My father, Leland Powell, never spoke much about the deaths and accidents he witnessed during his more than thirty years as a coal miner in Carbon County. But on a few occasions as we drove north on Highway 6 along the Price River and past the coal-mining town of Castle Gate, he did speak of a mine disaster in 1924 that had a profound effect on him. Born in Price in 1907, as a baby he was taken by his parents in a horse-drawn wagon to their new homestead in the Uintah Basin. By 1923, he was back in Carbon County working as a day laborer at a mine not far from Castle Gate. Although he did not witness the Castle Gate explosion himself, he did see the rescue crews dispatched to Castle Gate on March 8, 1924, to assist in the rescue and then recovery work that began immediately...

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