Some worked in the mining communities of Peerless, Scofield, Kenilworth, Castle Gate and Latuda. Seven miles west of Helper, Howard Browne's stepfather mined in the Rains precinct, which opened in 1915 and employed as many as 200 men.
"Black miners went wherever they saw a chance to get a job, and drifted from one mine to the next," Browne said in family interviews archived at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. "I remember 20 black people living in bunkhouses in Rains while white people lived in homes below."
Howard Browne was born in Kansas City in 1911. His grandfather was a doctor. His father, a first lieutenant in World War I, was a lawyer whose career was limited by segregation.
"He was appointed to the state auditor's office," Browne said, "but never got the chance to practice law."
After the war, Browne's parents divorced. Howard spent summer vacations with his mother in the coal mining camps of Carbon County and attended school in Kansas City. In 1929, he enrolled at the University of Kansas as a pre-med student and married his college sweetheart, Marguerite.
But his education was cut short by the Great Depression and his mother's urgent plea.
"She was a conservative woman. She took in people's laundry, brewed beer for sale to bachelors, and saved enough money to buy 40 acres of farmland in Carbonville." Browne explained. "Then her husband got sick and she needed my help."
Seeing his mother did not have a house to live in, he built one. He dug a compact 10-foot hole-in-the-ground structure, felled a large pine tree in the mountains and spliced it to form a pitch for the roof. Lashing smaller trees to the beams, he overlaid the substrate with tar paper and dirt. He then cut an opening for a stove pipe and built stairs to the front door.
Finding a home of their own was made more difficult because, Browne's wife acknowledged, "no one would rent houses to blacks."
For several years, the family lived in rented chicken coops "half the size of a 'normal' living room." Browne farmed in summer and mined in winter.
He dug ditches, "opened up dog holes in the side of the mountain," laid rails, worked on his knees and hauled coal. At 28, he finally said he'd been around mines "long enough" to read the signs.
"The most dangerous times in a mine are noon and midnight when the tides of the ocean come in. Very few people believe this, but when the tides come in, they move mountains way up here in Utah," he said.
Then he tells what happened while mining in Spring Canyon in 1939.
"It was near noon. We were at the end of the property, pulling back pillars, propping up timbers, and shoveling coal onto a conveyor when I heard the roof and floor crackling - when they say the mountain is 'working.' You can tell by that 'popping' sound something's going to happen real quick."
Grabbing his shovel, Browne raced toward the portal. The superintendent couldn't persuade him or the others to stay.
"He said nothing was going to happen before morning," Browne said. "I said by tomorrow, I wasn't going to be there."
The mineworkers were topside eating lunch when suddenly the "whole thing came down. The machinery, the drills, the main [entrance] - everything - went down," Browne said. "That superintendent just wanted to take the chance [by keeping us working].
"And I told him, 'You son of a bitch, you tried to get me killed! You can have your mine!' "
Survival bound, the following summer Howard Browne moved his family north to Salt Lake where a red cap future on the railroad awaited
him.
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* EILEEN HALLET STONE is co-author of Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah. She seeks information about Utah mining experiences. You may reach her at ehswriter@aol.com.
