“Oh, damn it, dagos are cheaper than props.”
-Mother Jones quoting a mine manager.
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday December 11, 1907
Monongah, West Virginia – Little Orphan Girls Beg for Work
Journalist Dorothy Dale reports from the devastated town:
Please letta me work, lady; gotta getta money…Please you get something for me, I can do.
A little hand touched my arm. The curl-framed face of a girl of 10 years looked into mine.
[She said pitifully:]
You know mans all dead. Boys all dead. Only girls left to work.
From The Pittsburgh Press of Dec 10, 1907:
Fairmont, W. Va., December 10.-“Please letta me work, lady; gotta getta money.”
It was the appeal on every side in Monongah on Tuesday and it came from little girls, many of them not 10 years old. It is the newest development in the mine horror. Girls-mind you-not boys!
The boys of Monongah lie sleeping under the coal-weighted hills. Early Tuesday the corpse of a slender child form was brought out of No. 6. It was identified as Johnny Yaconis, and taken to the tumble down shack up in Red Row, over the mine, where a stony faced little woman kissed it until her face was black from the charred flesh. Another body, that of the boy’s father, Franco Yaconis, is still concealed in one of those underground rooms.
Dominic, her boy of 15, lies in the company hospital, where his crushed leg was amputated. Only her Johnny had been brought to her. “Devil Johnny,” they called him, but there was nothing devilish about him. At the age of 12 years the stunted little overalled figure trudged every morning to the mines, where he was a trapper. At 13 years of age he died in those mines.
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