal car, one miner chalked the message,

I’ll have you know, Mr. Dunne, That with this car my day is done. If you don’t like my work or poem, You can go to hell, I’m going home!

“Only a Miner,” the folk song that Archie Green calls “the American Miner’s national anthem” in his book Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs, was passed around from singer to singer from 1888 until its recording in 1928. The song isn’t about coal mining, specifically, but it fits:

He’s only a miner been killed in the ground, Only a miner and one more is found, Killed by an accident, no one can tell, His mining’s all over, poor miner farewell.  

Underground anthracite mining was a craft requiring concentration, fearlessness, and the belief that the work was in one’s blood. The miners could only return to work every day because they negotiated their relationships with death by telling stories, which have been passed around with such vigor that we retain them and can see, in their totality, a preoccupation with the dead and injured. The single detail I’ve heard most in stories about my dad’s grandpa Edmund is that he was missing his thumb.

Novelist John Greene drew the mining-writing connection, too, on his website: “I [. . .] like to remind myself of something my dad said to me once in re. writers’ block: ‘Coal miners don’t get coal miners’ block.’”

When I’m blocked, it’s not because I’ve run out of ideas. It’s because I’m afraid of the ones I have on hand.

The mine workers were afraid, too, but not like writers. They dealt with their fears of being trapped underground by propping the roof with beams. From what I can tell, this was a mostly meaningless gesture that was most successful in convincing miners that they had the power to protect themselves from death. They also believed that the rats had extrasensory perceptive abilities that allowed them to predict cave-ins, and so they fed the rats from their lunch pails.

Miners could convince themselves that they were not going to die; I cannot always convince myself that I can make the page stop being blank.

Mostly, for mine workers, the fear of death and accidents was really the fear that loss of income would make their families destitute. Miners could stand around half the day telling stories about men buried alive because the coal face seemed endless, ready to continue giving. They could easily cut enough coal to provide for their families, and the work allowed for the mix of urgency and complacency: they were working for bread, the food that became metaphor in their homes, and they were working to make other men rich.

I should mention these families—more specifically, the wives—and acknowledge that, for the most part, I identify more with the miners than with the women whose occupations were listed on the census as “keeping house,” “none,” or a blank space. All of these entailed harder work than I have ever done: preparing meals, washing clothes (including those caked with coal dust), picking bits of discarded coal from the culm banks to heat the home, washing the man, making and rearing the children (often more than a dozen, including a few who disappear from the census before the end of childhood), gathering vegetables from the gardens and huckleberries from the hills, mending, and waiting for the sound of the whistle announcing that an accident has taken off a man’s arm.

It’s possible that I don’t identify with these women because, in every book I’ve read about mining, they serve to support the tragic-heroic miners. In the 1904 book Anthracite Coal Communities: A Study of the Demography, the Social, Educational and Moral Life of the Anthracite Region, Peter Roberts writes, “As a rule the words of Napoleon are believed and practiced in the houses of the mine workers : ‘A husband ought to have absolute rule over the actions of his wife.’ The lot of the miner’s wife is a hard one.”

A writer, unlike those miners’ wives, is her own boss.

In a 1976 article about a West Virginia mine disaster, Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson describe five categories of “manifestations of the general constellation of the survivor”: first, the death imprint , consisting of remembered imagery of the disaster, associated with death; second, death guilt, survivors’ inability to forgive themselves for their survival, coupled with gratitude for having done so, which deepens their guilt; third, psychic numbing, a muting in the ability to feel; fourth, impaired human relationships in which survivors need love but can’t truly accept any proffered love as genuine; and fifth, inner form, the survivor’s work of finding explanations for the devastating experience in order to find meaning in the rest of life.

In the Schuylkill fields, mine accidents were so prevalent that every miner likely had a story. Every miner was imprinted with death. Every retelling helped the miner to make sense of death as an inextricable part of the life he had built.  

My fear of the forever-blank page has nothing to do with death or putting bread on the table. I just spent more on eyeglasses than I earned directly from writing in the last six months. I fear incompetence. I fear the ideas running out, the right words never arriving, and the structure never cohering. This is luxury fear. The only thing at stake is the potential for self-satisfaction.

I’ve come to learn something that probably would have become obvious earlier if I weren’t embedded with a generations-old self-immolation streak: writing is only dangerous if I make it so. I no longer douse my writer’s block with whiskey and smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. When I get stuck, I take a break to put my vitamins in their compartmentalized container or lift weights at the gym.

I suspect the writing-mining connection hits me hard because of the fatalism and predilection for deeply-felt decay passed down from my coalcrackers, but why do other writers respond to it?

Maybe it’s because we think of mining as all brawn and no brain, all danger and no art, all stakes and no reward: just a brute action of the body meant to affect a result with no attachment to quality. But I see more: a sturdy belief that mining is in the blood, a striving so ingrained that a family will send its boys to the breaker even as the father’s black-ink cough sets in. I see work that is the foundation of identity.

Several years ago, in a professional development program for writers, our teacher asked the group how many hours per week we were writing and how many hours per week we wanted to be writing. Everyone reported that they were writing considerably fewer hours than they wanted to be—except for me. I said I didn’t know how much I was writing and I didn’t care. That was a lie. I cared a lot, but I wanted to fake away my frustration. I flagellated myself every day for what I saw as my inability to write. Years later, I’d see the publication of my second book less than a year after my debut, and I’ve spent the ensuing seven months panicked about my inability to follow up with a quick third.

They simply dig. I draft and discard book outlines. I spend an hour on ten words. I ride the intoxication of an early draft and the hangover of the devastating first look back at what I produced. I’ve always feared that I’m not up to the task of executing my grand literary plans, and I’ve repeatedly proven myself wrong. What does not come to mind when I sit down at my desk, but still surely blocks me, is the newer knowledge of what my writing does to my life among the other humans. I resist the label of “brave” because I can’t help but see my act of self-exposure, now, as naïve. I blame myself for failing to expect that a man would use my first book as a perfectly-tailored how-to manual for my emotional abuse. I told myself I was at fault when I briefly dated a man who read the book, unprompted, and interrogated me twice a week about what he saw as my irreparable damage.

My brain has begun to impose boundaries, in spite of my plans for production.

Sometimes, when I’m working out, I simply can’t lift the bar over my head for one more rep. My muscles quit. I break. I try again, but my arms refuse. Until the next time I can get to the weight room, I feel unsettled with my failure to complete a task whose end point doesn’t exist. I used to pay for CrossFit trainers that pushed me so hard I coughed up blood, which was the only time I’ve ever felt that I was working hard enough.

