Fire in the Hole

Always fascinated by mining lore, I once visited Mannington, West Virginia, the site of the worst mining disaster in America. A huge, black-slabbed granite monolith marks the spot where 167 miners met their deaths in 1967. I was so awed by the experience of standing in the lush green grass before that black rock that I wrote a novel about a coal miner's daughter orphaned by the murder-suicide of her miner father when she was ten. Since writing the book, I have followed the subject, recently reading Sybil Downing's novel based on the infamous Colorado Coal Mining disaster appropriately dubbed "The Ludlow Massacre." Her historical novel, "Fire in the Hole," is an accurate representation of the issues, the history, and the injustice of early mining conditions both in Colorado and nationwide. Appropriately, Downing's novel displays through thoughtful character development what truly was the generous heart of early Coloradoans. For make no mistake about it, Colorado to this day is a compassionate population of disparate people who are united in their commitment to Western values of fair play and individual and collective rights. The two main characters knew each other while attending law school in Colorado. Alex, from a wealthy family and one of few women in law at that time, is scorned by Bill Henderson, now the D.A. for Trinidad charged with maintaining the peace in a community charged with tension over miner strikes and heavy handed tactics of the Rockefeller run Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, then considered one of the harshest mining employers. Still recovering from the untimely death of her blue-blooded yet unproductive husband, Alex takes on a case for her father's law firm involving a miner who attempted to save her late husband in a mining accident. He is now charged with inciting a riot. Although Alex has indeed experienced the life of a privileged young woman, she chooses to take on the case as a method of securing a sense of her own identity apart from her successful father and his law firm. Proud and resilient and not without nerve, she confronts both officials and protesters and their families in an attempt to represent her client and to understand the issues involved in the strike. Soon she and Bill Henderson overcome their distrust of each other and identify with the injustice they see in the situation. Thus begins a series of actions on both of their parts that are dangerous but are intended to assist the miners in their cause to improve working conditions for the Trinidad area coal miners. Having taught school in the sixties in Louisville, Colorado, formerly a coal mining town, I was struck by the name of one particular miner in the book: Dominic Ferrara. This is the patriarch of an old Louisville family, and I taught Ferrara children in the old Catholic school there in the days when mining employment had declined, leaving a vast scars across the prairie outside of Boulder. Downing's characterization of Maria Fe

An excellent read. I knew a little about the ludlow massacre, but never really understood the context of the time until I read this book. Now I tell some of the story to all of my college students as they take their first course in Business. It is important for them to understand the absolute corruption of power of that time, and the legitimacy of unions in correcting the abuse. Of course later unions get too much power in some industries and they become the abusers of power. This is a valuable book to set the stage for a century long look at power issues in the workplace.