The Black Hills union and western stock review. [volume] (Rapid City, S.D.) 1904-19??, 1910-11-04
JOSEPH D. HOLMES 4
NATIONAL FIGURE
New Director of Mines Bureau Re-
sembles Pinchot-Served as
Janitor to Get Education.

New Director of Mines Bureau Re-
sembles Pinchot-Served as
Janitor to Get Education.
James B. Morrow, in st. Louis
Globe Democrat: Ten cent cigars are
being lighted with dollar bills by in
austrial America. The simile-an
overloaded vehicle for sober fact
sounds like drunken village loafer
after he has inherited his mothers
house and lot, or blanket Indian
who has sold his birthright to a
white man fer little ready cash.
Coming to the point in unexaag-
gerated words, no more than ten per
cent of the coal burned in the manu-
factories or on railroads is converted
into work. The loss is greater, al
most unbelievable, when the work
happens to be electric light.
The waste, though this is Won
barous; the destruction of a forest
one might almost say, to boil hunt
er's coffee pot, and to cook his bacon
and flapjacks. But the squandering
of vanishing resources goes beyond
material wealth. Each seventy-tive
trainloads of coal--huge cars of
steel piled high with glistening Jumps
represents the needless sacrifice
of one human life The injured,
broken men-some of them unfit for
further work, should be added to
the cost.
Indeed if all the miners killed dur
ing two decades were alive and con.
centrated, with their families, at a
single spot, there would be city
with more than 10000 inhabitants.
Gettysburg was horribly bloody. So
vas Shiloh. Yet the fatalities in the
coal mines of the United States are
larger annually than the fatalities
among the troops under Meade or
Grant in either of those terrible bat
ties, between the north and the south
Aud again, the wounded do not fig
ure in the list, nor do the metal
miners, nor the quarry men who die
as part of the price paid for the
necessaries, comforts and beauties of
civilized life.
The story brought up from the
depths of the earth is shameful.
whether measured in human bloou
or in dollars and cents. But it is
drawing to an end. Hereafter its
chapters will be shorter and less bru-
tally realistic. The ridiculous In
dian is gradually to fade from the
scene of his extravaganza and Gre
dulity. The village prodigal is to
have guardian and place to work.
The grinning skull of death is to be
pulled out of the shafts and tunnels
where prosperity is supported and in
dustry begins. In sense, the ma
tiOnal government has turned miner,
operator and consumer that 1t may
counsel the country scientifically ana
baternally.
The announcement was recently
made that President Taft had chosen
DIR. Joseph Austin Holmes to be d.
rector of the newly created bureau
OF mines. Hidden away in the ap-
pointment was an unusual state of
facts. Holmes, as a name, meant
nothing to the public that reads of
current events To mine operators.
mine workers, manufacturers, engi-
neers, railroad managers, chemists
and biologists. however, the name
was instantly pleasantly associated
with one of the most useful, accom-
plished and broad~minded scientists
In the United States.
= An uncommon element pertaining
to the appointment was spontaniety
enthusiasm and nnanimity of it's de-
mand. The man with the lamp in
his hat Joined the Pennsylvania rail
road company and the United States