If I were to stop saying that my writing is going   fine or really great thanks or you know I’m finally back in the swing of things and it feels good and tell the truth, I would say that I continue to be emotionally dependent on an activity that has become embedded in my sense of self while flaying me all the time, even when the writing is going well, because at any moment, that could turn. I keep doing it because pulling the exact words out of my head and embroidering them onto the page in the scheme I’ve envisioned remains the hardest work I’ve ever done, and the products of that work are beautiful to me. And I do it because this compulsive act of creation is the only way I am able to make sense of life after rape, assault, mania, depression, loss of self through overmedication, and self-destruction.

I’m tired of pretending writing isn’t hard because I feel guilty that I’m not doing something that rots me from the inside out like those men who capped every ascent from dark tunnels with a shot and a lager, or several. I can admit, as I sit in a cupcake shop on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, that I have it easier than my great-grandfather Michael, who, after his last afternoon drunk, stumbled home, his hand in nine-year-old Grandpa’s, got into bed, and died there at age fifty-one, either from black lung or a kicked liver. I have my thumbs and my lungs. I am heading for death, but when I get there, my lungs won’t be fighting to empty themselves of soot. Writing is hard work, but not hard like coal mining: it’s hard like milking the venom from a black widow and letting it go on living.

Even as the rapist was still sleeping in my bed, I sat at my laptop in the dark and began to turn my pain into a story that would help me keep living after disaster. The work has always been hard. I always hit blocks I’ll never use black powder to blast through. I stop digging. I start again, swinging my pick into my head and resuming the work of mining every last rock.

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘Down the Mine’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Down the Mine’ is an essay by George Orwell (1903-50), originally published as the second chapter of his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier but later reprinted as a separate essay. In ‘Down the Mine’, Orwell describes his experience of going down an English coal mine to see the conditions of coal miners in the 1930s.

You can read ‘Down the Mine’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Orwell’s argument below.

Orwell describes the experience of miners working in a typical coal mine in 1930s England. He describes mine-workers as ‘splendid’ men (they are always men) who are usually small, because the tunnels down the mine are so small that taller men would find it difficult (if not impossible) to work there.

These men are physically fit from their labour, having worked down the mine since they were children in most cases. They have bodies of ‘iron’, like statues (at the end of the essay he refers to their ‘muscles of steel’).

They tend to work in shifts of seven-and-a-half hours, stopping perhaps for a short break to eat something (bread and cold tea, in many cases). Orwell focuses on small details of the miners’ everyday working lives, such as their habit of chewing tobacco, because it staves off thirst.

Orwell pays particular attention to the long journeys along the underground tunnels which miners often have to make: once they have been lowered down into the mine, they often have to walk (bending as they do so, but with their heads kept facing forwards to watch out for beams overhead) for a mile, sometimes three miles, and (in the case of one mine) up to five miles below-ground before they can begin work.

This is their ‘commute’, a journey which Orwell likens to Londoners having to walk from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. (Earlier, Orwell had described the journey down into the mine, in the densely packed cage that transports miners from the surface down to the coal-face, as like going down the lift on the Piccadilly line on the London Underground; though he makes this comparison in order to contrast that relatively short journey with the extreme depths underground that many miners travel, as much as four hundred yards below the Earth’s surface.)

Once Orwell has described the miners’ journey travelling to and from their place of work, he then reports on the ways in which coal is extracted from the earth. ‘Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock,’ he tells us, ‘so that essentially the process of getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice.’ The ‘fillers’ load up the coal, while the shale is used in road-building; everything else is dumped above-ground in ‘dirt-heaps’.

Orwell is frank about just how back-breaking and intensive coal-mining is. Although he figures that he could perform many kinds of manual labour, being a coal-miner would prove completely beyond his strength or stamina:

When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National.

Orwell points out that the world inhabited by coal-miners is a different world from the one he and many other people inhabit: it’s one that people who don’t work in mining very rarely heard about (and, in many cases, probably wouldn’t want to hear about).

Yet, as Orwell states, ‘it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above’, because so much of what people do involves the use of coal. But ‘we are not aware of it’. He likens coal, in a biblical reference, to ‘manna’ – the mysterious food that fell from heaven to feed the Israelites during their travels in the wilderness – except it has to be paid for. But its origins are, in some ways, just as mysterious to those who benefit from it.

He concludes ‘Down the Mine’ by observing that, as hard as these conditions are, they used to be even harder. Pregnant women, until relatively recently, were put to work in the mines. Even today, Orwell writes, everyone in society owes their relative comfort to those workers who toil away in those dark, cramped, dirty conditions underground.

‘Down the Mine’ is a classic example of Orwell’s willingness to put himself at some discomfort in order to experience the conditions of other people first-hand. In order to understand working conditions of people in the north-west of England (Wigan is located around 15 miles northwest of Manchester), Orwell went and lived among them, and his journey down the mine showed his commitment to documenting as faithfully as he could the plight of mine-workers in a fairly typical coal-mine.

For much of ‘Down the Mine’, and especially in his closing paragraphs, Orwell is keen to remind his readers – the vast majority of whom would never so much as seen the inside of a mine, let alone worked in one – that the world is governed by coal, and even some mass shake-up of the current world order, such as a war or a revolution, would still necessitate the mining of coal to heat fires, fuel machinery, and do the countless other things it either directly or indirectly contributes to in the course of daily life.

His mention of Adolf Hitler reminds us that, even in 1937, the threat of imminent European conflict was growing, and sure enough, the war effort (once the Second World War broke out a couple of years after Orwell was writing) would be just as reliant on the production of coal as it would be on farming and manufacturing – indeed, it was even more important than these, because much manufacturing would have been impossible without coal.

Orwell wishes to remind his relatively privileged readers of the exhausting and demanding work that miners undertake. He doesn’t pay attention to mining accidents, which is a curious omission, but he does focus on the day-to-day conditions – the dust, the physical strain, and the darkness – with clarity and attention to detail.

It is noteworthy how often, throughout ‘Down the Mine’, Orwell employs the second-person pronoun, writing not ‘I’ but ‘you’ to describe his own experiences as a sojourner among this world rather than a seasoned miner. This colloquial touch succeeds in placing us down there in the mine with Orwell, involving us in his own journeying through this subterranean other-world.

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Mental health in mine workers: a literature review

José matamala pizarro.

