King Coal
Glossary
"
- "Choke-damp" (mine gas)
- An odorless, heavier-than-air gas (a mixture rich in carbon dioxide) that collects in old or poorly ventilated mine workings and can suffocate miners without warning — one of several invisible hazards, alongside firedamp and coal dust, that made underground coal mining lethally dangerous.
- Related: Mule-driver, North Valley (Pine Creek)
- "The Song of Harrigan" (miners' satirical ballad)
- A mocking song sung by the miners about Peter Harrigan and 'King Coal' — 'hurrah for his pipe, and hurrah for his bowl... and hurrah for you and me' — that gives the novel its ironic title-concept: coal as a monarch whose wealth flows from the labor of subjects who openly satirize him.
- Related: Peter Harrigan, General Fuel Company
A
- Alec Stone
- The pit-boss of Number Two mine at North Valley, who hires 'Joe Smith' as a mule-driver — one of the company's front-line supervisors whose petty authority over hiring and working conditions Hal experiences directly.
- Related: Jeff Cotton, North Valley
B
- Big Jerry and Little Jerry
- A miner and his young son at North Valley, part of the novel's portrait of childhood inside the coal camps — Little Jerry's early exposure to the mines and the mimicry of his father's labor foreshadow the generational trap company-town life represents.
- Related: North Valley, The Company Town
- Blacklist
- The coordinated practice among mining companies of sharing the names of workers involved in strikes or union organizing, barring them from employment across the district — the fate that befell John Edstrom and his sons after an earlier strike.
- Related: John Edstrom, General Fuel Company
C
- Check-weighman
- A worker's representative, guaranteed under state law and paid from the miners' own wages, whose job was to verify the company's weighing of mined coal at the scales — since miners were paid by weight, and companies were widely accused of shortchanging them, this legal right was one of the era's central, contested labor protections.
- Related: The Company Town, General Fuel Company
- Company store / scrip system
- The practice by which coal companies paid miners partly in scrip redeemable only at company-owned stores, and deducted rent and supplies directly from wages — a mechanism, documented in Sinclair's Postscript, that kept miners perpetually indebted to their employer.
- Related: The Company Town, General Fuel Company
- Company-controlled school board
- North Valley's school board consists of the mine superintendent (Cartwright), a company store clerk, and a preacher dependent on the company's favor — Sinclair's illustration of how thoroughly company ownership extended even into supposedly public institutions like education.
- Related: The Company Town, General Fuel Company
E
- Edward Warner
- Hal's older brother, eight years his senior — 'the perfect type of the young American business man,' erect, athletic, and quietly decisive, who manages company operations at North Valley and represents the managerial class Hal is investigating from the inside.
- Related: Hal Warner / "Joe Smith", Peter Harrigan
G
- General Fuel Company
- The fictional coal company that owns the mines and, effectively, the towns around them — modeled on the real Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose labor conditions Sinclair researched directly around the 1913-14 strikes. Owned by Peter Harrigan, it controls housing, stores, schools, and law enforcement throughout its camps.
- Related: Peter Harrigan, The Company Town, North Valley
H
- Hal Warner / "Joe Smith"
- The novel's protagonist — the son of a wealthy coal-management family who takes the false name Joe Smith and goes to work incognito as a mule-driver in the Pine Creek (North Valley) coal camp to learn firsthand what the men who mine coal for companies like his own actually live through.
- Related: General Fuel Company, North Valley, Edward Warner
J
- Jeff Cotton
- The camp-marshal of North Valley — lean, distinguished-looking, capable of passing for a diplomat in evening dress, but with a gun bearing six notches and a mouth that turns ugly when displeased. He embodies the company's private law enforcement, answerable to General Fuel rather than any public authority.
- Related: Alec Stone, The Company Town
- Jessie Arthur
- Hal's fiancée back in Western City, the daughter of banker Robert Arthur and heiress-apparent to the Arthur and Sons banking business. Her genteel unfamiliarity with mining conditions and her social ties to the Harrigan circle make her a foil to what Hal is learning undercover.
- Related: Hal Warner / "Joe Smith", Western City, Peter Harrigan
- John Edstrom
- An old Swedish miner from Minnesota who has worked the district since its mines first opened. Blacklisted along with his four sons after an earlier strike eight years before, his experience and quiet trustworthiness make him a natural adviser to the men beginning to organize again.
- Related: North Valley, The Company Town
K
- Keating
- A company official or organizer figure who appears in the novel's later books as the conflict between miners and management sharpens toward Book Three's confrontation with the company's 'henchmen.'
