1908 



THE GOVERNORS' CONFERENCE 



311 



the underlying or overlying coal, as the 

 case may be, is left in the mine, usually in 

 such a condition as to be practicably irre- 

 coverable. These parting shales often occur 

 near the middle of the coal seam, and thus 

 one-half of the bed will remain buried in 

 mine rubbish, virith no possibility of ever se- 

 curing its precious fuel. Very much akin 

 to this is another kind of waste about 

 which we as yet cannot even approximate 

 the extent. It is well known that in very 

 rich coal fields several (3 to 10) beds may 

 overlie each other in the same mountain, 

 separated by from five to 200 feet of rock 

 material. It often happens that the thickest 

 and best of the beds may underlie all the 

 others, and hence will be the first one 

 mined, regardless of the fact that when the 

 overlying strata break down, some and pos- 

 sibly several of the higher coal beds will be 

 so dislocated and disturbed and their areas 

 so permeated with deadly gases from the 

 abandoned mines below that much of this 

 higher coal will be lost. Just how much no 

 one yet knows, but it is feared that the 

 fuel waste from this source will prove large. 

 Of course nearly all this loss could be pre- 

 vented by mining the higher beds first. _ An- 

 other deadly peril to deep coal rnining is an 

 incident of oil and gas production. Many 

 thousands of holes have been drilled 

 through the coal measures to reach the pro- 

 ductive oil and gas zones below. Very 

 many of them have found only natural gas, 

 and unless the well was very large or a 

 profitable market near at hand, the casing 

 has been drawn and the well abandoned. 

 It is greatly feared that, in such cases, an- 

 other great menace will be added to the 

 coal mining industry, since these abandoned 

 oil and gas wells, which penetrate the coal 

 measures, are numbered by the thousand, 

 and no accurate public charts of the same 

 have ever been kept. 



The same story of waste of fuel comes 

 from every mining center. The experts of 

 the United States Geological Survey report 

 the quantity of fuel left unmined in the 

 ground all the way from 40 to 70 per cent 

 of the total deposits. I shall not worry you 

 with details from all over the country, but 

 shall illustrate the rapid exhaustion of our 

 fields by special reference to one great dis- 

 trict with which many of you are person- 

 ally familiar. 



The mining of bituminous coal, and the 

 manufacturing industries dependent there- 

 on, originated at Pittsburg only about a 

 century ago, and her citizens, as well as all 

 others, may learn a useful lesson by recall- 

 ing the history of this beginning. The 

 earliest settlers found there cropping high 

 in the steep hills which border the Monon- 

 gahela River a thick bed of splendid coal. 

 As roadways could not be constructed to 

 the inaccessible cliffs where the coal was 

 first discovered, some other method of se- 

 curing it was necessary. 



At that time the American bison, or buf- 

 falo, roamed the vast plains of the middle 

 West in countless millions, and these ani- 



mals were so abundant even in the Pitts- 

 burg region that their skins were used for 

 conveying the coal from the mines to the 

 factories in the deep valley below, a few 

 bushels of coal being sewed up in each hide 

 and then rolled down the steep slopes. To 

 our forefathers the supply of buffalo ap- 

 peared "inexhaustible," and yet less than a 

 century of wanton slaughter has practically 

 exterminated this noble animal. This pass- 

 ing of the buffalo illustrates in a striking 

 way what will just as surely happen to vast 

 areas of our fuel resources, great as they 

 are, even within the limits of the present 

 century, unless our people awaken to what 

 they are doing and make a determined ef- 

 fort to stop their destruction. The people 

 generally have been so often told of their 

 "inexhaustible" supplies of fuel that its 

 waste has not impressed them as a problem 

 worthy of serious thought. They have gen- 

 erally believed that its exhaustion was so 

 remote that its consideration even con- 

 cerned the present only in an academic way. 

 Let us see about that. We shall take for 

 our illustration the Appalachian coal field, 

 which is conceded by all to be the richest 

 in fuel of any on the continent. It is also 

 the most important to the welfare of the 

 country, since it is nearest the seaboard and 

 contains the vast bulk of our_ good coking 

 coals upon which our pre-eminence in the 

 iron and steel industry depends. With the 

 exception of a few narrow strips close to 

 regions of rock disturbance or folding in 

 our Western country, no first-class coking 

 coals have yet been discovered in the United 

 States outside of this Appalachian Basin. 



It has long been recognized by all that 

 the Pittsburg district is located in the heart 

 of the Appalachian field, where fuel of 

 every description is most abundant and 

 most accessible. You will pardon a per- 

 sonal reminiscence which illustrates how an 

 eminent political economist regarded this 

 favored region. It was my good fortune to 

 accompany the lamented Blaine, one of the 

 greatest statesmen that America has. ever 

 produced, up the beautiful Monongahela 

 River the last time that he visited his boy- 

 hood's home, 20 years ago. He had ac- 

 quired 1,100 acres of Pittsburg coal lands 

 in the vicinity of Elizabeth, about 22 miles 

 above Pittsburg, and the party stopped 

 there a few hours to permit Mr. Blaine to 

 examine his property, which he termed his 

 "savings bank," since he had acquired it by 

 the occasional purchase of small farms dur- 

 ing a period of several years. Being curi- 

 ous to know why he had made an invest- 

 ment of this kind, so far removed from his 

 home in Maine, I asked him how it hap- 

 pened. His reply impressed me deeply be- 

 cause it contained a prophecy. He said that 

 cheap fuel was the most important element 

 in the life of nations, and that in looking 

 the country over he had concluded that 

 there was more of it easily accessible to 

 the Pittsburg region than in any other por- 

 tion of the country, and hence the Pittsburg 

 district would sometime become the man- 