1 School of Psychology. Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile

Francisco AGUAYO FUENZALIDA

The mining environment is hazardous for worker’s health. It can affect the mental health, triggering symptoms and diseases, such as anxiety, job stress, depression, sleep disorders, mental fatigue and other. The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the scientific literature about the mental health in mine workers and to summarize the findings. The method used was scoping review. The principal outcomes were the following: evidence in the last 12 years in the topic was focused in four themes 1) Psychological problems & personal factors (38.2%); 2) Psychosocial problems & health related factor (23.6%); 3) Well-being (21.1%) and 4) Physical problems & organization factors (17.1%). Several affections, symptoms, characteristics or disorders were inquired about mine worker’s mental health, such as job strain, unsafety experiences, poor quality of sleep, non-subjective well-being, job unsatisfaction, social-relations conflict, risk of accidents and injuries, musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), substance abuse, dangerous working conditions and demanding job organization, and so on. For those factors, Mining could expose to serious mental health problems to a part of their workers. It’s necessary to deepen the elaboration of international policies and carry out more scientific research and suggestions to make programs on the topic.

Introduction

The mining work has been identified as one of the most hazardous environment for the work activity that exist around the world 1 ) . It’s defined as a high load work, featured with risky conditions and organization systems that involve long distances from workers residences, high demand due shift work schedules and job strain related to compliance the business aims. The available literature has detailed that these characteristics can severely affect the worker’s safety and health, causing diseases, disabilities and even death.

Regarding these negative consequences, the literature has highlighted that the mine workers could develop different ailments and health complications, both physical and mental, which are linked with physical risks, such as dust exposure 2 ) , high temperatures 3 ) , high altitude 4 ) , noise and vibrations environment 5 ) , chemical substances and heavy metals 6 ) , injuries and accidents 7 ) ; likewise with the psychosocial risks, such as high job demand 8 ) , psychological distress 9 ) , shift work schedules 10 ) , distance and isolation with respect to the family 11 ) , hostile legal environments, aggressive employers, outsourcing 12 ) .

Owing to the existence of both kind of risks at mining work (physical and psychosocial), the world research in the theme has characterized some typical occupational diseases, for instance respiratory illnesses, such as silicosis, tuberculosis, asthma 13 ) , pulmonary edema and Acute Mountain Sickness 14 ) ; cardiovascular illnesses, such as heart disease 15 ) , high blood pressure 16 ) ; musculoeskeletal disorders 17 ) ; some types of cancer, such as lung cancer 18 ) and prostate cancer 19 ) ; mental disorders, for instance, job stress, anxiety and depression 20 ) , sleep disorders and fatigue. These are serious indicators of the perilous environment where they work, which can develop suffering experiences and downgrade the mine worker’s health.

The above mentioned, not only reduces the health status of workers, also affects the mining organization. In the study conducted by Nakua et al. 21 ) , they found that 265 miners (25.8% of all miners surveyed) reporting injuries during the past year. This resulted in equal to overall incidence rate of 19.67 injuries per 200,000 hours worked and almost 26.9% to 35.8% of the cases presented moderate or severe absence at work, respectively. Additionally, Widanarko et al. 22 ) affirmed that the presence of Low Back Symptoms (LBS) increased the odds of reporting reduced activities (odds ratio, OR: 4.42, 95% CI: 3.18–6.15) and absenteeism (OR: 4.74, 95% CI: 3.32–6.77); estimated around 805 days lost due to LBS in a year reduced the company’s productivity by USD 209,300 and USD 200 million in national annual productivity.

According to Street et al. 23 ) , job stress was associated with an average of 33.6% work impairment and $45,240.70 (SD = 30,655.26) in productivity costs per employee and workers feeling stressed ‘all of the time’ four week before reporting the highest productivity costs (M = $75,337.16; SD = $47,379.12). Other mental health problems, like the fatigue and sleep deprivation can decrease the focus and attention to tasks 24 ) and augment the risks of accidents 25 ) which rise in long working hours, i.e., irregular shift work 26 ) . The accidents in mining can be fatal. As an example, in 2018 the Chilean mining registered one of the highest amount of days lost in average for work accidents (36.9 days lost average) and in 2017 showed a growth in fatalities (9.0 workers dead from 100,000 protected), both quantities in respect to the national statistics 27 ) .

Consequently, it’s important to know how the worker’s health is affected by mining and, hence, correctly manage the associated factors. A good tool on the matter is the summarized literature. In the last decade, some published literature reviewed in the topic centered at lost-time injury 28 ) ; exposure to silica dust and risk of lung cancer 29 ) ; stomach cancer mortality of workers exposed to asbestos 30 ) ; heat and it’s impacts to safety and health 31 ) , the adverse effects of work at altitude and acclimatization process 14 ) ; sexual and reproductive health 32 ) ; other types of cancer, allergies and respiratory diseases 33 ) .

However, the literature related to miner’s mental health has been more constrained and shallower. It highlights two articles as examples. The first one is the report of Basu et al. 34 ) , it emphasizes on the study’s findings that half of the participants reported feeling nervous or stressed “sometimes” and cortisol signs of chronic stress and pointed out the association between stress and adverse outcomes like cardiovascular disease, acute myocardial infarction, inflammation, hypertension, inadequate nutrition and alcohol/drugs consumption. The second one is the study of Bauerle et al. 35 ) focused on fatigue at mining and they described the factors associated, such as FIFO system (fly-in-fly-out) impoverish the quality of rest, lack of sleep affects the cognitive outcomes (i.e. reaction time), longer shift work shortens the leisure time, childcare and household activities.

Despite the results, both literature reviews show limitations. The first one briefly addressed on the matter, and the second one only paid attention to fatigue factors. For that reason, the need for a more general literature review arose. In order to summarize the evidence, to help knowing about the mental health related problems at mining work and to bridge the existing gap in literature review on the theme, this study presents the results of scoping review on mental health in mine workers across the world.

The research question was What evidences have been produced regarding mental health of mine worker across the world? The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the published scientific literature about the mental health in mine workers and to summarize the findings. The method used was scoping review as suggested by Arksey & O’Malley 36 ) . The reason for using that is associated to the three purposes argued by Pham et al. 37 ) because the focus of the present study was 1) to map the body of literature on a topic area (mine worker’s mental health); 2) To include a major range of design and methodologies on studies with no interest in the effectiveness of the interventions (see inclusion criteria); and 3) seek to provide a descriptive overview of the material and findings without critically appraising individual studies or show synthesis at the risk of bias (see Results).

Strategies for identifying relevant studies

It was search only studies published in scientific journal indexed in the following electronic databases: WOS (Web of Science), SCOPUS, SCIELO and BVS ( Biblioteca Virtual de Salud ). These databases contain many articles relative to the aim of this study. Regarding to realism and enough limit of time, the period of years revised were from 2008 to 2019. The quest was undertaken during august 2019.

