Disclaimer and Guide

 

By: Katie Orwig

How Death Gloated! is a collection of numerous resources and publications on the history of the Monongah Mine Disaster. They are arranged and presented in the form of a timeline of events as this better helps my own organization when it comes to working on my historic fiction about Monongah.

The title is taken from a newspaper article published on December 10, 1907 in the Cumberland Evening Times.

This timeline is not to be blindly trusted and is constantly subject to future change as I come across any new information. However, as far as I have found in my few years of formal research on this topic, I have yet to come across anything like a detailed timeline of events so I felt obligated to share this form of organizing my research despite the fact that I don’t think it will ever be a finished product.

I’d like to inform you of specific choices I made for How Death Gloated! so that it may help you navigate the information better:

1. Certain events included in this timeline may have only come with time stamps like “this afternoon,” or “early morning”. In these instances I would do my best to consider the context of the original source, cross check with other sources for anything which may conflict or concur the event being described, and then do my best to estimate the approximate time this event may have occurred based on what information I had to that point. Sometimes an event could get more accurately placed later on when more information is obtained, and sometimes it will remain in its ‘best guess’ slot.
2. I have not included ALL of my information. Some events which matter very much to the research for my historic fiction but are not necessary to the format and purpose of How Death Gloated!, have been omitted…for now. Almost all of these are just waiting for more clarification on where they should be placed, while the others have more of a storytelling/narrative intent and will not be included at all. For many of these issues, I will be making and posting separate journal entries about the problems they pose.
3. When considering my sources and their provided information, I often gave greatest partiality to the people of Monongah and the stories I heard through my life about the disaster. They often discussed the wrong information which was spread vs. what they knew or grew up hearing themselves.

These resources include contemporary newspaper, journal, and magazine accounts; photographs from various points in time; documentaries; published texts; personal accounts, etc. They will also be consistently updated.

These resources and the cited information contained on this site are not presented with the intention of formal citation.

In less formal lingo, please cite the source I cited for this information whenever possible.

If you have any questions about any of the information or a citation is unclear or missing, please contact me and I will do my best to answer any of your questions, point you in a possible direction for more information, or clear up something I probably just overlooked.

Please feel free to leave comments or discuss the events with myself and others here or on other media platforms. I welcome conversation and discussion on this matter as I feel collaboration on historic matters is absolutely vital.