Indiana’s King Coal

Maintaining safe conditions in the mines was a low priority for these coal barons, even though the industry was fraught with danger. The miners, left on their own to protect themselves, began to join together in unions to protect each other and lobby for better conditions. This led to the creation of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA or UMW) on Jan. 25, 1890. The UMW was established in Columbus, Ohio, during a convention that brought together other labor organizations.

Muckraking author Upton Sinclair published a novel in 1917 called “King Coal,” which portrayed the coal barons of Colorado and the hard times of the coal miners who worked for them. In real life and in the novel, the clash between the two groups led to the intervention of federal troops that triggered the bloody Ludlow, Colo., coal wars of 1914. Less bloody but equally meaningful to all involved were UMW strikes in Indiana and all the other major U.S. coal mining states.

Although less ruthless than the Colorado coal barons, in terms of power and influence Walter Scott Bogle was Indiana’s King Coal; newspaper accounts say he owned most or all of Indiana’s coal mines as well as elsewhere in the Midwest during the first quarter of the last century until he died in 1922. His father, Daniel Bogle, who was born in 1819 a coal mining region of Scotland, started the business.

When Daniel came to the United States in about 1842, he first worked as an engraver in New Hampshire. In 1861 Daniel moved his family to Chicago, where he became a coal and iron merchant until 1871, when he left the area to go hunt for gold in South Dakota. By the time of Daniel’s death in 1896, Walter, born in 1858, had taken over his father’s coal and iron merchant business and had become active in Chicago Democratic politics.

In 1902, The Indianapolis Star reported that the W. S. Bogle Co. was opening up a new mine north of Sullivan that would employ 600 miners. By 1903, Walter Bogle and his Crescent Coal and Mining Company were indicted, along with two other major coal operators in Indiana and Illinois and a number of smaller mine operators, for colluding to fix the price of coal headed to the Chicago market.

The agreement resulting from this collusion was called the “Bogle Agreement.” Smaller operators testified that Bogle forced them into signing the agreement by threatening to cut them out of the coal market. An indicator of how shrewd a businessman he was, Bogle was not only involved in the agreement as a coal producer—he was also the person in Chicago who would be selling the coal—essentially, he made an agreement with himself and benefited from it in two ways.

Even while fighting the indictment, Walter was the key spokesman for his fellow coal operators in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio, in discussions in Indianapolis with senior UMW leaders about miners petitioning for more wages. He criticized miners who had organized in order to press for higher wages when coal company profits increased. Thomas L. Lewis, then the vice-president of the UMW, replied that if the mine operators could create a centralized organization, then so could labor. Later in 1903, when 10,000 Hoosier coalminers had stopped work, Bogle and UMW president John Mitchell negotiated an agreement that enabled the miners to return to work the next day.

One of Bogle non-business roles was serving as president of Chicago’s St. Andrew’s Society, a Scottish-American charitable organization. In 1904, he was accused by its secretary and three other members of wanting to misuse the organization’s money to the point of bankrupting it. His accusers wanted a court injunction against him, but apparently the issue was resolved within the organization.

Because Bogle was a rich and famous man, events related to his family life became news. This was particularly the case in June 1903, when Bogle’s only son, Walter Scott Bogle Jr., was jilted by his bride-to-be four days before their scheduled wedding. The young woman, Helen Louise Eldred, declared to Walter’s mother, Delia Stearns Bogle, that she did not love her son and could not marry him.

She denied that another man was involved, but speculation revolved around her childhood friend and previous beau, William “Billy” Hotchkiss. According to The Indianapolis Star, Billy denied involvement, stating, “Why, I have looked upon her as belonging to Walter. When a girl is betrothed to another fellow, do you suppose for one second I am the sort that would cut in?” In retrospect, it appears that his comment was a sarcastic reference to Walter having cut in on Billy’s relationship with Helen.

In fact, Helen and Billy married a day before she was to have married young Walter. Instead of the huge wedding planned for the Bogle ceremony, they had a small family-attended ceremony.

Friends of the bride commented to reporters that Helen and Billy had long been a couple. They speculated that when the extremely wealthy and well-connected Walter Jr. started to court Helen, her father, who was also in the coal business, pressed her to accept his proposal. Her last-minute rebellion was the mark of true love. Billy and Helen went on to have two daughters and, based on their 37-year marriage, lived happily ever after.

Young Walter’s father said of the jilting, “Our boy is broken up, and I don’t blame him. So few days have elapsed since the announcement of the wedding. I can’t understand it. All we know is that she came here and said she did not love him. Sorry comfort for Walter, who believed in her. You can’t understand a girl’s mind. But she is 22.”

By late 1906, Walter Sr was preparing to turn his business over to Walter Jr, a Cornell University-trained mining engineer. People who knew the son then said that he continued to brood over the loss of Helen.

In January 1907, the father and son had an argument concerning a business trip to Washington, D.C., that the son was about to make. With a carriage outside waiting for him, Walter Jr. went into a room to finish packing his valise. Somehow, his gun went off, killing him.

Walter’s father fainted when he saw his son’s body. Delia, the already ailing mother, never recovered from her grief. Convinced by her husband to try a change of scenery, Delia traveled to Florida. She died there in March 1907.

Walter and Delia also had two daughters, May Stearns Bogle and Nellie Delia Bogle. Newspapers followed their lives, too. In 1895, 26-year-old May Bogle married Thomas Gilmore, a coal dealer. The couple eventually moved to Wisconsin and then to Texas. May and her two daughters would inherit most of May’s father’s estate.

Nellie was 21 years old in 1904 when she married Henry Edward Sauer, a medical doctor, but that marriage didn’t last. In 1916, she married, Perry Chance, an American dentist practicing in Paris, who was also divorced. She went to live with him there, a rather remarkable adventure for her because France was in the midst of World War I.

Nellie died in Paris in 1918 of an intestinal infection. She had no children. Years later in 1933, Dr. Chance, by then a naturalized French citizen, committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart at his villa in Nice. His wife at the time attributed the act to a case of severe sunstroke Chance had suffered a week before.

Walter Bogle weathered personal tragedies, experienced the U.S. coal industry’s best times, and saw the start of its decline. World War I increased the demand for coal, but the war’s end in 1918 and the rise of competing fuels like gas and oil caused demand to decrease steadily.

On May 24, 1922, Walter Scott Bogle Sr., died at the age of 70, one month into a massive nationwide strike of 500,000 miners that lasted until August of that year. No successor could match Bogle’s role as Indiana’s King Coal.