The keywords used to find the registers were: “Mental health AND miners* mining”; “Mental diseases AND miners* mining”; “Mental disorders AND miners* mining”; “Stress AND miners* mining”; “Depression AND miners* mining”; “Anxiety AND miners* mining”; “Satisfaction AND miners* mining”; “Occupational risk AND miners* mining”; “Occupational diseases AND miners* mining”; “Well-being AND miners* mining”; “Workload AND miners* mining”; “Shift work AND miners* mining”; “Sleep disorders AND miners* mining”; “Suffering AND miners* mining” and “Workplace violence AND miners* miners”. The same keywords were used too, but in Spanish. In total, 2,604 articles were found in English, whereas just 35 in Spanish.

Study selection process

The material located was downloaded and saved in RIS format. Then, it was included in Collaboratron platform (see https://collaboratron.epistelab.com/ ), removed the duplicates and so as to 1,266 abstracts of documents were maintained. Two researchers read the abstracts and decided (yes or no) if the article entered to whole review or was excluded. After that, the selected records were shared in a common folder in Mendeley Desktop v. 1.19.4 to ease the reading and notes. A total of 113 articles were finally completely checked.

Inclusion criteria

The articles incorporated fulfilled this inclusion criteria: primary studies or secondary data analysis; available as full read and written in English or Spanish; documents that utilized quantitative or qualitative methods and other design (i.e. case report) and showed these characteristics of quality: research problem correctly described, aims, description of method, well set forth the procedure with clear/concise results and an adequate discussion of them. At last, the documents that presented these features were excluded: narrative or systematic reviews; essays, short communications; books or chapter of books; proposals or assessments of interventions; wrote in other languages and inaccessible for reading and notes.

Forty articles were included by inclusion criteria and relevance with the aim of this review. Fig. 1 summarized the search and selection procedure. Charting the data (see Table 1 ) was recorded as follows: Authors, year of publication, aim, study location, mining activity, aims, variables assessment, methods/design, instruments, sample. The data about results and conclusions were charting in Table 2 .

Summary of search and selection procedure.

Source: Own elaboration (2020)

Source: own elaboration (2020)

Regarding to data charting form, 10 articles (25%) were carried out in Australia; nine (22.5%) in China; six (15%) in Chile; four (10%) in South Africa; 2 (5%) in India. In similar quantities (1=2.5%), the rest of documents located in Perú, Ghana, Serbia, Canada, Brazil and Poland. Two studies (5%) included participants from 2+ countries.

About the mining activity, 16 (40%) studies focused on coal mining. Of these, nine (22.5%) considered Chinese coal miners; four (10%) Australian coal miners; Serbian, Brazilian and Indian miners in equal numbers (1=2.5%). On the other hand, three (7.5%) articles centered in copper mining; specifically, two (5%) in Chilean copper miners and one (2.5%) in Indian. Meanwhile, in the same proportions (2=5%), other studies focused on gold (Chilean and Ghanaian miners), metal (Australian and Polish miners), platinum (Australian and South African miners) and two mining activities (silver-gold and copper-nickel miners). One document (2.5%) approached the diamond mining (South African miners) as well as another in the quarry/sandstone mining (Indian miners). A relevant amount (11=27.5%) of documents non-specified mining activity.

In another field, the measured variables in the studies were varied. For that reason, it was grouped in 17 variables. Along with it, these variables were organized in four themes (see Fig. 2 ) in such way that it summarized the highlighted data. Around the 38.2% of the studies approached the theme Psychological problems & personal factors . Inside this category, mental diseases or symptoms (e.g. depression, anxiety, burnout), job stress (e.g. distress, job strain) and sleep quality/fatigue (i.e. sleep disorders and fatigue) were the most evaluated in the documents. Besides, a 23.6% of the studies focused on the theme Psychosocial problems & health related factors. The variables Psychosocial risks (such as job demand, effort/reward imbalance, work-life conflict, etc.); Interpersonal relations (e.g. family and friend relations, workplace relations) and other variables (such as segregation, racism, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), suicidal attempts, obesity, cancer experiences, disaster experiences, gender discrimination at workplace) were the most analyzed.

Themes and variables grouped.

Source: Own elaboration.

Furthermore, a 21.1% of the documents inquired into the theme Well-being . The variable Subjective Well-being was the most studied, followed by Job satisfaction and Quality of life. Lastly, a 17.1% of the articles deemed variables according to Physical problems & organization factors . They tended mostly to investigate the shift work incidences (i.e., FIFO/DIDO systems and work schedule); organization’s variables (e.g. management, environment, organizational commitment, workplace factors); Injuries and Safety at work (i.e. injuries, safety environment and safe behavior).

On the other hand, most of the studies (35=87.5%) used quantitative designs. From them, the majority used cross-sectional design (70%); followed by longitudinal (12.5%); retrospective case control and quantitative secondary data analysis in the same percentages (2.5%). Then, there were studies that employed descriptive qualitative (7.5%) and exploratory sequential design (5%). In turn, many studies non-specified the sampling strategies (35%); whereas other did. These used convenience sampling (32.5%); stratified sample (cluster-randomly) (17.5%); simple random (10%); matched pair sample and census method in the same frequencies (2.5%). Thus, the range of participants in quantitative design was from 19 to 3,068 individual; whilst in qualitative design was 10-11 individual. In the first case, the average ages declared waved between 31.5 to 55+ years. In the second one, the age range was for 20 to 73 years.

Descriptive analysis about the themes

According to the former four themes (see Fig. 2 ), the studies that included variables above the Psychological problems & personal factors presented findings related to psychological symptoms and diseases, job stress, sleep quality and associated disorders, neuropsychological deterioration and personality traits. For instance, Ansoleaga & Toro 38 ) researched on the relation between the psychosocial risks and depressive symptoms in copper workers. They used the demand-control model of Karasek & Theorell; the effort-reward model of Siegrist and the Organizational Justice model of Moorman as theorical base into the inquiry problem construction. As well as they applied the EQCOTESST along with two questions from PRIME-MD for depressive symptoms and K6 scale for distress. Similarly, Garrido & Hunt 39 ) researched on the relations between job stress and other factors (e.g. work organization, depression and anxiety symptoms and well-being). They defined job stress according to Karasek and Siegrist model, but applied their own scale named Cuestionario de Organización del Trabajo (COT) to evaluate it. Also, they used HADS scale for assessment anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Other samples of the theme are the studies of Corral et al. 40 ) , Liu & Chen 41 ) , Manic et al. 42 ) and Joaquim et al. 43 ) The first one approached on neurological and neuropsychological deterioration due to the mercury exposure. They used the neurological examination and neuropsychological evaluation of depressive symptoms with BDI-II scale, auditive, visual memory, visoconstruction and visuoperception with REY complex figure and executive functions with WCST. The second one evaluated the depressive symptoms within the highly risky and stressful working. They assessed depressive symptoms with CES-D scale, effort-reward imbalance with ERI-OC scale, stressful working with OSI-R and other variables gauged, i.e. work characteristics and work-family. The third one focused on the evaluation of burnout with CBI scale, depressive symptoms with PHQ-9 and the proactive coping with PCI. Finally, the fourth one evaluated depressive and anxiety symptoms with BDI-II and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), psychological capital with PCQ-12 scale and sleep quality with PSQI-BR.

