TRANSCRIPT

Who are you?

I'm Bob Moffat

And where did you used to work?

I worked in the Red Deer Valley Coal Mine, I worked at the Murray Mine in East Coulee, and I worked at the Hygrade in Drumheller.

Ahhh…we were talking about some of the ladies of ill repute in the valley. And seeing as I had quit school in grade 11, or early in grade 11 and gone to work in the mine, I was able to buy myself a car. Now, I went back to school, and at that time there were only two of us in the school that had cars. So I became quite popular driving the boys around the town and what I would do for a small fee, I would drive them down to, the ahhh, Mary Ropers. Which was one of the houses of ill repute. Now old Mary always had a poker game going in there and lots a whiskey, and she was always after me to go with one of her girls. But I would tell her "no thanks, there is no way that five bucks is going outta my pocket for one of your girls.". And she said, "Well, why don't you play poker?" And I would say " I don't gamble". Well she said " you should at least have a drink" I said "okay…I'll have some whiskey." SO she brought me a whiskey and it was TERRIBLE. It was the cheapest rye you could buy. And to me it had already been watered down. So I said to her, I said " For God sakes, do you have any scotch?" She said " you drink scotch? Nobody drinks scotch but me!" and after that whenever I took somebody down, her and I would sit down and have several drinks of scotch and she never charged me for them. End of story!

What about striking? Do you have any stories about striking?

Oh Yes…I have several stories about striking. First of all I'll tell you about the strike I started.
I worked as a driver with contract miners. And I would usually have all their coal hauled away by one or one thirty in the afternoon. And would make sure that they all had an empty car for their clean up, sometimes helped them timber a bit or drill some holes for the dynamite. But, there was no use, as far as I was concerned, in just sitting around down there. So I would sneak out through the old coal workings, and jump on a load of slack as it went by, and ride out of the mine. Then I would give my lamp, and my check, which was a little brass tag that had your number on it, to my dad who worked outside in the mine. And when he turned in his check, he would turn in my lamp and my check also.

Well, he forgot to do it one time and of course they thought that I was lost down in the mine, and they sent a search party down there and eventually decided that probably Bob left early. So I got reprimanded.

The second time this happened, they docked me an hour. Which upset me considerably. So I decided, I know what to do with these guys. All the drivers always went down the mine 15 minutes early, so that we would be at the coal face when the miners got there and our ponies would be hooked up and we would pull out the cars that we had left for clean up and give them a new clean ready to go car. So I got a hold of all of the drivers and I said "we've gotta stay down that mine till 4 o'clock. We're not going down until 8." All of us lined up at the face there, er the entry and nobody would go past us. They came out and said, " We're reinstating your hour." End of strike. Shortest strike we ever had at that coal mine. So that was the strike I started.

The strike that I stopped was a little more involved and a little more hazardous to my health. We had a miner there who I will call Brother Lushwell. Anyway Brother Lushwell, quite often missed work because he had what we called the 26-ounce flu. Anyway, they fired Brother Lushwell. So into the wash house comes our union head.

"Brothers, they fired Brother Lushwell. And we wont put up with it. We're going out." Out we go. We missed three days of work. They rehired Brother Lushwell. I swear it wasn't six weeks later, what happens? Brother Lushwell misses three days work again and they fire him. Here comes our union head "Brothers they fired Brother Lushwell, and we're going out!" So out we go, but after one day, management came out to us and they said you can stay out forever as far as we're concerned. We're not hiring him back. SO what do we do? The union head goes to all of the other union heads in the valley and every mine closes down. Sympathy Strike. Well it took about one hours for all of the miners, mine managers and mine owners to get on our mine manager and we rehire Brother Lushwell. A long about 2 months later here comes our union head up on the bench he gets "Brothers, they fired Brother Lushwell." Well there was a lot of groans and the guys started taking off their lamps and then I jumped up on the bench, and I said "I don't know about you brothers but I've lost enough wages over Brother Lushwell, and I'm going to work!" And I'll be go to blazes here that they didn't all decide to go to work with me. Well now comes our union president and he tells me "you little bleep bleep you watch your back, and stay away from my daughter too!" He had two very good looking daughters neither one of which really wanted anything to do with me but even if they had I guarantee you I wouldn't a gone anywhere near them. And that's the end of the strike stories.

