Mining is tradition for many in Utah

Half a century ago, Laraine Jensen Augustus came home to find her father crying on the porch. He had just brought the lifeless body of one of his friends out of a Carbon County mine after a cave-in.

"The whole town knew that fear that grips you when you feel a rumble because it meant you would have to wait hours to find out what, if anything, it meant," she said in an e-mail. "I felt such gratitude to my dad after that because of the danger he put himself in every day to support our family and give us the things I need."

Coal mining has a rich tradition in Utah, as a lucrative yet dangerous profession. Laraine's father, William Jensen, was part of that fabric, as the son of an immigrant from Denmark who learned blacksmithing and mining from his father, said Brent Augustus, Laraine's son.

After Jensen married, he chose to mine, Brent Augustus said, because it was "one of the only jobs that an able-bodied man could just walk into and get good, good pay for a hard day's work.

While he no longer lives in Utah, in e-mails to the Deseret Morning News, Augustus recalled that after his grandfather injured his back while working in the mine, "he was very firm that none of his children or grandchildren would end up being 'blackies,"' a term Augustus said referred to miners who would come out of the mines covered in black coal dust and would cough and spit it out.

Much of Utah's ethnic, religious and cultural diversity today can be attributed to those who came here to work the mines and railroads, said Philip F. Notarianni, director of the Division of State History.

"The coal mining companies needed large groups of workers, and the immigrants were coming in and were able to fill that demand," he said. "That was the work available to them."

The trend has shifted. Immigrants are filling jobs in growth industries such as construction, as well as hospitality and services, said Pamela Perlich, senior research economist for the University of Utah.

Some 43 percent of the state's stucco masons, 35 percent of dishwashers and 34 percent of housekeepers are foreign-born, she said. At the same time highly educated immigrants are moving in, accounting for 49 percent of the state's medical scientists and 12 percent of university professors, she said.

While mining is a very small portion of the state's economy, accounting for only 2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2005, according to the Economic Report to the Governor, it remains lucrative for those without college degrees.

In Emery County, mining accounts for 22 percent of total employment and is the top pay scale, accounting for more than one-third of all wages paid, the report said.