Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/142

138

degree hygienic. The miners live in various localities; some in cheap boarding houses in the towns in the neighborhood of the mines, some in settlements or "locations," as they are called, smaller aggregations of dwellings, small villages, as it were, situated close to an open mine or shaft. Some live in camps—clusters of buildings of a much poorer sort than those alluded to above, more or less temporary in character and also located near the mines. Of these miners the Finns are by far the most cleanly and the most stable; almost all of the married miners are to be found in their ranks. The Austrians, by far outnumbering the other races, for the most part pass in and out of the country as chance dictates, and their domestic habits and the environment which they tolerate are so filthy as to lead one to suppose that they, above all others, would be the worst sufferers from typhoid. The Italians, more numerous than the Finns, less so than the Austrians, appear to vie with the latter in the matter of negligence of their surroundings. The Swedes, industrious and cleanly, are so few in number (less than 700 on the entire range in 1907) that we might practically disregard them in this discussion were it not for the fact that they suffered to some extent from typhoid in a recent epidemic, and for a reason to be explained later.

Now, in illustrating conditions which prevail in one portion of the