What other stories do you have?
I would like to hear about your accident with Johnny.
I've never heard that story
Yeah tell em that story.

Well I could tell you about some of the ponies that I drove when I was down in the mine. If I can get all their names straight again here. There was ah Queenie, who was a beautiful little mare, if you looked at her without…, if you had a picture of her and there was nobody standing near so you could get perspective you'd a sworn that she was a thorough bred horse. But unfortunately she couldn't work in the area where I was because of the hills and she was what they called wind broke, her lungs were shot. So I only drove her for a couple of days. They gave me Poncho, the only little stallion that we had in the mine. And you needed reins on him and he was the only horse that we had that we had reins on, and he would run away every opportunity he got, which was quite disastrous in the area that I worked because I had steep hills and so that lasted two days and Poncho was gone. Then we had Jonny. Jonny was my little horse and he was wonderful. Jonny worked as hard as horses twice his size. I many times had hooked 14 cars of coal on him, and he would pull his heart out for you. One, There was a time when Jonny just about got killed and I myself also, I stopped the cars on the top of the hill and I would run down and open the door to the main entry and then I would whistle and he would pull and go through and I would jump back on the car just as he got there. And then the door would just bang, bang, bang, and close behind us. Well that time, I no sooner got down to the door when I heard some of the wooden sprags break. And I could tell, here comes the loads with Jonny. Well I pulled that door open and he went by and I swear, I'd swear on the bible, that horse had his but up against that first car trying to stop. Anyway, he made it through and we were fine. It was sometime later, it was past the time when we hauled coal and our routine was at the end, you know, about 1 or 1:30 in the afternoon I would pull out the last trip that I was going to make that day and just flip the chain and he'd turn off to the left where we'd take off his harness. Well they phoned down just about the time I was gonna take the harness off and then they said "we need, we're short a coal, we want to get another boxcar out, and we know darn well that you'll have a dozen cars in there or so". So I said "okay", take the pony and in we go to pick up loads and I told the guy I said "look, your in a hurry, the parting is full of coal cars now, so when you see my light come around the corner, you take with the motor and I'll hook off on the run. Well, in order to do that Jonny had to keep going in a straight line, but he knew it was quitting time, so he turned off to the left as he usually did which brought that tail chain across my leg which threw me over, the chain caught in the frog, er the switch in the tracks, and I ended up with the car of coal on top of my leg, the horse trying to run away, and all of the cars had bumper locked. Ol' Louis Petit who was the fellow on the motor that was pulling out the cars saw my light go crazy and end up where it shouldn't be. He stopped his motor, ran back and managed to lift enough with a tie that I could drag my leg out from underneath the cars. So anyway, I wasn't too badly busted up. They loaded me on a car of slack, took me out and several days later I ran into Louis and I said, "Louis, you gotta be the strongest man on earth!" He said "why?" Well I says, "While I was laying there waiting for them to come and haul me out, I saw three guys try to lift, what you lifted alone." And you couldn't do it because all of the cars were bumper locked and you had to move each car back and then finally the three of you lifted that one car on. I said "you gotta be the strongest guy on earth" he said " no I'm not maybe the second strongest" He said " you were holding that horse from running away with one hand" and actually the horse was he was trying to go and on the rock bottom he was slippin out. But I knew if he went so did my leg go, the chain was wrapped around my knee and it would have been goodbye Charlie, because the leg was trapped underneath all of the cars. But it was a, it was a bad, shortly after that I left that mine and decided, what the heck, I'm getting four or five months of work a year and I'm not gonna loose my leg, it isn't worth it. It was actually the end of my career as a driver.

Which mine was that?