About the sleep quality/disorders and personality traits variables, it stands out the studies of Paul 44 ) and Legault et al. 24 ) Paul 44 ) studied the role of negative personality traits, such as negative affectivity, impulsiveness, risk taking and depression, on the injury risks, safe work behavior and job stress. They used own questionnaire with three-point Likert scales for measuring the variables of personality traits. Legault et al. 24 ) researched on cognitive impairment, sleep disorders, reaction time and executive functions related to heat conditions on shift work schedule. They used the BRIEF-A scale for measuring executive functions, actigraphy and sleep log for sleep behaviors, PVT-B for reaction time, attention and focus and core temperature for heat exposure.

About the Psychosocial problems & health related factors theme, the studies researched on psychosocial risks, interpersonal relations, OH/drug/tobacco consumption and other variables. For example, Amponsah et al. 55 ) and Mościcka et al. 76 ) inquired on psychosocial risks. The first one related to the physical and psychosocial risks with the worker’s safety experience. Amponsah et al. 55 ) used the International Labour Organization (ILO) concept to define the psychosocial risks along with what is supported by Karasek (job demand, decision latitude and social support) and Siegrist (intrinsic effort, extrinsic effort, and reward). Finally, they used COPSOQ short version along with physical hazards scale that included following variables: mine gas, fires, excessive noise, heat stress, poor visuality and dusty conditions. Then, the study of Mościcka et al. 76 ) compared the level of psychosocial risks among industrial workers (one of these were the miners). They defined psychosocial risks supported by European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), and used the PRS scale to assess it.

Moreover, the study of Torkington et al. 50 ) investigated the impacts of FIFO (fly-in fly-out system) on interpersonal relation, specifically, the family life, relationship and partner support. They used the semiestructured interview, in order to ask about wether FIFO systems impacts their lifes and how. In a similar way, McLean 54 ) researched about the impact in the interpersonal relation, with the difference that they worked with resident participants (non fly-in fly-out). She used the semiestructured interview for asking about the benefits of non FIFO system.

Besides, Tynan et al. 62 ) deepens in the substance use and problems related in coal miners. They used the AUDIT Test to measure the hazardous or harmful drinking and asocciated it with the current health history, illicit drug consumption and workplace factors (such as commute type, years working in mining, employment category, etc.). Corral et al. 40 ) also centered on smoking and alcohol habits as it influences on the neuropsychological scores.

According to other variables measured in the theme, Jackson et al. 52 ) pointed out the role of adverse acculturation on well-being throughout the differences among black and white miner’s experiences. They used scales for measuring the mainstream domain (i.e. mainstream segregation demands, perceived discrimination and subtle racism), ethnocultural domain (individual separation acculturation and perceived co-ethnic separation at work), psychological and socio-cultural acculturation outcomes (PSI and Work Success Scales). On another concern, McPhedran & De Leo 57 ) described the psychiatric characteristics and stressful life events related to the attempts and death by suicide. They used the secondary data analysis of Queensland suicide register to compare the suicide behaviors and death of miners with other occupations.

In another theme, the studies of Well-being approached on Quality of life (QOL), Subjective well-being and Job satisfaction. Yu et al. 45 ) defined QOL according to World Health Organization (WHO) and measured it in miners with/without pneumoconiosis. They used the WHOQOL-BREF for that. Gow et al. 56 ) defined Health-Related QOL supported on Lorenz et al. They assessed the comparison of QOL in miners with/without HIV and used the AQOL (Mark 2) for HR-QOL, EQ-5D for health outcomes and HUI 3 for health status and generic health.

Meanwhile, Subjective Well-being was studied by Li et al. 65 ) . They used the concept of Tay & Diener to comprise the subjective well-being (i.e. life evaluation, positive feelings and negative feelings) and to make their own scale from it. Then, they related the subjective well-being with the unsafe behavior. Han et al. 70 ) used the QOL definition by Skevington et al. and Liu et al. and researched on the comparison in QOL values between underground/ground miners. For that, they employed the SF-36 scale.

Lastly, Job satisfaction was studied by Masia & Pienaar 49 ) . They related the job satisfaction with the safety compliance. Also, they used the definition of job satisfaction from Hellgren, Sjöberg and Sverke. According to this, job satisfaction is a positive emotional state based in organizational and dispositional factors. For that reason, they employed the Job Satisfaction questionnaire of Hellgren, Sjöberg and Sverke in their research.

Finally, regarding the Physical problems and organization factor’s theme, the variables included were the following: injuries, muscoloeskeletal disorders/pain, organization’s variables (e.g. organizational commitment, working characteristics, environmental conditions, management, etc.) and shift work (i.e. FIFO/DIDO, commuting time, etc.). For instance, Cui et al. 60 ) associated the individual-related factors (such as living habits, obesity, sleep disturbances, etc.), job-related factors (i.e. work conditions, hours of work, length of shift work, etc.) and injurie risks. Deng et al. 64 ) studied on the relationship between musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and personality traits, distress, and accidents proneness. They used the MSDs questionnaire, Eysenck Personality questionnaire (EPQ) and SCL-90 to assess the psychological distress. Yu et al. 66 ) related mental fatigue and cognitive bias with the safety paradox (i.e., emergent by shift work systems). They approached the phenomenon on the managers and the consequences in the management performance. The mental fatigue reduced the frequency and standard of inspection, it became dangerous for the miners due to the lack of supervision of their safety compliance. James et al. 71 ) related job stress with workplace factors (such as, employment status, current role, number of years in mining, FIFO/DIDO system, etc.) They used the K10 for measuring the distress and own questionnaire about the workplace variables (mainly occupational and workplace characteristics). Pelders & Nelson 74 ) assessed the commuting time related to fatigue. Despite mentioning that commuting time and fatigue could be related, the study did not find that relation.

The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze the published scientific literature about the mental health in mine workers and to summarize the findings. For that reason, it reviewed 12 years of several literature about research on mental health in mine workers across the world. In the period analyzed, most of the articles reviewed were associated to report results about coal miners (40%), followed by copper miners (7.5%). A considerable number of reports (27.5%) didn’t specified the type of mining activity.

On the other hand, the results suggesting that the scope of research centered in four themes: 1) Psychological problems & personal factors; 2) Psychosocial problems & health related factors; 3) Well-being 4) Physical problems & organization factors.

