Coal Valley: The Making of a Miner

Coal Valley: The Making of a Miner is the story of Chip, a boy who lost his father in the 1914 Hillcrest mining disaster, but who wants more than anything to be an underground coal miner.  Against his mother’s wishes, he gets hired on at the new mines in their new home in the Red Deer River Valley.  He makes friends with Slav, an immigrant miner who only wants a wife, and together they brave the courses of history between the world wars, fighting racism, strikes, unsafe conditions and unfair owners, but finding a life that allows them to be “their own man.”  Their wives, however, have differing views on that! When it is time for Chip to close the last mine, he finds what he has been searching for all along in the deep:  the spirit of his father, the lost miner, who has been coaching and protecting him from the beginning.