company-store and a couple of saloons. There were several
boarding-houses like Reminitsky's, and long rows of board cabins
containing from two to four rooms each, some of them occupied by several
families. A little way up a slope stood a school-house, and another
small one-room building which served as a church; the clergyman
belonging to the General Fuel Company denomination. He was given the use
of the building, by way of start over the saloons, which had to pay a
heavy rental to the company; it seemed a proof of the innate perversity
of human nature that even in spite of this advantage, heaven was losing
out in the struggle against hell in the coal-camp.

As one walked through this village, the first impression was of
desolation. The mountains towered, barren and lonely, scarred with the
wounds of geologic ages. In these canyons the sun set early in the
afternoon, the snow came early in the fall; everywhere Nature's hand
seemed against man, and man had succumbed to her power. Inside the camps
one felt a still more cruel desolation--that of sordidness and
animalism. There were a few pitiful attempts at vegetable-gardens, but
the cinders and smoke killed everything, and the prevailing colour was
of grime. The landscape was strewn with ash-heaps, old wire and
tomato-cans, and smudged and smutty children playing.

There was a part of the camp called "shanty-town," where, amid miniature
mountains of slag, some of the lowest of the newly-arrived foreigners
had been permitted to build themselves shacks out of old boards, tin,
and sheets of tar-paper. These homes were beneath the dignity of
chicken-houses, yet in some of them a dozen people were crowded, men and
women sleeping on old rags and blankets on a cinder floor. Here the
babies swarmed like maggots. They wore for the most part a single ragged
smock, and their bare buttocks were shamelessly upturned to the heavens.