The first theme was the most highlighted. Some studies approached on symptoms and psychological-related problems. For instance, job stress, depressive symptoms, anxiety, sleep disorders were announced in the results reviewed. These findings could be related that mining is a part of the industrial sector. In this, the literature has indicated that workers can develop depressive disorders (see Tran et al. 77 ) ), moderate-high job stress (see Hoboubi et al. 78 ) ), significative level of anxiety (see Rao & Ramesh 79 ) ), sleep disorders or problems related (i.e. insomnia, sleepiness, fatigue, overweight, obesity, breathing-related problem) (see Uehli et al. 80 ) ).

In these studies, some findings suggested (e.g. Carlisle & Paker 58 ) ; Loudoun et al. 59 ) ; Ahmad 63 ) ; Li et al. 73 ) ) that young mine workers, marital status, monthly income or educational level is related to psychological problems. That is concordant with the study of Pavičić et al. 81 ) where they support that young workers industrial sector had more anxiety and depression compared with other. Also, the results are concordant with the following: the study of Mojtabai et al. 82 ) , concluded that marital status has been related to mental health disorders, specifically divorce status; with the study of Syrén et al. 83 ) that discussed significant association between incomes and reversed depression, personality traits (i.e. extraversion and neuroticism) and psychological well-being; and the study of Niemeyer et al. 84 ) , which indicated that depressive symptoms increased in groups with low educational level and lesser psychological resources. Finally, on neuropsychological deterioration by chemical exposure, the results of Corral et al. 40 ) were associated with the study of van den Bosch & Meyer 85 ) who mentioned that mercury exposure disturbed neurotransmission and could cause depression and increase the suicide risk.

Concerning the second theme, the articles focused on psychosocial risk at work, interpersonal relations, consumption of substances and other health-related variables. Some studies related the psychosocial risks at work with mental health problems (e.g. Ansoleaga & Toro 38 ) ; Amponsah et al. 55 ) ; Salas et al. 61 ) ; Li et al. 73 ) ). These enounced that high job demand/low control and security, high effort/low reward, higher work-family interference, violence at work and low social support were related to poor mental health and quality of life. This evidence is concordant with a systematic review reported by Fernandes & Pereira 86 ) on psychosocial risk at work. They commented high stress, high job demands, work-family conflicts, lack of role clarity, quantitative overloads deteriorated the psychological well-being (caused mood disorders, substance abuse and health-related problems, such as diabetes, headaches, etc.). As well, the evidence summarized that interpersonal problems (see Torkington et al. 50 ) , Liu & Chen 41 ) ) were related to that indicated by Street et al. 23 ) according to the low relationship between miners and with their families could be a source of stress.

Moreover, the results about consumption of substances (i.e. tobacco, alcohol and drugs) could be explained with the remark by Street & Lancey 87 ) and Bassiony et al. 88 ) in their study. They said that industrial workers usage of substances is common, being most prevalent in older males with smoking habits. The mining is featured by a largest presence of male workers and they are exposed to higher workload and inclement conditions (e.g. underground mining) (see Ahmad, Rahmad & Alagarajan. 89 ) ). At the end, other variables, such as suicide risk (see Mcphedran & De Leo 57 ) ) and cancer experiences (see Ramashia et al. 72 ) ) showed the feelings and changes in mine workers to trigger suicide attempts and death, as well as the social isolation, fear, uncertainty in who is living with cancer.

Regarding to the third theme, the documents (e.g. Yu et al. 45 ) ; Masia & Pienaarz 49 ) ; McLean 54 ) ; Gow et al. 2013; Li et al. 65 ) ; Han et al. 70 ) ) pointed out the relevance of Quality of life (QOL), Subjective Well-being and Job satisfaction in mine workers. Some literature reviews in these topics (see Bora, Saumendra & Murthy 90 ) ; Carolan, Harris & Cavanagh et al. 91 ) ; Naz & Sharma, 92 ) ; Loon et al. 93 ) ) concluded that the three variables are important to ensure the productivity. For instance, QOL contributes on positive organizational outcomes, retained skilled workers, work effectiveness, protect the mental health at work, etc. Additionally, job satisfaction increases the feeling of optimism and is an indicator of overall job wellness. Also, Well-being is useful to achieve sense of meaning and purpose and experience adequate social interactions (Bartels, Peterson & Reina 94 ) ). All these outcomes are very important in mining because it’s a very competitive sector and depends on their scale of production. The productivity is directly correlated to the mine workers 95 ) and is feasible to be one of reasons that the studies have approached on the three variables previously mentioned.

Finally, about the fourth theme, the articles reviewed (e.g. Wang et al. 47 ) ; Paech, et al. 48 ) ; Ferguson, et al. 51 ) ; Carlisle & Parker 58 ) ; Deng et al. 64 ) ; Yu et al. 66 ) ; James et al. 71 ) ; Pelders & Nelson 74 ) ) inquired on the relationship of mental health risk at work, physical problems and work organization problems (such as fatigue, injuries, safety environment, musculoskeletal pain/disorders (MSDs), management and organization of working day in shift work). About this, the scientific literature said the lack or deprivation of sleep caused physical fatigue (see Caldwell et al. 96 ) ) increased the risk of injuries and accidents (see Garbarino et al. 97 ) ). Besides, the MSDs impact in mental health outcomes (see Etuknwa, Daniels & Eib 98 ) ), and work in longer periods and shift work are related to serious effects on sleep, time of reactions, safety behavior and mental health status (see Zhao et al. 99 ) ; Brown et al. 100 ) ). According to what is highlighted in the theme, is possibly argued that in the last time the literature has increased their attention in relation to physical and mental health to assess/manage the risk at work, investigated on safety culture, performance and other factors. In this point, it is also important to comment that mining is involved in an important transformation called “mining 4.0” (see Lööw et al. 101 ) ). The incorporation of new technology and robotized processes entails those workers coordinate the use of their mental/physical resources to perform their tasks, and for that reason, may have been important in the reviewed studies that explored on both dimension of workers health.

Mining can expose to a significative part of their workers to serious mental health problems and risk at work. According to the literature reviewed, four themes emerging as relevant to manage that. Thus, psychological problems and personal factors, psychosocial problems and health-related factors, well-being and physical problems and organization factors were highlighted for controlling, improving, and promoting the mental health status and ensuring psychological wellness at mine workers. The evidence suggested that hazardous environment (e.g. risky conditions), work organization (e.g. shift work schedules), interpersonal relations (e.g. work-family conflicts), psychosocial risk at work (e.g. high job demand, job stress), well-being (e.g. quality of life, job satisfaction), substance abuse, personality traits, psychological capital, somatic and physical affection (e.g. MSDs, pain) and other variables summarized in Table 1 and Table 2 must be incorporate in the enterprises démarche, in such a way to ensure the care and promotion of mine workers’ mental health.