That was the Hygrade. It was the last mine in the valley to use ponies. They actually used them for a couple more years after I left, maybe four years after I left. And one of these days I wanna bring Ron down here Ron Bigford and he actually had an accident with one of the horses that I drove and that was Turk, the one that could count. Turk could count cars. Now I know that there were people that didn't believe my story and that's fine, But I'll be darned if I didn't read and article by a fellow from Taber, who also had a horse that could count. Turk was famous for his ability. He would pull six cars and no more, and if you tried to get past him, to maybe give him a bite in the ear and get moving he kicked the blazes out of you. And there was a time when Turks drive was off sick and they wanted me to drive Turk as well as Jonny, so that the miners could get some cars out anyway. So I went in and I took Turk and I put 8 cars on and that son of a gun kicked the heck out of me as I tried to get by him. So I unhooked to cars and we would haul six cars and I said " this is crazy" I'd taken quite a few empties into the miners and I was putting the loads off on one of the side entries, and I got an idea. I hooked Turk up to the first car and there were quite a few cars as I recall, it was somewhere around 12 or 14. And I stretched the chains out tight on every one except the first 5. Hollered at him "get up" and away he went, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang and no problem whatsoever. Hauled all those cars out to the main parting ad that's what it was. Apparently, if he felt more than 5 jerks, he had too many cars. And I think it was when he was, they were breaking him in probably, that's all they would hook onto him because he was young and not all muscled up yet. SO that's my theory on why. But anyway, everybody wanted to know how I got Turk to haul more than 6 cars and being the miserable little guy that I was I wouldn't tell them.

If you saw what those miners went through in the thirties, now when I ended up, my career as a, in the mines, I was payroll clerk and shipper at the Murray Collieries, and when we closed down the Collieries they kept me on to sell equipment and clean the place up. And at times I had nothing to do, I started going through the old records and when you saw that a miner made $2.35 for a days work and they deducted for his wash house, for sharpening his pick, for his carbide lamp, etc. etc. etc. and the guy ends up with the $1.10 for a days work, I figured it was time for unions. And a the unions eventually priced us out of the coal market I guess because they had to charge $12.00 a ton for coal and the strip mines were selling it for $4.00 and so maybe we priced ourselves out of the market. I think it was more the gas had come in and more people were burning gas and so the demand for coal was down. And anybody that burned the strip mine coal had to admit that their ash content was 4 times what ours was and the heat wasn't as good either. But, it was cheap so you could burn twice as much and carry 4 times as many ashes and still be money ahead. So, that was that end of it. But if you saw what those miners went through back in the early days it was just pitiful. End of story.

Okay Bob I would really like to know where men went to the bathroom underground in the mine?

Well you try to avoid going to the bathroom if possible. Number one was easy, you could do that any darn place. But if you had to as we say, "take a dump" you went into an abandoned room and did what comes naturally. It was very interesting though you could tell wherever somebody went because it grew funny long, white things off it, which glowed in the dark, which scared the hell outta me the first time I saw them because I didn't know what they were. But anyway, sort of like mushrooms, you know that type of whatever you call those things, FUNGUS! That's the word, I couldn't think of the word. But, you would find fungus growing and you knew that somebody had had a go there. So that's where you went.

What about the change in ventilation as the air moved through those rooms?

You probably didn't notice if you sat behind a pony like I did. The smell goes away shortly afterwards.

The area that I lived in when I was just a kid was over where Westerguard motors is now. There were about a dozen or so houses in that area. The one fellow he was quite wealthy and he decided that rather than having water hauled in by the carrel, he would dig a well. So down he drills and what does he hit but an old abandoned mine shaft. And he kept drilling and drilling and hit hard pan and no water. But he though well I have the hole here now, what a wonderful place to put my sewage. So you know if anyone ever falls into that old shaft they're gonna get a very crappy kind of a surprise I would think.

And tell us about the opening to the old Elgin Mine.

Oh when I was a kid I don't know how many mines were back in that area but, there were various vertical shafts there, that were abandoned, they'd just put barbed wire around them, barbed wire fence around them and as kids we would get boulders and drop them down to see whether there was water in the bottom of them or not. You'd drop it in and it took awhile for the rock to hit the bottom and it would either go CLUNK or SPLUNK, indicating water in the second one there. And I guess maybe we're lucky that none of us ever fell in or lost our dogs or anything. I think eventually they closed some of them because people did loose a cow or some thing down there.

