“I told my dad I wasn’t going to school anymore. He said: Why, you just come on and go work with me. I went in the mines, and I
went to work. From ’31 to about the last of ’32…We lived eight miles from the mine, and we had to ride it horseback…Many times I’d have to git off and hammer his feet out of the stirrups. They’d be froze in the stirrups…We got up at five in the mornin’, start at six. We got out at ten that night. We’d work about six hours a day, seventeen hours.” –Buddy Blankenship, West Virginia miner Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression 1. What is the main idea of this primary source document?
Answer: I think the main idea is to show what struggles families faced during the Great Depression. Also, to especially show the struggled children had to face working for their families.
Explanation: Buddy Blankenship starts the paragraph by saying "I told my dad I wasn't going to school anymore". This shows that the author was a child when he started working in the mines with his father. He goes into detail on the struggle he faced, ie, "We got up at 5 in the mornin'" and "We'd work about six hours a day, seventeen hours". This kind of work is grueling and awful for a child.