Limitations

This review was made only with literature published in the databases descripted prior. Also, the focus was descriptive and analytic, non-explicative. Maybe a new review of the theme will help in this way. Moreover, the most of studies were conducted by quantitative methods. This could indicate some lack of studies that deepening in subjective experiences of mental health at mining work, which can preclude to know the personal’s appreciations about the relation between their mental health and work performance or workplace. Finally, the most of samples in studies were males. For that, it’s necessary improve the female’s inclusion in the future studies, because it’s fact that their incorporation to the heading significant and in the future, it will be equitable with respect to males. This could contribute to promote specific policies to care mental health at work according to gender of mine workers, avoiding the gender bias.

Recommendations

It’s necessary to make national and international policies to approach mental health in mining, and supervising their compliment, both nationally and internationally. In this sense, the policies could contain orientation to manage the risk of mental disorders and other related-affection, design instruments to vigilance and promote the mental health of mine workers and to keep a national statistics of mental health problems and related-problems. This is possible, because some countries (e.g. Chile, Perú, Australia, etc.) already have a system to guide, monitor and account for accidents in mining. These have been useful to reduce the risk of accidents. In the same way, the system could contribute to reduce the risks of chronic mental health problems along with specifics programs to promote the mental health among miners.

Finally, other variables could be included in new research on mine workers, such as suffering at work. When suffering is pathogenic, it triggers severe consequences on mental health (see Gama et al. 102 ) ). This variable wasn’t observed in the documents reviewed and can be relevant to contribute with evidence of it to help clarifying the problem in the sector.

Conflict of Interest

None conflict interest related with this study.

Acknowledgements

To Vicerrectoria de Estudios Avanzados of Pontifical Catholical University of Valparaíso, for supported to first author through “PUCV Postgraduate grant 2020”.

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History of mining in South Africa

From the world’s largest hand-dug mine to strike action with fatal violence on both sides, South Africa’s mining industry has been one of the country’s most influential for over a hundred years. We look at the history of mining in South Africa.

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The first mine constructed in what is now South Africa began operations in 1852, a copper project that would form the cornerstone of the town of Springbokfontein, today Springbok, in the Northern Cape province. Commercial coal mining began 12 years later, with the construction of a mine in the Eastern Cape that would also see a settlement constructed around it, the town of Molteno.

It was established by George Vice, the local-born son of an Englishman. He found the process of white Europeans moving to South Africa to set up mining operations, staffed predominantly by black workers. This trend would characterise later generations of South African mining.

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Coal mining continued to expand until the turn of the 20th century, with deposits at Vereeniging and Witbank exploited from 1879 and 1895, respectively fuelling the region’s growing industries.

Diamond and platinum rushes

In the 1860s, two notable diamonds were unearthed; The 21-carat Eureka diamond and the 83-carat Star of South Africa, inspiring a diamond rush in the region aided by the more established coal industry. In 1879, the Orange Free State government-commissioned English-born George William Stow to uncover coal deposits; he would later move to  Kimberley , the famous Big Hole diamond mine site.

The first diamonds were uncovered at the site of the Big Hole in 1871. Until the mine’s closure in 1914, up to 50,000 miners excavated the deepest hole ever dug by hand, extending 215 metres underground. While the mine would yield 2,720kg of diamonds and help establish the De Beers mining company, which remains a major industry player to this day. Operations were again characterised by racial disparity.

White Briton Cecil Rhodes served as the mine’s governor and later founded De Beers, while over one thousand black workers died during mining or from diseases contracted during work. Over five thousand black workers were admitted to a local hospital with conditions throughout the mine’s life.

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Following the closure of the Big Hole with the outbreak of the First World War, attention turned towards platinum mining, with the first deposit discovered in 1924. The South African Minerals Council reports that the mines built along this first deposit, in an area known as Mashishing, have accounted for more than three-quarters of the world’s total platinum output since commercial operations began.

Post-war expansion

After the World Wars, South African mining continued to expand, with several new uses for minerals and mining products, such as platinum in the petroleum industry, to improve fuel’s octane rating. The construction of power stations on the coalfields of Witbank and Delmas established fossil fuels, and by extension mining, as the primary source of South African power, while the combination of the Venterspost, Libanon and  Kloof gold mines  into a single operation by 1968 established a project that has gone on to produce around 15,000kg of gold per year.

However, these industrial changes sparked significant social changes, with the number of people employed in manufacturing alone increasing by 60% during the Second World War. The number of people employed in mining swelled, with up to 158,000 people working in the sector by 1946 and 119 separate unions established to represent their political interests. That year, the African Mineworkers Union went on strike, with 60,000 workers downing tools to demand higher wages. But police broke up the protest by killing 12 striking miners, establishing a conflict between mining unions and government forces that would be a feature of the sector in years to come.

Apartheid and social tensions

Alongside these internal fractures, the South African mining industry was under additional pressure by overseas developments in the latter half of the 20th century. The development of diamond projects in countries such as Russia dramatically depleted the value of De Beers, whose near-monopoly over the global diamond trade began to erode; according to analyst Paul Zimnisky, the company’s share of the global rough diamond industry fell from 80% in 1987 to less than 60% by the turn of the century, and just 35% by 2019.

The sector also began to struggle following generations of reliance on migrant labour, which old racial divisions influenced.  The Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy  reported that the number of gold miners employed in “cheap black labour” jumped from 14,000 in 1890 to 534,000 in 1986. The paper also notes that as mineral reserves run low, miners demand better working conditions, and itinerant workers move back to their homes and families, the mining sector became less productive for companies, with the percentage of the world’s gold produced by these companies falling from 70% in the middle of the 20th century to 25% by 2004.

Apartheid, the government policy of racial segregation, influenced and encouraged this reliance on “cheap black labour”, legitimising the division between a small group of white owners responsible for managing mining companies and more significant numbers of black workers involved in the day-to-day running of operations.

Violence, strikes and an uncertain future

While Apartheid is no longer a government policy, its impacts are still felt across South Africa, particularly in mining. Last year, mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe caused controversy by trying to introduce a new mining charter that would increase the minimum percentage of black ownership of mining rights from 26% to 30% ; while a compromise  has since been worked out , tension remains between those historically advantaged and those traditionally disadvantaged by the mining industry.

The sector has also seen several dramatic conflicts since the turn of the 21st century, from the Marikana Massacre in 2012, when police killed 34 striking mineworkers at Lonmin’s operations, to the ongoing disputes between the government and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. The combative union has organised two significant protests, a 70,000-strong strike at platinum mines in 2014 and action involving nearly 20,000 platinum and gold workers between 2018 and 2019. It is currently facing the threat of deregistration by the government.

