In the late 19th century, Eureka, Nevada, a mining town with over a dozen smelters, was known as the “Pittsburgh of the West.” Labor disputes in such towns often turned violent, and an August 1879 dispute in Eureka was no exception, leaving five men dead and many wounded, including a deputy sheriff. Governor John Henry Kinkead received this urgent message: “2,000 persons banded together, and with arms in their possession, defied the civil authorities and refused to have any of their number arrested. They now hold forcible possession of many coal pits in this county. By force they have prevented, and are now preventing, the owners of charcoal from hauling it to their furnaces, and they threaten to destroy other property and burn the town. Arrests have been resisted by the rioters, who are well armed and organized under the command of desperate leaders.” The governor activated the Nevada militia to restore order, and soon the local jail and militia armory were full of prisoners.
How could something as ordinary as charcoal lead to riots? Charcoal was the fuel of the smelters. Under good conditions it might take 30 or more bushels of charcoal to reduce 1 ton of ore. A cord of wood produced about 25 to 35 bushels of charcoal. Price was a function of product quality, hauling distance and fluctuating supply and demand. Teamsters hauled charcoal by mule train in multiple wagons. An average price for charcoal in the late 19th-century West was about 25 cents per bushel, representing a smelter’s largest single operating cost.
Nevada woodlands yielded 8 to 10 cords to the acre. Thus it didn’t take long to denude forests around a charcoal operation. For example, in 1873, just a couple of years after mining began in Eureka, loggers had cleared the trees for 10 miles in any direction. By 1874 deforestation extended 20 miles. Four years later, with six smelting companies operating 16 furnaces that consumed about 16,000 bushels of charcoal daily when operating at full capacity, trees were scarce within 50 miles of Eureka. As the hauling distance increased, however, the price for charcoal did not always keep pace with increased production costs, and labor troubles easily developed.
The insatiable demand for charcoal drew thousands of Swiss-Italian carbonari (“charcoal burners” from the old country). Most of them were skilled colliers, who constructed and tended the charcoal kilns and pits. Others, less skilled, concentrated on woodcutting and had less social status. Sometimes the primitive “charcoal camps” included Chinese, Irish or Cornish workers. Even the top carbonari earned less than half the wage of the average miner and often had to spend that at company stores. Many spoke poor English and were routinely cheated in financial transactions. Middlemen controlled the industry, some of whom ran charcoal ranches, with their own timber, teamsters to haul the charcoal and mercantile establishments that charged the carbonari inflated prices. Carbonari dissatisfaction was the main cause of labor disputes known as “charcoal wars.”
That was the situation in Eureka in 1879. With the price of charcoal at 28 cents per bushel, and teamsters and middlemen often taking more than half of that as their cut, 500 carbonari met in Tatti’s Saloon to form the Eureka Coalburners Protective Association. Its objective: to force the price of charcoal to 30 cents per bushel. The association called a strike, and the war was on. The carbonari threatened both strikebreakers and any teamsters who continued to haul charcoal. Violence erupted when a group of deputies confronted at least 100 carbonari at Fish Creek, south of Eureka, killing five Italians. The battle ended the war, and the companies dropped the price of charcoal to 26 cents a bushel.
Charcoal comes from controlled combustion of wood in the absence of oxygen. A collier heats the cords in an airtight kiln or pit to temperatures near 1,000 degrees, which breaks down the wood into volatile gases, a watery tar mixture and the solid residue known as charcoal.
Colliers operated such pits in forested areas throughout the West, although the word pit is a misnomer. A charcoal pit lay above ground, its base a flat, cleared space about 30 to 40 feet in diameter. Atop this clearing, the collier stacked wood into an inward-leaning, self-supporting pile fitted with a chimney and covered with soil and leaves as a barrier against oxygen and insulation against heat loss. A pit might contain 100 cords and take up to 15 to 20 days to burn down. Later, in the smelter furnace, this charcoal produced an intense white heat with no smoke.
Only a “dead fire” could produce charcoal. The collier watched smoke color to gauge the level of combustion and determine when to restrict airflow or block the chimney altogether. He kept plenty of dust atop the pit to patch any area that might vent and destroy the pile. Periodically he would “jump the pit,” using a crude ladder to clamber up and look for weak spots. But as the wood charred, air pockets developed, making this a dangerous task. More than one charcoal burner became “part of the process.”
The Eureka Daily Sentinel of May 11, 1876, headlined one such COAL PIT MYSTERY, involving a charcoal burner who went missing. Unusual smoke roused a rancher who rode six miles to check on the man but found no one. The charcoal burner’s “pipe, tobacco, provisions, bedding and pistol were all found in a cabin nearby, and the only tracks were around the pit and where he had gone for water and returned, and where he had stepped on the edge of the pit.… If the missing man fell into the pit, or he was murdered and his body thrown in, there is hardly a possibility that any portion of his remains will ever be found, as the intense heat occasioned by the burning of 150 cords of wood would soon destroy every particle of the body.”
Relics from the charcoal industry remain throughout the West, including old pits containing residual charcoal. More conspicuous are the beehive or dome-shaped kilns used in charcoal production from about 1872 onward. Among the best extant examples are six kilns near Ely, Nev., and a set of 10 on the west side of Death Valley National Park.
Often built in sets, stone or brick kilns might cost $500 to $1,000 each to construct, but they produced better quality charcoal and could be used indefinitely, thus offsetting the higher initial costs. A kiln’s height was equal to its diameter and ranged from 16 to 30 feet. Wall thickness increased proportionally with height, with a base between 25 and 30 inches thick and a 12- to 18-inch-thick peak. An experienced collier would stoke the pile from one of two large openings—in front at ground level and at back toward the top. He could also control airflow using vent holes set in two to four rows just above ground level.
Kilns held about 35 to 45 cords per firing. When the wood burned through, the collier sealed the lower vent holes and allowed the contents to cool. The process reduced the volume by about half. Kiln hands then broke the cooled charcoal into usable pieces ready for shipment to the smelter. Charcoal kilns took considerably less time to produce the product than charcoal pits.
From the 1860s to the 1880s—before the railroads brought in alternative fuel (coal) and chemists introduced the cyanide process (which did not require the ore be roasted)—charcoal fueled the mining industry. Even areas with scant forests lost their few trees to charcoal production, while smelters also used charcoal made from sagebrush. The deforestation hurt Indians who depended on pine nuts and local wildlife—forgotten victims of the business that fueled the moneymaking mining industry.
Tom Straka teaches forestry and natural resources at Clemson University. Nevadan Robert H. Wynn is a ghost town expert.
Originally published in the June 2010 issue of Wild West.
