. . . it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. — George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier Out of work and out of luck, the coal miners of Logan County, W. Va., come to the Big Eagle Gun and Pawn Shop to offer up the last thing they have of any worth: their simple gold wedding bands. The rings, buffed free of inscriptions, fill a black velvet tray. Dozens more crowd a shelf in the vault. Over the past five years, more than 1,000 miners and their wives have come here to slip off their rings and slide them silently across the narrow glass counter. They walk away with a $15 loan and a claim stub. In time, their rings are shipped in bulk to a smelter in North Carolina, where they are melted down — as disposable as they once were valued, not unlike the miners themselves. The store is an inventory of broken dreams. From VCRs to old pocket watches, the lost possessions give testimony to the legacy that coal mining has left upon Appalachia: unemployment, a ruined economy, crippling injuries and early deaths. For Logan County — and for much of Appalachia — coal has been a blessing and a curse. It provided generations with work, solid wages, a source of immense pride and a tax base for schools, hospitals and roads. But the mines have exacted a high price in return. Many miners spend their lives crawling on their hands and knees in tunnels sometimes no higher than a yardstick, wading through mud and water, burrowing through unutterable darkness. Nearly every miner can name a friend or family member who has been killed, maimed or stricken with black lung disease. “You die quick or you die slow,” says Hassell Butcher, chief of Logan County’s tax department. But the casualties of mining cannot be measured by injuries alone. Generations of young men were lured from the classroom into the mines, many of them barely able to read or write. Communities staked everything on King Coal, neglecting to diversify. And still they cling to it, with vain hopes that the men will be called back to work. But tens of thousands of mining jobs have been lost as the process of extracting coal from Appalachia’s deep seams has been transformed by cheaper, automated methods and by the development of surface mines in the Western states. Of the 20 most productive mines in the U.S., not one is in Appalachia. As a result, the number of coal miners in the U.S. has plunged from about 230,000 a decade ago to 130,000 today. As the industry has moved from man to machine, the miners have lost the political and economic clout to defend themselves. Union miners produced less than a third of America’s coal output last year, compared with about 45% a decade ago. Miners claim that the Reagan Administration often favored the coal companies at the miners’ expense, relaxing the severity of penalties for safety violations. Corruption too has taken its toll on inspections. Last week dozens of coal companies and executives agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges that they conspired to falsify tests for coal dust, the substance that causes black lung.
