Some men are just born to suffer bad luck. That's how The Pittsburgh Press described mine superintendent Fred C. Keighley on its editorial page.

"This man has been connected ... with three serious mine explosions within the last few years," the newspaper noted on Jan. 30, 1891. "It does not appear that the disasters have occurred through any fault of his, but he has been unfortunate enough to be in charge ..."

The third and most horrific of those calamities took place Jan. 27, 1891, at Henry Clay Frick's Mammoth Mine in Westmoreland County.

"Over 100 miners killed," the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported the next day. "Not a Man Is Left Who Can Tell the Cause of the Sudden, Terrific Explosion." The disaster happened around 9 a.m. near Youngwood.

The suspected cause was "fire-damp," the 19th-century name for the mixture of methane and other flammable gases that added to the danger of bituminous coal mining. The pocket of gas apparently had been ignited by a worker's oil lamp. Miners who were not burned to death in the explosion were suffocated by the "after damp," a deadly mix of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. "Miners, Mules and Cars Packed into a Clotted Mass," a headline in the Jan. 28 edition of the Gazette said.

Once the initial fire had been extinguished, about 60 bodies were brought out. Then a new blaze began and rescue efforts had to be halted for several hours.

By noon the next day, 106 bodies had been removed from the mine. The discovery of a final victim raised the death toll to 107.

Many of the dead miners were buried on Jan. 28 in St. John the Baptist Cemetery in Scottdale. A crowd of about 5,000 gathered in the rain for the evening graveside service, according to the Gazette.

"This was undoubtedly the saddest day that Scottdale, as well as the entire coke region, has ever witnessed," the Gazette reported on Jan. 29, the day after the mass burial.

Pine coffins arrived by train and were loaded onto 15 horse-drawn wagons. "Three coffins were placed on each wagon," The Pittsburgh Press reported Jan. 29. "It required all the strength of two horses to get a team through the roads, which already covered for several inches with mud, were made muddier still by a fine, drizzling rain which started to fall about 4 o'clock. The passage from the train to the cemetery was a battle between muscle and mud."

"When the first coffins reached the burying ground[,] the men were still at work with pick and shovel." Workers had dug two parallel trenches, each about 150 feet long.

Coffins were placed in rows on wooden boards next to the hastily prepared burial sites. "At the head of the graves the Rev. Father A.M. Lambing took his position ... The coffins were placed close to each other. Their headboards, containing the name [of the man in] the box, were stuck into the ground. The early winter night closed in with 100 men at work burying their fellow employees."

One, and possibly two, of the victims brought to Scottdale, was fated not to rest in peace. The body of "Billy Buchell, No. 26" was sent on to Latrobe for burial there. Another of the "coffins may be removed as the remains are said to be those of a Protestant," the Press reported. "This was discovered at a late hour."

The Mammoth Mine disaster happened seven months after a similar explosion killed 31 workers at the Hill Farm Mine near Dunbar, Fayette County. "The Dunbar disaster has been repeated and overshadowed," the Gazette said.

The year 1891 was a terrible time to be a coal miner in Pennsylvania. Of the 956 workers who died in coal mining accidents that year, more than two-thirds were killed in this state, according to U.S. Department of the Interior statistics.

Things got even worse over the next 15 years, with 1907 ultimately becoming the deadliest year in U.S. mining history. There were 3,242 deaths that year. Almost half -- 1,507 -- happened in Pennsylvania's hard- and soft-coal mines, according to a 1916 government reported compiled by Albert H. Fay.

Whatever bad luck accompanied Keighley, he did survive both the Mammoth explosion and threats by surviving workers, "rendered insane by grief," to hang him. It was to the credit of the "men in the coke region ... that they were dissuaded from their cowardly design," the Press opined. "There are enough horrors already ... without adding murder to the list."

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