"CANARIES IN A COAL MINE"

THE CROSS MOUNTAIN COAL MINE DISASTER

On December 9, 1911, a tiny flicker of flame from a coal miner’s lamp ignited an explosion that caused a disaster in the small town of Briceville, Tennessee that is still being felt today. During the early morning hours of that fateful day, the deadly explosion – killing 84 men and boys who had just entered the mine – sent a cloud of smoke and dust billowing more than 100 feet into the air. Five miners survived the blast, while the rest died from the initial concussion or suffocated on the poisonous gases that filled the mine shafts.

Briceville became a town that “echoed with the cries of widows and children.”

After the Civil War, coal became king in the areas around Knoxville, where towns like Briceville would spring to life. Such areas were rebuilt more quickly than other parts of the South, in part because of a resurgence in manufacturing and mining. Coal provided the power to begin this industrial revival and it was discovered that a 46-inch-thick layer of the mineral called the Coal Creek seam ran through the mountains. Mine entrances began to dot the countryside, all operated by a company out of Knoxville. They opened the Fraterville and Thistle Mines, as well as the Cross Mountain Mine. In 1877, a series of labor disputes forced the company to bring in convicts to replace the striking miners. That unrest prompted the company to invest in the latest equipment to trim its labor force in its Cross Mountain Mine.

That mine opened in 1888, and Briceville grew up around it. At one point, it was the biggest town in Anderson County, with a population of 6,000 and boasting its own opera house. By 1911, the Cross Mountain mining operation included two power plants to furnish electricity. Coal was cut from the seam using electric chain-driven machines and hauled out on electric rail cars. The mine was designated as “methane-free” since the flammable gas was rarely detected there. It was considered one of the safest in the region.

But as in far too many cases where terms like “unsinkable” and “fire-proof” are used, disaster came to the Cross Mountain Mine in 1911.

On December 9, a portion of the roof collapsed inside of the mine and apparently freed a pocket of methane gas. A miner carrying a lamp with an open flame who had gone to check on the roof collapse touched off the initial explosion. And utter devastation followed.

Reminders of the tragedy linger today in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. Some of the reminders are tombstones, some arranged in concentric circles around a central monument in one hillside cemetery, while others are scattered in the Briceville Church Cemetery. Inscriptions carved into markers include the poignant farewell message that 22-year-old miner Eugene Ault scrawled on barricade boards as he slowly suffocated: "I guess I have come to die. Air is not good now. Well, all be good and I aim to pray to God to save me and all of you."

The tragedy left other legacies, too, including rescue techniques that saved many lives in the future. In addition, the phrase "canary in a coal mine" originated in Briceville. For the first time, rescuers carried the caged birds into the Cross Mountain Mine as an early-warning system to alert them to changes in air quality. The explosion had rendered much of the air inside the mine deadly with afterdamp, the asphyxiating mix of toxic gases. According to an article in a 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics, "As long as the birds remained cheerful and hopped about in their cages, it was known that all was well with the surrounding atmosphere. But suddenly when the birds began to droop and gasp for breath it was realized that the traces of the deadly 'afterdamp' were present and the unmasked volunteers with no oxygen equipment had reached the place for them to stop. The canary birds drew the line of safety."

More importantly, it was the use of oxygen equipment that was first used at Briceville that became essential to future rescue efforts. The Cross Mountain Mine explosion was the first time that the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which was created 1910, mounted a full-scale rescue effort. Staff members from the Knoxville office arrived hours after receiving word of the disaster. Those rescuers used self-contained breathing apparatus as they combed the dark shafts of the mine, looking for survivors. Almost miraculously, five miners were found alive behind a barricade they erected far inside the mine 58 hours after the explosion. By that time, everyone had given up hope and the stories of the rescued miners were plastered across the front page of newspapers across the country.

And there were strange stories connected to the disaster as well...

The Cross Mountain Mine disaster occurred less than a decade after another nearby coal mine tragedy. That one was inside of the Fraterville Mine, located just a mile away, and it occurred in May 1902. Both mine explosions occurred at the same time – 7:20 a.m., or just shortly after the miners reported for work. At Cross Mountain, though, many men were spared by luck. The normal workforce was 125 miners, but only 89 went inside that morning.

One of them, Hugh Larue, claimed to be spared by a dream. His wife, who had a nightmare the night before of "scores of miners with their heads blown off," refused to make him lunch. Unsettled by her recounting of the nightmare, he stayed home that day.

Colonel Isaac Williams, a teenager at the time, had been barred from working on the day of the disaster. He had been forbidden to enter the mine because he'd refused to cross a picket line a short time before. It turned out to be a decision that saved his life. Williams did assist in the rescue effort, though, going deep into the mine to retrieve the bodies of his friends and co-workers. As he walked along the railroad tracks toward the mine, he later said that “every house along the way echoed with the cries of widows and children."

The man who led a rescue effort in the Fraterville Mine, Phillip Francis, also headed an effort at Cross Mountain. When he arrived at the mine, he found the same sorrowful scene awaiting him – scores of women and children, weeping and in great distress. When the initial plume of dust and smoke had risen over the town, they had flocked to the entrance to the mine, fearing the worst.