And some of the mines were? Which ones?

Well I'm trying to think. It was the Elgin, the Elgin Jr. back in there.

ABC?

Not that, that's not that far up the valley.

The old Atlas?

I don't remember what the names of them were.

But all of them were on Plueg St.?

No. South end of 2nd St. W and towards Highway 9 from in there. That's the area that we all played in and well we lived back in there.

In the 20's the Drumheller Valley was a hot bed of Klu Klux Klan "ers". They brought in priests and they brought in the Mounties and to combat this. Eventually, the Grand whatever his name is shut her down around here but I did have some fun when I was young occasionally we would build a cross wrap it up with some brattice, which is what we used in the mines, put a little oil on it sink it in the hill and then late at night light it. Well, everybody said that the Klan is back.

Why was the Klan here, because there weren't a lot of black people?

They no no, the Klan was not against any black, we had only a couple of black people. It was the other immigrants, the Hungarians, and Ukrainians that they were bringing in to work in the mines that they didn't want brought in here. A very prejudice, anybody from the British Empire was very prejudice. I can tell you about that because all of my ancestors were from there.

We don't have record of any Asian immigrants. Do you remember any Chinese or Asians?

We had Chinese but we didn't have any that worked in the mines that I knew of. They ran the restaurants. We had several black miners, a few. I think maybe there was some Japanese in Wayne and they ran the grocery store and the café and I'm not to sure that some of them didn't work in the mine. But I couldn't swear to that. Mostly we had people from Europe in the mines. Quite a few Italians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and of course the people from the British Isles. But the majority of them were Ukrainians or Hungarians That I worked with anyway.

You mentioned the Welshmen earlier. Were there many Welsh here in Drumheller?

Oh quite a few Welsh here. It seemed like they always ended up being the union leaders. A kinda radical bunch.

They were eloquent and spoke well?

Oh certainly. There's nobody more eloquent than a Welshman. Other than maybe an Irishman.

We won't argue with that!

We were on the street where the Drumheller Mail, the old Drumheller Mail building was in that part of the building before Drumheller Mail moved into it. There were two cafes on that street, one was called the Dallas, and the other was the Palace. The Palace eventually became the Diana. Across the Street was another café, which was called the Rainbow Café, which at one time was fairly respectable, and then it became the Dominion, better known as the Bucket of Blood. It was guaranteed Friday night and Saturday night that there would be a minimum of one fight in that particular establishment. Matter of fact, my friend Ron Bigford, who I hope to bring down here one of these days so you can interview him. Ron and I had met in there. Both of us had had several drinks and we decided that we would push each around a little bit. Well a couple of our friends decided that they would back us up, and the fists started to fly. Ron and I sat down and observed this fight as the plate glass window went out, the door window went out, food was scattered all over the place, and Ron and I were quite enjoying this and the RCMP showed up. Now big Katie worked in there, Big Katie McCuchin. She was a wonderful lady. She grabbed Ron, pushed him in the men's bathroom and pushed me into the women's bathroom and said both of you stay there until we've got it all cleaned up in here. And so we got off with it. Ahhh it was a wonderful fight. And some people went to jail.

What year was that?

Oh that would be 1952-53 in there. Those were pretty good days back then. We were a little under age to be drinking but if you knew the right people you could always get to the bootleggers and I think that I knew of about a dozen myself so it wasn't hard to get liquor.

When you look a the bars opened at ten and closed at ten. So 10 am to 10pm. The liquor store was open from 9 or 10 in the morning till 6 o'clock at night and it was closed on Sundays, as were the bars and people wanted to drink. There was a great market out there for bootleggers. As there is for drug dealers now. Unfortunately, I think that I would much rather have the bootleggers than what we've got today. But it was a thriving business, bootlegging. You paid $2.10 for a mickey of cheap rot gut rye in the liquor store. If you went to the bootleggers, you paid $5.00 for that. A case of beer was $2.10 in the liquor store, you paid $5.00 for that at the bootleggers. So you can see that they turned a fairly tidy profit. And if they got caught it was a couple hundred dollar fine, which they could make up on a weekend, so…

So they were making beer, they were making hooch, what else were they making, bootleggers?

