Barabara Simila’s “Company Locations” paints a picture of living on a mining site. She paints a grim picture of the scene as whole, pinning the miners as boring workers going about a monotonous routine. To better organize the scene she describes in the poem, we can separate how the mining locations are sites of change, contingency, and complexity. One way that Simila illustrates the mining companies is with the reference to the community that most mines built for their workers. Simila writes, “…the frame houses paced the measure of the narrow streets…” According to the book Hollowed Ground by Larry Lankton, the church arrived in the Copper Country area before the mines did. When miners began moving here for work, they found some comfort in the fact they could still practice their religion. As more miners came to work, mining companies began to realize that if they wanted labor to stay, they needed to build a place for their labor and subsequent family to stay. Houses began as log cabins, but as some mining companies grew they built up large communities with cheap identical houses and narrow streets, as written in “Company Locations”. Again, according to Hollowed Ground, schools were also created, but they were subpar, …show more content…
She does this with the lines “…of the narrow streets where life and labor weighed out by the tone and piles of poor rock vaulted towards the sun until the last shift…” This shows that even though the mining companies are building up communities for their workers, it’s just so that they workers will stick around and work longer. As stated in Hollowed Ground, the communities that were made were subpar, further showing how the mining companies really only care about profit. So, while it looks like they are caring for the well-being of the workers, its still a rather complicated