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in a small digging that they made. So they then borrowed money, which could be borrowed in those days, at high rates of interest and went into great operations to open up a mine, not knowing in advance anything really about the prospects of finding a good vein of coal. In other words, the geology of coal mining had not been fully developed and there had been a great many openings. People who were interested in mining coals had eyes which were too big for their stomachs, as we used to say as children. In other words, their imagination as to what they could sell and find in the way of coal was bigger than the realities of the possibility of the market to absorb so much coal. The coal industry was always going through ups and downs of demands and the mines that got pushed out were always the high cost mines where the low grade of coal was developed.

The people who owned these low grade-high cost mines wanted to make money just the same. So they were always trying to get special arrangements with certain mills to take their coal. The reason why the U.S. Steel Company finally bought their own mines was because they had this difficulty in securing a steady supply of coal from high grade ores at a price they were willing to pay. U.S. Steel, then Bethlehem and then other companies bought their own mines, but bought only middle grade mines. There are only a few areas of really