Carbon City was a hoot

By Janice Kurbjun
Times staff writer

It was hazardous and unhealthy, yet raucously fun, to be working and living in Carbon City and its mines in the 1860s.

“It was an active community,” Nancy Anderson, an authority on the history of eastern Carbon County towns, said during Tuesday’s “The Power of Place: Legacies of Carbon County” lecture. She outlined and provided anecdotes for the extensive history of a population growing roots in the West, first in Carbon City and then moving with the Union Pacific Railroad on to greener pastures in Hanna.

“They bet on everything,” she said. Horse racing, pigeon shooting, wrestling — the miners and their families watched as well as participated in the events.

There was also music. Carbon City had its own Carbon Boys Band, a group that practiced on combs before their instruments arrived by train.

There still exists a program from the 1888 Fourth of July function, which Anderson said is full of activities for children and adults. Strawberry festivals, opera house events and general jokesters in the community made that blip on the new frontier an amusing place to be.

One jokester in Carbon City made himself particularly memorable. Coffee Johnson was a Swedish traveler who owned a store called General Merchandise, which, according to Anderson, was a favorite among children.

“We was learning a lot right there in Carbon,” wrote Mont Hawthorne in his autobiography, “Them was the Days.” “At night, I’d go to his store and stand and look at the bottle of water from the Dead Sea, the sand from the Sahara, the bullets from Gettysburg, the lion skin from Africa, and the eight-legged lamb that was growed here in Wyoming.”

How much of his collection actually existed isn’t know, particularly since the autobiography was written late in Hawthorne’s life. Anderson thought it might be possible that some of it existed. She pointed out that when Johnson’s coin collection was stolen and taken to Denmark, the newspapers recorded his endeavors to travel to the European nation to recover it.

Johnson was also photographed throwing a welcome home party with parrots and sombreros from the West Indies. “You know, I always take my sources for what their worth. Even if they’re perceptions, that’s just as real as anything,” Anderson said of Hawthorne’s account of Johnson.

Thomas Henry Butler was another fellow who made life interesting in 19th century Carbon City. As an 11-year-old boy, he started working in the mines and went through all the steps to earn the title of general superintendent of the Union Pacific coal mines. As such a hard worker, Butler earned respect in the community.

Despite his hard exterior, Anderson said, Butler did have a prankster side. He rode in a town parade on a white horse with a bowler hat mechanized to tip side to side, making onlookers giggle with delight.

Carbon City had its entertainers, but it also had its hazards. A community that built wherever it could to extract the coal necessary to fuel the railroad, the town did not have the most ideal planning.

Walking, the primary mode of travel, led some to get caught in the railroad tracks. Others were caught in a surprise spring storm and froze to death. Some drowned, others were victims of accidental shootings. Some were dragged by horses to their deaths.

Diphtheria and typhoid took many children, as is shown by a mass of graves atop the still existing cemetery at the Carbon City site.

The mines also proved dangerous. While there were few explosions, deaths occurred by falling rocks or coal, where entire roofs would collapse on the miners.

A visitor to Carbon City today would note that nothing substantial stands at the site except for the cemetery. “It is very quiet there,” Anderson said.

The railroad altered its tracks to Hanna in the early 20th century to capitalize on better coal. Many of the buildings of Carbon City were moved to Hanna and others were recycled for materials.

There still exists evidence of dugout homes built in the early settling days when workers had to be creative with their abodes. Some stone walls remain.

The elevated spot where the railroad track used to lay is marked by black cinders. Otherwise, there is little to no evidence that Carbon City was once a thriving mining town, chock full of settlers of every nationality, personality and mentality.