- Related: Jeff Cotton, The Company Town
L
- Ludlow Massacre (historical context)
- The real April 1914 attack by Colorado National Guard troops and company guards on a tent colony of striking miners' families near Ludlow, Colorado, killing dozens including women and children — the historical event that frames the strikes Sinclair researched in writing King Coal, addressed directly in the Postscript.
- Related: The Postscript, General Fuel Company
M
- Mine-guard system
- The private security force — camp marshals, gunmen, and detectives employed directly by the coal company — that policed company towns like North Valley in place of independent civil authority, a system central to Sinclair's critique and drawn from documented Colorado coalfield practice.
- Related: Jeff Cotton, The Company Town
- Mule-driver
- The job Hal takes under his alias 'Joe Smith' — driving the mules that hauled coal cars through the mine's underground passages, one of the most physically demanding and dangerous entry-level jobs in a coal mine.
- Related: Hal Warner / "Joe Smith", Alec Stone
N
- North Valley (Pine Creek)
- The General Fuel Company coal camp, up the Pine Creek canyon, where Hal takes his job as 'Joe Smith.' The camp's mines, boarding houses, company store, and enforced isolation give the novel its principal setting for Books One and Two.
- Related: General Fuel Company, The Company Town
O
- Old Mike
- A veteran miner at North Valley who appears among Hal's fellow workers, part of the ensemble of immigrant and native-born laborers — Irish, Slavic, and other nationalities — whose collective daily experience Sinclair uses to build the novel's picture of camp life.
- Related: North Valley
P
- Pedro
- The straggling town of stores and saloons at the edge of the mountain country, from which branch railroads run up into the canyons feeding the coal camps — Hal's entry point into the mining district at the novel's opening.
- Related: North Valley (Pine Creek), General Fuel Company
- Percy Harrigan
- Peter Harrigan's son, 'the Coal King's son,' who travels in his own private train car — a figure of inherited wealth and insulation from the mines that fund his lifestyle, and a pointed contrast to Hal's own choice to live as a miner rather than simply inherit his class position.
- Related: Peter Harrigan, Jessie Arthur
- Peter Harrigan
- The absentee owner of General Fuel Company, described by his own employees as unlike 'most of these Western wolves' — a self-styled pious, high-church man whose personal religiosity coexists with the company's ruthless labor practices, a portrait drawing on real coal barons of the period.
- Related: General Fuel Company, Edward Warner
R
- Red Mary (Mary Burke)
- An Irish miner's daughter whose grace, wit, and defiance make her one of the novel's most vivid figures — nicknamed for her hair, and singled out in Georg Brandes's introduction as a 'Valkyrie of the working-class.' She becomes close to Hal during his time undercover in North Valley.
- Related: Hal Warner / "Joe Smith", Tim Rafferty
T
- The Company Town
- The novel's central social machine: housing, stores, schools, and law enforcement in the coal camps are all owned or controlled by the company, leaving miners almost no independent leverage, no private life, and no institution to appeal to outside the company's own authority.
- Related: General Fuel Company, Jeff Cotton, North Valley
- The novel's four-book structure
- King Coal is organized in four books — The Domain of King Coal (Hal's arrival), The Serfs of King Coal (life underground and in camp), The Henchmen of King Coal (the company's enforcers confront early organizing), and The Will of King Coal (the conflict's climax, followed by Sinclair's Postscript).
- Related: The Postscript
- The Postscript
- Sinclair's own afterword, appended to the novel, explaining exactly which details are drawn from real reporting and sworn testimony about the Colorado coal fields — his direct answer to readers who wrote asking whether the book was true to fact, making this a rare case of a novelist showing his sources.
- Related: General Fuel Company
- Thomas Olson
- A secret organizer for the United Mine Workers, the national coal-miners' union, whom Hal encounters undercover at North Valley — his covert presence in the camp dramatizes both the danger union organizers faced from company gunmen and the beginnings of the strike movement the novel builds toward.
- Related: North Valley (Pine Creek), Jeff Cotton
- Tim Rafferty
- A young miner at North Valley connected to the Burke family; his fate over the course of the novel illustrates the physical dangers — mine accidents, company retaliation — that fall on the camp's workers.
- Related: Red Mary (Mary Burke), North Valley
U
- United Mine Workers
- The real national coal-miners' union that Thomas Olson secretly organizes for within North Valley — its historical strikes in Colorado, including the events leading to the Ludlow Massacre, form the documented backdrop Sinclair draws on throughout the novel and explains in the Postscript.
- Related: Thomas Olson, Ludlow Massacre (historical context)
W
- Western City
- The fictional metropolis (a stand-in for Denver) where Hal's family and social circle, including Jessie Arthur, live in comfort far removed from the coal camps whose profits sustain them.
- Related: Jessie Arthur, Peter Harrigan