Posted on June 11, 2019
Today is a memorial day - but it honors fallen coal miners rather than fallen soldiers!
Unfortunately, coal mining is quite dangerous. There have been mine wall failures and roof collapses, rock bursts and gas explosions, and also the quieter gas poisoning.
The long name of this holiday is the William Davis Miner's Memorial Day. Davis was a miner who lived in the Nova Scotia province of Canada. Davis lived in a coal mining town; he was the son of a miner, and despite the fact that his older brother had died in a mining accident at age 14, Davis started working in a coal mine when he was old enough, too.
A labor union for coal miners existed to secure better safety rules and better wages - but when the mine that Davis worked at got a new corporate owner, management decided to break the union. (What I mean is that the mine owners wanted to basically destroy the workers' union and end their rights to negotiate, as a group, for better conditions and pay.)
In the long struggle between the coal company management and the labor union, things came to a head on June 11, 1925, and while the miners were peacefully protesting, police officers charged the crowd, and one officer shot Davis in the heart!
Davis was not just a miner, he was a husband and a father to nine, with a tenth child on the way at the time of his death. There was an outpouring of support by the community - with a huge crowd attending Davis's funeral, a fund established to support his family, and miners refusing to work on the anniversary of his death. Now Davis Day is an established holiday for the miners of the entire province.
Nova Scotia is one of the most beautiful places in Canada, and maybe the world.
It has fjords - narrow inlets of ocean - that show a dramatic difference when the tide is in from when the tide is out.
And there are a lot of beautiful natural and human-made scenes in any tide!
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