While mining has been an economic cornerstone for South Africa for over a century, social pressures, declining extractive industry and an inability to modernise mean the sector’s future remains unclear.

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Vibrant culture

A history of mining in south africa.

M M ining in South Africa has been a contentious issue since 15-year-old Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs discovered South Africa’s first diamond, the Eureka, in Hopetown in 1867. It kickstarted what historians call the Mineral Revolution, which made few European opportunists wealthy beyond measure, and saw hundreds of thousands of men leaving their homes to become fulltime mineworkers.

Today, the mining industry remains one of the biggest contributors to the country’s economy with an estimated worth of R20.3 trillion (US$2.5 trillion). It is the world’s fifth largest mining sector in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), contributing eight percent to South Africa’s GDP.  Do not let the numbers deter you from the realities of mining in the past. It was, and to some degree remains a dangerous job.

The mineworker’s plight was captured wonderfully by founding member of the African National Congress, Sol Plaatjie, in 1914. “Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar ‘fall of rock’ and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1 000 to 3 000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners' phthisis and pneumonia.”

I I t was with these dangers in mind that miners have demanded higher wages throughout the industry’s 150-year history. As a result, mining has been marred by violence, with the Marikana Massacre of 2012 being the most recent occurrence where police killed 34 workers and injured 78.

Such events are rooted in a strike led by the African Mine Workers’ Union in August 1946. Miners of the Witwatersrand were demanding higher pay: an extra 10 shillings a day. The strike went on for a week despite what South African History Online describes as “the most savage police terror”. Officially, the police and army attacked the unarmed workers, wounding 1 248 and killing nine.

The strike had “profound repercussions which are felt until this day”, said the history portal.

Most major cities around the world were built on or near a body of water as a matter of survival. But Johannesburg, built on the arid Highveld, spawned from a lust for gold.  The story behind gold’s discovery is still disputed. Jan Gerrit Bantjes and the Struben brothers unearthed gold on separate occasions in 1884. However, according to South African History Online , these were minor reefs and credit for the discovery of the main reef on Langlaagte Farm went to Australian George Harrison in July 1886. Johannesburg’s large gold deposits that ran for miles underground ensured the little mining town mushroomed into a leviathan.  

Before the discovery, there were about 600 white farmers in the Witwatersrand region, which was considered well-populated at the time. Within a year of gold findings, the area had some 7 000 people with 3 000 living in Johannesburg. By 1895, just nine years after the Langlaagte find, Johannesburg was home to some 102 000 people. To date the Witwatersrand Basin, the largest gold resource in the world, has produced more than two billion ounces of gold.

S S outh Africa is also rich in platinum, manganese and coal, and large industries have grown from these minerals. However, none of them had induced the “dangerous madness” like diamonds did, which attracted hundreds of people in ox wagons and mule carts who wanted to make it rich.

Some even travelled by foot from as far as Cape Town, a more than 1 000 kilometre journey across the Karoo, to reach the diamond fields of Kimberley and the Transvaal.  While prospecting, these miners endured poor diets and horrible living conditions. A stench hung over the tented settlements, approach roads were lined with the carcasses of pack animals and open trenches served as public toilets. Only a few became rich. One of these men was British tycoon Cecil John Rhodes who founded De Beers, which came to dominate the market and is still synonymous with diamonds today.

F F ast forward to the late 20th century, and South African diamonds are still sought after, with an estimated R16-billion worth of the stones sold locally and internationally per year.

Diamond miners were memorialised in the Diggers Fountain, which you can find in Kimberley. I nstalled at the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Gardens in 1959, Herman Wald’s bronze sculpture portrays five men holding up a diamond sieve.

Mining in South Africa continues to transform the country to this day. Currently, the industry is mostly run by white executives overseeing a huge, low-skilled and cheap black workforce but industry and government are trying to change that by increasing black ownership.

By the end of 2011, South Africa’s mining industry was the largest contributor to economic transformation, with broad-based black economic empowerment deals worth R150-billion completed.

A A bout the author

Shamin Chibba has 13 years of writing experience, including three years as an editor. He has written in numerous formats, from long-form features for Al Jazeera Magazine and Brand South Africa.com to adaptations of classic tales for graphic novels. He also founded Seer Media, which provided news and information for NGOs in the Eastern Cape. When not writing, he can be found squirming painfully while trying to perfect his kung fu horse-stance. You can find his portfolio at Edge of Mystery .

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Coal Mining — The Extraction of Valuable Minerals

The Extraction of Valuable Minerals

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“Body Ritual among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner

Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or pattern of perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several institutions in the society. Examples are “machismo” in Spanish-influenced cultures, “face” in Japanese culture, and “pollution by females” in some highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that “attitudes about the body” have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacirema society.

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock [1] . In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.

Professor Linton [2]  first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strength—the throwing of a piece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided.

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution [3] . The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as “holy-mouth-men.” The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [4]   about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures. [5]

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client’s view, the purpose of these ministrations [6]  is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.

It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite includes scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women’s rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.

The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso , in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge [7]  but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.

The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because “that is where you go to die.” Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.

The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso . A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client’s sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men.

Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant’s mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people’s faith in the medicine men.

There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a “listener.” This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the “listener” all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.

In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.

Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.

Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski [8]  when he wrote:

Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization.

Footnotes are added by Dowell as modified by Chase

• Murdock, George P. 1949. Social Structure . NY: The Macmillan Co., page 71. George Peter Murdock (1897-1996 [?]) is a famous ethnographer. ↵
• Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man . NY: D. Appleton-Century Co. page 326. Ralph Linton (1893-1953) is best known for studies of enculturation (maintaining that all culture is learned rather than inherited; the process by which a society's culture is transmitted from one generation to the next), claiming culture is humanity's "social heredity." ↵
• A washing or cleansing of the body or a part of the body. From the Latin abluere, to wash away ↵
• Marked by precise observance of the finer points of etiquette and formal conduct. ↵
• It is worthy of note that since Prof. Miner's original research was conducted, the Nacirema have almost universally abandoned the natural bristles of their private mouth-rite in favor of oil-based polymerized synthetics. Additionally, the powders associated with this ritual have generally been semi-liquefied. Other updates to the Nacirema culture shall be eschewed in this document for the sake of parsimony. ↵
• Tending to religious or other important functions ↵
• A miracle-worker. ↵
• Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science, and Religion . Glencoe: The Free Press, page 70. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) is a famous cultural anthropologist best known for his argument that people everywhere share common biological and psychological needs and that the function of all cultural institutions is to fulfill such needs; the nature of the institution is determined by its function. ↵
• Body Ritual of the Nacirema. Authored by : Horace Miner. Located at : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright