Coal, Rails, and the Sebastian County Mine Belt

Twenty miles east of Fort Smith, the terrain lifts into the Ouachita foothills, and beneath those hills runs one of the most extensive coal deposits in the American South. The Sebastian County coalfields, extending across the line into Oklahoma, with Hartshorne and McAlester among the best known mining towns on the Oklahoma side, began serious production in the eighteen seventies when the railroads arrived looking for fuel. The timing was not coincidental.

The railroads needed coal to run, and they built themselves directly to where the coal was. Fort Smith became the commercial and shipping hub for the coal district. Mines in what is now eastern Oklahoma shipped their product east through the Choctaw Nation to Fort Smith and then onward to markets in Saint Louis, Kansas City, and beyond.

The coal trade employed thousands of workers by the eighteen nineties, including a large population of immigrant miners from Italy, Poland, and Eastern Europe who settled in the mining camps and small towns of the region. The mine owners and the railroads held enormous power over the workers, setting wages and controlling the scrip stores at which miners were often required to spend their earnings. Labor organizing in the coalfields was intense and sometimes violent.

The United Mine Workers of America made repeated efforts to organize the district in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds, and the struggle between the union and the operators shaped the politics of the entire region for a generation. Fort Smith's prosperity in the coal era was real but uneven. The town profited from the trade without bearing the physical costs of extraction.

Those costs were borne by the men underground in Sebastian County and in the Choctaw Nation, in a country where the lines of profit and the lines of danger ran in opposite directions.