Union Pacific needed coal. In 1889, after the nearby Carbon mines ran dry, the railroad company opened new shafts at Chimney Springs, soon renamed Hanna after Ohio Senator Marcus A. Hanna, a Union Pacific board member. The massive coal-fired locomotives that crossed the continent demanded constant feeding. What the railroad needed, the railroad got, and safety was a distant second to production. Mine Number One opened without safety teams, without meaningful inspections, without the laws that would later protect miners. Company inspectors gave glowing reviews. The coal kept flowing. The trains kept running.

On June 30, 1903, Mine Number One exploded. The blast killed 169 men - Wyoming's deadliest mining disaster, before or since. Many bodies took a year to recover; some never were. The mine's bosses blamed a careless miner. Within months, with Colorado coal strikes pinching supply, Union Pacific reopened the shaft. Widows buried what remained of their husbands in the Hanna Cemetery and went back to company housing. New miners descended into the same tunnels where the dead still lay.

Five years later, on March 28, 1908, methane accumulated in the worked-out rooms of Mine Number One found its spark. The explosion trapped 18 miners below. The state mine inspector and 40 rescuers rushed in. A second explosion killed all 59 of them. Recovery teams eventually retrieved 27 bodies. Thirty-two remained in the mountain, joining the 169 from five years before. The state inspector blamed Union Pacific's 'gouging' method - mining coal immediately as tunnels advanced rather than flooding emptied rooms with water to prevent gas buildup. The method yielded coal faster. It also yielded corpses.

The 1908 disasters left 31 widows and orphaned 103 children. Union Pacific offered settlements: $800 for each widow who stayed in Hanna, plus $50 per child. Widows who chose to return to their homelands abroad received $350. Every settlement came with one condition - no future claims against the company. In an era before worker protections, before unions had real power, before safety regulations had teeth, the widows signed. What choice did they have? The company owned the town, the houses, the store. It had just killed their husbands.

After 1908, Union Pacific finally sealed Mine Number One forever. New mines opened with new workers, but the original shaft became a mass grave. The Hanna mines operated until 1954, when diesel locomotives made Wyoming coal irrelevant. Today, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality works to prevent mine subsidence from swallowing the town built above the tombs. A memorial stands at Hanna Junction, northeast of Highway US-30, in a site difficult to access - much like the truth about what happened here, and what was allowed to happen twice. Two hundred and twenty-eight men dead in five years. Two hundred and one still underground. The mountain holds them still.