As the men from the Bureau of Mines worked to pump the poisonous gases from the mine, rescue workers edged through the darkness, hoping for a miracle. More than two days after the explosion, rescuers found a door in the mine with instructions on where one group of miners had gone. Following directions, they located a barricade, tore it down and found the miners huddled inside.

One of the miners was a man named William Henderson. The first thing that he asked for when rescue workers found him was tobacco for his pipe. He could survive without food and water, he told them, but it about killed him because he didn't have any tobacco.

THE ASSASSIN FROM ILLINOIS

THE STORY OF JAMES EARL RAY

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The man arrested and charged -- and who entered a guilty plea – for the murder was James Earl Ray, who became one of the most hated men in America.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Why the small-time crook would have even consider killing a man like Dr. King remains a mystery to most, as every crime that he ever committed was for money, never for political convictions. Many have speculated that he was paid to kill King, and he went to his grave professing his innocence, but what really happened is unknown. Few Illinois residents know (or care to remember) that James Earl Ray was a native of the state – specifically Alton, Illinois – or that a robbery that he committed in Alton may have actually financed the assassination of Dr. King.

James Earl Ray was born in Alton on March 10, 1928 in a small frame house in the 1000 block of West Ninth Street. His family moved to Quincy after his father was run out of town following his arrest for writing a series of bad checks. It was in Alton, however, that Ray's criminal career began. He was a cheap crook who held up gas stations and stores and was arrested several times for burglary and armed robbery. In a 1952 robbery attempt, he actually dropped his wallet at the crime scene, which led to his arrest. He spent time at the Illinois State Prison in Joliet and then returned to Alton again.

James Earl Ray

In 1959, he robbed Wegner's Food Store in Alton and fled to Missouri. While on the run from police officers, he clownishly fell out of his escape car and was immediately arrested. Ray was already wanted for a robbery in that state and so he was sentenced to two terms at the Missouri State Prison. Incredibly, he escaped from prison by hiding in a large box that was used to transport bread to the prison's farm crew. He vanished on April 23, 1967 and again returned to Alton.

In July 1967, Ray robbed the Bank of Alton and managed to get away with $30,000. Investigators came to believe that it was with this money that Ray fled the country after killing Dr. King.

After the robbery, he left Alton and eight months later, turned up in Memphis. Using several aliases, Ray rented rooms all over the city, one of which was directly across the street from the motel where King was staying. As he stood at a bathroom window on the night of April 4, Ray had a clear shot at the civil rights leader as he emerged from his second-floor room and stood talking to some friends on the balcony. The assassin raised his rifle and sighting through a pair of binoculars, squeezed the trigger only once. The bullet ripped through King's neck, passed through his lower jaw, severed his spinal column and sent him spinning back against the wall. King died without speaking an hour later at a nearby hospital.

Friends and staff members of Dr. King react after shots ring out 

at the Lorraine Motel

The moment after firing his weapon, Ray calmly left his possessions in the room and casually drove away from Memphis, crossing into Canada three days later. Despite being listed on the FBI "most wanted" list, he stayed in Toronto for a month and then using a Canadian passport (and another alias), he departed for London. After remaining there for six days, he flew to Lisbon, spent five days at the Hotel Portugal and returned to London. Some reports claim that it was in Lisbon that Ray received payment for killing King. Back in London, though, Ray moved erratically from hotel to hotel and then, as if to prove what a moronic small-time hoodlum he was, Ray called several London newspapers and inquired as to how one might go about enlisting in the mercenary military forces in Africa. Days later, he was arrested by the London police.

Ray was almost immediately scheduled to stand trial in Memphis in March 1969 but then he abruptly pled guilty after being extradited from England. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison after just a two-hour hearing. Three days later, Ray recanted his confession and claimed that he had been set up for the assassination by a man named "Raoul," who he had met in Montreal. He later wrote a book that claimed he was a political prisoner and the victim of a vast conspiracy.

Ray had hired Jack Kershaw as his attorney, who promoted Ray's claim that he was not responsible for the shooting. Kershaw and his client met with representatives of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations and convinced the committee to run ballistics tests—which ultimately proved inconclusive—that they felt would show that Ray had not fired the fatal shot. Kershaw claimed that the escape was additional proof that Ray had been involved in a conspiracy that had provided him with the outside assistance he would have needed to break out of jail. Kershaw convinced Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy magazine. The magazine said that the test results showed "that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Needless to say, this was not what Ray wanted to hear but he managed to spin it into further evidence of the conspiracy against him.

Strangely, though, Dr. King’s son, Dexter, met with Ray in 1997 and publicly supported his efforts to obtain a retrial. Dr. William Pepper, a friend of King in the last year of his life, represented Ray in a televised mock trial in an attempt to get him the trial he never had. The King family has since concluded that Ray did not have anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70, from complications related to kidney disease and liver failure caused by hepatitis C. While his claims of far-reaching conspiracies may be hard to swallow, there are still a number of unanswered questions in regards to Ray and the King assassination. However, they are questions that are likely never going to be answered.