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By Larry Linney These memories are stories related to me by my father, George A. Linney¹, a coal miner by occupation. When George Linney was a small boy, his dad, John Perry Linney ran a ferryboat across the Red River, east of Denison, Texas. He told me they caught big catfish in the river. Dad�s first school was in Kemp, Oklahoma. Kemp was also my dad�s birthplace. Later, they moved to Caddo, Oklahoma where John Perry Linney�s wife is buried near Caddo, at Bloomfield Cemetery. George Linney was approximately nine years old when his mother (Rose Ellen Patterson Linney) died. John Perry Linney and his children later moved to Gowen, Oklahoma, which is east of Hartshorne, Oklahoma, when George was 13 years old. His dad, John Perry, was shot and killed in Gowen, on Christmas Day. Will Taylor, Othelia Leonard (a niece to John Perry) Taylor�s husband. Will walked up to grandpa�s front gate and told John Perry to hold out his hat and he would shoot a hole in it. John did, and Will missed and shot John Perry in the chest. He died of the wounds. My dad had two sister, Myrtle Linney Skellenger and Stella Linney Duggan. As dad only had a third grade education, he went to work in the coal mine�s. Some other relatives also worked in the coal mine�s. in the Hartshorne area and later they retired from the mines. There were, Charlie Leonard, Jim Leonard, Emery Skellenger (son of Annie Leonard Skellenger). The Rock Island Railroad had a lot of mines in Eastern Oklahoma. The coal was important because that is what they used to run their steam engines before they had diesel locomotives. Later, when they had diesel engines to pull the trains. The Lone Star Steel Company operated the mines east of McAlester and used the coal to make steel at Lone Star in East Texas. This mine was named the Carbon Mine. When I was a small boy during the depression, my dad, George Linney and one other man mined coal in what was called a �dog hole� in a mine just East of Hartshorne, Oklahoma on a hill called Number 18 Hill. They dug a hold about 8 to 10 feet in diameter, and down 20 to 30 feet in the ground to a vein of coal. At that time, you could go to the hardware store and buy dynamite and blasting caps to shoot and loosen the coal. They build a ladder to climb up and down the shaft to the coal. They also build a hand crank hoist over the �dog hole�. They had a #3 washtub tied to a rope. One would load the tub full of coal and the one at the top of the ground would crank it up to the top of the hole. They also had a man with a truck who would then haul the coal to town. They split the coal between them. People had coal stoves to heat and cook with. At that time, there was little money so they traded coals for hogs, chickens and other things to eat or sell. The #3 washtub they used to bring the coals up out the �dog hole� was used by the women to wash their closes, using the tub and a washboard, and to takes their baths in. In the larger mines, some were shafts that went straight down to the vein of coal and some were slopes that went down at an angle to the veins of coal. They used mules in the earlier days to pull the coal by sleds. These mules sometimes never came out of the mines for a very long period of time. My dad told me that they took birds into the mines because the mines sometimes had methanie gas accumulations in them. They used the birds for detection of the gas and this was a signal to the coal miners to evacuate the mines. Because of this gas, there were many mine explosions and many miners were killed in these explosions. There is a miner�s memorial erected at Chadick Park, McAlester, Oklahoma to honor all of the miners who died in the mines. This memorial has the names of these miners who were killed while working in these mines. (1) Ed. Note: Photo is George "Rosum" and Belma Linney. |