Oh no! They were buying this from the liquor store. They were smart enough they were just, you might say buying it wholesale and selling it retail is what it was. Oh there were some that made wine, and you could buy wine from a few people, lots of people in this valley made wine and some people in this valley made beer. Now I, the only fellow I knew that made moonshine was my grandfather. Oh and I'm sure there were lots of others, oh and an uncle, oh God, potato champagne they called it. I can remember one batch the my uncle made and it turned cloudy and he said, oh my God, he'd already had it bottled and he got me to dispose of it. Now I was supposed to break it all up and throw it all out, but a few bottles went into the back end of the garage, and I can tell you that you drank that, you got really drunk. And really sick. Your head would not fit through a 32 inch door the next day. You were poisoned it what it was actually you were poisoned. It was terrible. But the good stuff was really good. You could burn that down and there was nothing left on that spoon. It was super, it was about 190 proof I guess, somewhere in there.

What kind of wine did people make?

Oh chokecherry, and rhubarb and dandelion. In this valley you had Rhubarb wine, Dandelion wine, and Chokecherry, lots of chokecherry wine cause we have chokecherries all over heck here.

Dandelion wine? I've never heard of it.

Oh no. And it was good too!

Where can you get dandelion wine now?

Well, I don't, there's nobody that manufactures it. I'm sure that there's still people that make it. But you won't buy it in a liquor store. Course you won't buy Chokecherry wine in a liquor store either. Or rhubarb wine for all that's concerned. There was a great variety of wine. Some were good, some were not so good, some were potent and some were not so potent.

What about the time that your light went out?

Oh yeah. My light went out in the mine, that was pretty darn scary I was going down the hill, before the door that I had to go ahead and open before I could let the horse down, my light went out, I managed to stop the cars and I always knew where my sprags were. I always carried them on the first car. And I got sprags in the wheels so that the cars aren't gonna slide away from me, or roll away on me. Now I don't know what I'm gonna do for awhile here, it's very dark, you can't believe how dark it is. And I thought, well, there's one thing to do. And that's get down here, get down to the rail and follow it out. Which I did. Ran into the door and said okay I know where I'm at now with this and I'd unhooked my pony and I was bringing him along with me and we went out into the parting and eventually we, the motor man come along to pick up loads and bring in empties and they always carry a spare battery and a spare lamp so I was back in business but there's nothing darker than a coal mine.

Could a pony find his way through in the mine?

No, well.., I don't think he could. I mean it's just, you're completely blind. He wasn't moving that's for sure. As long as I was calling him along and he was following me, which he did quite readily I might say. I guess I could have gone back the other way and got one of my miner, you know hollered like heck and got ahold a one of them, but I was driving quite a distance at that time and I was closer to the parting. I knew where I was going there so. It was pretty scary.
The lady I was talking about that pushed Ron and I into the washrooms was supposedly a French Canadian er a French and Indian mix, I don't know of any. Well I guess… maybe I'm wrong. How about the Dumont's, now they may have been Metis. I never thought about that. But the Dumont's and the McCuchins were sorta like cousins and that's why I'm not sure.

Well I guess might a Metis person would have called themselves a half-breed?

Well yeah, probably, I mean everybody was called a half-breed. Course like I was saying earlier everybody had a handle at that time. You were, what are considered derogatory terms now we just accepted. Everybody called everybody something.

You mentioned some of those names earlier. What are some of those names?

Well we had Micks, and Spicks and Waps, and Square Heads and Bohunks, and Niggers, I'm trying to think. There were more than that but I just….Kites is another one, so there's a few. Nobody really got too upset about it. I mean, we called all of the Catholics Dogans, and they called us protestant…I won't say what they called us. But anyway, nobody got really upset about that kinda stuff, you know. That's just the way it was. And now you can go to jail.