Wyoming Almanac and History of Wyoming

When disaster struck Hanna—twice

By Phil Roberts

 The energy boom in Hanna, Wyo., has turned the once nearly deserted town into home for more than 1,500 persons. New homes are being built daily and mobile homes roll into town with regularity.

Many of the newcomers do not know about the existence of the “Miners’ Memorial” and its significance for families of coal miners in another time.

Hanna, Wyo., is listed twice in the World Almanac and both refer to disasters.

The town of Hanna, named for an Ohio political boss and railroad shareholder, Mark Hanna, was founded because of coal. Prospectors, disappointed with the poor grade of coal being taken from mines at Carbon (now a ghost town 15 miles southeast of Hanna), found rich seams of higher-grade coal in the late 1880s. The town sprang up near the new workings and by 1891, it had 100 homes, a boarding house and two active mines.

The Union Pacific Railroad, owner and developer of the mines, ran a spur line into the new town, but the underground riches proved so promising that the mines at Carbon were soon abandoned and the miners left for Hanna. By the turn of the century, the main line of the Union Pacific was moved so it passed through Hanna.

With the exception of one man killed in a cave-in in the opening months of No. 1 mine, the Hanna mines were surprisingly fatality-free in their first 13 years. By 1900 the two mines, Nos. 1 and 2, were in full production with tonnage growing appreciably by the year. The future looked bright for the mines and for the small town whose life depended on them.

But No. 1’s fatality-free record came to an end in catastrophe.

June 30, 1903, began like any mid-summer day for the 169 miners who worked the day shift. They arrived at the mine early, rode the coal cars to where they were to work that day and began the drilling and loading of the coal. At about 10 a.m. townspeople felt a rumble from deep beneath the town and it was followed by the sound of an intense explosion. The housewives, shopkeepers and night-shift miners ran to the entrance of No. 1 mine.

The rescuers saved three men near the surface, but when they tried to enter the main slope entrance, deadly gas forced them to retreat. Attempts to rescue miners through the ventilator outlet also were unsuccessful.

Mrs. Sarah Cummings of Laramie, Wyo., who was 8 at the time, remembers the tragic day.[i] "Nearly everyone in town lost someone in the mine. My father, a miner in No. 1, was on the night shift that week, so he was not injured. But his two brothers and four nephews perished. They found 168 bodies, but never the 169th," Mrs. Cummings says. "Some people thought the man whose body was never found might have been responsible for the explosion. He was a smoker and he might have lit up a cigarette even though it was against the rules. We'll never know for sure though."

Three days after the Tuesday morning blast, the rescue teams could enter the mines briefly and bring out the victims.

A Fourth of July news dispatch reflected the feelings of Hanna residents: "Even the women, whose strong faith held out so long, have given up hope now....the town has sunken [sic] into the lethargy of despair."

The miners' bodies were taken to Finn Hall, and wagons loaded with coffins rumbled through the winding streets of the sorrowing town. Burials were in cemeteries at Hanna and Carbon.

The mine reopened in 1904, but it took another four years for it to get back to normal operation.

On March 28, 1908, 19 officials of the mine, including David Elias, Wyoming state mine inspector, and Alexander Briggs, mine superintendent, toured the mine.[ii] It was payday for the miners and they were not at work in the mine.

At 4 p.m., an explosion ripped through the mine, trapping all 19 officials. Rescuers tried all evening to extricate the men. At 11 p.m., another explosion caught 40 rescuers in the bowels of the mine. All were lost.

By the end of August, all but 27 bodies had been brought to the surface. The search for the missing was abandoned and the mine was sealed as their tomb.

The two separate tragedies claimed 229 lives, left 88 widows and 134 fatherless children.

The 1903 incident, particularly, served subtly as a reference point for Hanna residents. Events were recalled as "before 1903" or "after 1903" just as world wars or terrible storms mark events for other towns.

Train cars loaded with coal still rumble though Hanna, and men still dig the fuel from mines in the area, even though operations have changed radically. The barren hillside south of Hanna is marked with fragments of metal, bits of coal and the fenced memorial. People rarely speak of the disasters and few remember them, except those who lived in Hanna then or lost loved ones in the explosions.

The memorial to the 228 men was erected on the site of No. 1 mine in 1933. Each Memorial Day, a few old-timers gather to conduct services and remember the dead. The earth below their feet is silent; the sagebrush ripples in the wind.

1 Sarah Cummings (1895-1980)

2 David Mills Elias (b. Pomeroy, Meigs County, Ohio, 1857; d. Hanna, March 28, 1908). Alexander Briggs (b. 1860, d. Hanna, March 28, 1908)

"Wagons loaded with coffins rumbled through the winding streets of the sorrowing town."

This article first appeared in Empire: The Sunday Magazine of the Denver Post, April 16, 1978, 66-69. *



 * Empire was the Sunday Magazine of the Denver Post, founded in 1950 by Post publisher Palmer Hoyt and Seattle-born Bill Hosokawa (1915-2007) as founding editor. In 38 years with the Denver Post, Hosokawa served for 25 years as Empire editor. A veteran news reporter prior to his incarceration as an internee at Heart Mountain during World War II, Hosokawa edited the Heart Mountain Sentinel, the camp newspaper. After his retirement from the Denver Post, he was a guest faculty at the University of Wyoming in the 1980s and 1990s. He frequently spoke to Phil Roberts' History of Wyoming classes in that period. In 1978 when this article was published, Empire editor was Carl Skiff, a native of Pueblo. Skiff had a long career in journalism with many newspapers in a half dozen states. He died in Sept. 2009.