![]() ![]() Despite glowing public predictions about the output of the Dana mine, the UP Coal Company was aware of the poor quality and relative lack of merchantable coal at Dana. ![]() Workers from nearby Carbon, Wyoming Territory, were sent to build the mine entrance and the processing equipment for the new Dana mine in winter 1888. It was, furthermore, the first and only Wyoming coal town where Blacks ever made up the ethnic majority.ĭana started as just one of several short-lived coal camps in southern Wyoming. It represents the first documented occurrence of that coal company expressly recruiting a group of Black men to work in the Wyoming coal mines. Dana’s story, however, peaks with a burst of activity between 18, when it became a Union Pacific Coal Company mining town. ![]() The Union Pacific Railway section called Dana, which started out as a stage stop along the Overland route, spent most of its existence as quick water or rest stop along the transcontinental railroad-the Union Pacific Railway-a few miles south of Hanna and 150 miles west of Cheyenne. This important chapter in Wyoming’s history has only recently been brought to light. In the few short years the Dana mine was active, its Black miners inadvertently played a major role in bringing widespread attention to the issue of fair labor practices through their demand for equity and honesty in their work and pay. Still, Dana is highly significant, especially to the history of Black Wyomingites. The town of Dana, Wyo., has largely been forgotten in the history of the West, gone from living memory and barely mentioned in accounts of Wyoming’s boom-and-bust coal mining towns. ![]()
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