How Miners Can Die.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 281, 3 September 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

How Miners Can Die.

Sixteen years ago there was a terrible colliery disaster in Saxony, by which a large number of miners lost their lives, Of that disaster an old miner In this city has preserved a most remarkable record in a series of manuscript copies, translated into English, of messages written to their friends by such of the doomed Saxon miners as were not killed outright by the explosion, but were preserved for the no less sure and more terrible death by suffocation as the poisoned gases slowly destroyed the pure air that remained in the mine.

There is a curious pathos in some of the lines scrawled by these death-besieged men in the gloom of their narrow prison. A young man, Jantz by name, had pinned to his coat a leaf from a note-book. On it were written his last words to his sweetheart: “Darling Rika. My last thought wasof thee. Thy name will be the last word my lips shall speak. Farewell.” The miner, Reiche, when his body was found, clutched in his band a scrap of paper. “ Dear sister,” it read, “ Meyer, in the village owes me ten thalers. It is yours. I hope my face will not be distorted when they find us. I might have been better to you. Good-by.” Reiche, according to the old miner', who seems to have the histories of all the unfortunate Saxon miners at his tongue's end, was a severe man, and, though just to his sister, who was his only relative, gave her no liberties, The thought that he had not done right evidently haunted him in his death hour.

The absence of all selfishness, all repininga on account of themselves, is touchingly apparent in all the messages. "My dear relations,” wrote the miner Schmidt, “ while seeing death before me I remember you. Farewell until we meet again in happiness.” Lying next to young Jantz, whose message to his sweetheart is quoted above, a miner named Moretz was found. On a paper in his cap was written : “ Jantz has just died. Richer is dying and says : 1 Tell my family I leave them with God.’ Farewell, dearwife. Farewell, dear children, May God keep you.” The miners who died from suffocation had evidently been driven from one place to another, according to the following found in the note-book of a miner named Bahr: “ This is the last place where we had taken refuge. I have given up all hope, because the ventilation has been destroyed in three separate 'places. May God take myself and relatives and dear friends who must die with me, as well as our families, under his protection.”

“Dear wife,” writes Moller, “take good care of Mary. In a book in the bedroom you will find a thaler. Farewell, dear mother, till we meet again.” Mary was the miner’s only child, who was blind.

A miner named Jahne or Jaehn wrote to his brother, who was a miner, but had been unable to work that day : “ Thank God for His goodness,- brother. You are safe.” “No more toil in darkness,” wrote another.

The uniform spirit of piety that marked all the messages of the dying men was explained by the custodian of these touching records. He said the miners of Saxony are all reared in a strict religious school, and that on entering the mines they all petition Heaven for protection through the day, and on leaving the mines return thanks to God for guarding them and bringing them safely through the damages of their toil. “I never read the simple messages of those poor men without moistened eyes,” said the old miner, and his eyes were certainly more than moist as he spoke. 11 1 can picture to myself the scene of the roughhanded but soft-hearted men, spending their last momenta, not in wild cries of mercy and screams of remorse, nor in repinings against their cruel fate, but in sending these farewell messages to their loved ones, who were even then bewailing them as dead. While my heart bleeds over the picture, I thank God that, humble miners though they were, they showed the world how bravely and nobly they could die.”