Knowing the Nature of Place

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Capitalism shaped the physical re-ordering of space at the park and the mine, but it was not a "totalizing" influence. It is important to understand that capitalism connected these places, but it is equally important to ask what capitalism actually meant to people in these places. Particular formations of place depended upon the way that people came to these physical places: how their positions within a capitalist society afforded them very different "mental orderings" of the human and physical landscape. Much as the various Pacific Rim peoples studied by Marshall Sahlins incorporated and manipulated capitalism to fit into local belief systems and situations, people in Bellingham interpreted capitalism in multiple and variant ways.⁵⁶ An on-the-ground examination of these numerous "cosmologies" provides a more in-depth understanding of how people constructed Cornwall Park and the Bellingham Coal Mines.

In 1925 the Kiwanis Club came to the Bellingham Coal Mines. They came not to see its everyday work world but a largely imaginary landscape. Miners reordered parts of the mine in anticipation of the club’s arrival, transforming them into places of play. Boards covered the mine floor, and chairs and tables rested on top of the boards. Chefs served food and a band played music, further marking off the mine as a place of leisure. Paper lanterns covered the normally bare light bulbs. Overhead, tree branches attached to the ceiling completed the mine's decoration.

This was a clearly temporary re-creation, but it was one that supported a distinctly middle-class cosmology. The boards and paper lanterns would not remain. The chefs and musicians had no regular role to play in mining. The tree branches, their ephemeral nature obvious, would also disappear. Yet the re-created mine was important. It bolstered the booster construction of the mine, allowing middle-class tourists to experience the mine as a unique local attribute while at the same time glossing over the actual work that defined it on a daily basis. This voyeuristic opportunity allowed for a benevolent and reassuring interpretation of capitalism. Kiwanis pictures.

Miners, although they rode the same man-trip as the Kiwanians, came to a different mine. Work, not catered food and imported music, defined their interaction with this landscape. This relationship with place led to divergent constructions of it. Capitalism, as a mode of production and as an ideology, controlled access to and knowledge of nature in the mine. An examination of the ways it did this sheds light on not only how capitalism helped shape relationships with physical space in the mine but also how it affected human relations in this place as well.

To work in the coal mine was to know nature.⁵⁷ Because people have historically constructed "nature" as removed from human influence, a coal mine seems a strange place to interact with it.  The manipulation of the physical world in order to realize profit, after all, defines coal mining. Artificial boundaries laid down from above limited the mine’s actual space. People survived in it because they imported air from the surface and exported water from its tunnels. Coal, though, is undeniably natural. Even in definitions of "nature" built on the problematic context of separation from human influence, coal, infinitely older than the oldest old growth forest, fits the description.⁵⁸

Capitalism structured the intimacy and breadth of workers’ knowledge of the mine. Although Walter Johnson did not work in the mine during the 1920s, his work experience provides a prime example of this. Johnson, who began nearly a decade of work in the mine in 1941 at the age of eighteen, remembered clearly the parts of the mine in which he worked thirty years after he left them. He remembered the approximate height of the ceilings in the rooms he worked, the temperature in those places, and how good it felt to finish the construction of a passage between levels and feel the "fresh air coming through." What Johnson did not remember so clearly was the larger place. As he said, "I didn’t cover all of the mine, the only levels I worked was the seventh level, and then I did work 8 south, 9 north, and then 10 south back entry, that’s … an airway."⁵⁹ 

In the nearly ten years Johnson worked there, the structure of the mine limited his knowledge of the larger place. Working only those areas that the management allotted him, Johnson operated in a circumscribed physical space.⁶⁰ At the same time that the mine’s physical and hierarchal structure limited his knowledge, however, Johnson’s work in those few areas gave him an intensely local knowledge of place. His relationship with nature in the mine was inseparable from the way capitalism influenced its structure. Johnson’s job, as a miner, was to drill into the world around him and set charges in it. For the mine and Johnson to realize optimum financial gain, he had to load a maximum amount of coal in a minimum amount of time.⁶¹ His relationship to nature was one in which he deconstructed the physical world in order to construct a place for capitalism. In doing this, he gained knowledge that turned into a lasting memory of place: the physical implementation of the culture of capitalism on nature became his memory of the mine.

Ed Marroy, who was a foreman in the mine during the time Johnson worked there, had a different relationship with nature. In charge of directing miners like Johnson, Marroy knew the nature of the mine more extensively than the mine workers. His supervisory position, however, did not lead to the same level of local knowledge of place that miners like Johnson gained through their work. As a foreman, Marroy spent a great deal of his time traveling around the mine, supervising the manner and direction in which the men worked.⁶² For Marroy, then, greater access to place than most miners was a necessary part of his daily work. Miners like Johnson tried to control the manner in which they disassembled the physical world around themselves. Marroy tried to direct this same process through Johnson and roughly 200 hundred other miners. Because his position in the mine removed him one layer from actual physical interaction with place, Marroy did not gain the specifically local knowledge of place that miners like Johnson did.

Marroy had a great deal more power than Johnson had to change physically the mine as a place. This was a direct reflection of people's understanding of the mine as a point of production: a place related directly to work and the extraction and marketing of resources for use in industry. Because people largely accepted the construction of the mine as a place of work, they recognized foremen like Marroy as having power in that limited context. During the workday, Marroy could travel the mine and enforce work rules concerning safety and the proper methods of mining.⁶³ In doing so, he confirmed the boosters’ definition of the mine as a place of work. At the same time, that definition lent him power. When he left the mine, though, capitalism no longer directly sanctioned his control over workers like Johnson. Capitalism limited Marroy's power to particular places and situations just as it limited Johnson's knowledge of the mine. When he was not operating in the specific context of the mine, capitalism lent him little influence.

On the surface, Peter Senuty’s relationship with nature was different from either Johnson's or Marroy’s. His location and the machinery he used separated Senuty, who ran the engine house, from Johnson’s direct daily interaction with nature in the mine. Similarly, Senuty’s fixed location contrasted with Marroy’s geographic mobility. Like them, however, Senuty could not escape the power of capitalism. The way capitalism influenced the construction of the mine ultimately defined Senuty's relationship with nature at this place.

Senuty knew nature in the mine through the context of power. This power was not derived from direct personal deconstruction or his ability to instruct others but from the actual physical restructuring of the place itself. As the engine hoistman, Senuty operated the steam-powered equipment upon which the mine depended to move coal. In its vaporous form Squalicum Creek ran the machinery that transported coal out of the mine, where water drawn from the creek washed and sorted it.  The creek and the coal mine, powering their own processing, converged with the equipment and workers imported to the mine.  It became what historian Richard White has labeled an "organic machine."⁶⁴ Senuty, in employing the power derived from nature, knew it in the context of machinery. When he ran coal out of the mine, Senuty directed power and nature. Like Marroy's power, though, Senuty's control was local.  Senuty enjoyed it only in the context of capitalism and work. Because Senuty did not own the tools of production, when the mine closed in the mid-1950s, he lost access to the power they offered and the place in which they existed.⁶⁵

At the park as well as the mine, cultural constructions of place shaped park users’ relationship with nature. If the construction of the mine as a place of work influenced how people knew nature there, the idea that the park was a place of play was equally important in determining people’s knowledge of that place. The physical re-arrangement of the park in direct response to the boosters’ vision of postcard nature structured the context and location of interactions inside it. The process of re-arranging the park to make it a place of play also led to park employees' knowing it in a context of work, much in the way the miners knew the mine. Most importantly, the boosters’ construction of the park as a place of play directly influenced the way many people understood it.

The physical structures built in the 1920s worked to control the ways park users interacted with nature. People could leave these delineated pathways, but these structures were clearly defined. They were the socially marked places constructed for movement in the park, and they influenced the perspective from which users consumed postcard scenes.

Postcard nature did not come naturally. The park needed constant maintenance. Just as in the mine, paid laborers fashioned the park and came to know portions of it in the context of work. The workers who built the road through the park in 1922, for instance, would have come to know the location and density of the trees they had to fell for it to progress, just as they would have had to know its grade, shape, and the idiosyncrasies they constructed into it. Their understanding and memory of a road that for the park board and boosters was a civic improvement scheme would have been of work.

In their privileged position, neither the park board nor the various booster organizations spent much time talking about the work that went into constructing their vision of the park. Theirs was the public voice, and they presented the park as a place of play, generously endowed with natural beauty. While boosters celebrated landscape alteration at the mine with bombastic statements, beyond passing mentions in annual park board reports, the public image makers largely glossed over the sweaty, grubby, human labor that created the park. It was the park’s "natural" beauties, instead,  that received attention. "When figures are studied of the money made available for expenditure," the park board declared, "[t]he casual observer readily may see how nature has helped, or else the city’s parks today could not be what they are for several years."⁶⁶ Descriptions of the mine also invoked the generosity of nature, but in the park this nature needed improvement, not rapid removal. "[T]here has been one line followed to the letter" the board further elaborated in describing its actions, "to-wit: to retain the beauties originally endowed."⁶⁷ To brag of the amount of work necessary to highlight these beauties would be to destroy the very "naturalness" the park board wanted to sell. Accordingly, the park board and the press defined the park in largely middle-class terms as a place of "nature," neglecting to mention the very real labor necessary to maintain their vision.

The public image of the park largely glossed over the waged labor that created and maintained the park as a place of relaxation; however, this construction entirely overlooked another form of labor--that of women. Historian Virginia Scharff points out that for women autocamping was often work.⁶⁸ Camping, she contends, served as a foil for middle-class, male waged work. For many women, however, it merely shifted the everyday tasks of reproductive labor in a different, and often more difficult, location.⁶⁹  Absent the not-so-minor convenience of a house, camping still demanded the very real work of food preparation, laundry, and child care. As historians have argued, such work, occurring away from the point of production and in a non-wage context, has traditionally gone unrecognized.⁷⁰ While  pictures of the tourist camp, such as the one entitled "campers' paradise" showing a crowd of dining tourists, strove to present a portrait of the relaxing attributes of an escape to nature, they also provide visual evidence of the very real work that occurred to make such outings possible.

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Notes

56.  Marshal Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-pacific Sector of 'the World System'" in Culture/Power/ History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory,  ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),  414-16. Return

57. The idea, central to this section,  that knowledge of nature can and is gained through work, is drawn from Richard White. See his "'Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?:' Work and Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 171-86. Return

Center  for Pacific Northwest Studies 

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