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From the beginning of the 18th century right up until the 1970s, a network of relationships developed in the Briançon Alps between a natural resource, coal, and a human population of peasants and mountain men, in the form of particular forms of exploitation, namely the coal women, who lived for a long time with the small industrial mines that were gradually set up in the Briançon basin. The overarching view of a history of technology focuses on the lack of rationality of country mining, thus joining the accusation of irrationality and waste of resources introduced by the representatives the mining technology, namely the mining engineers. Contrary to this view, this paper underlines the interest of a pragmatic approach which, in applying the principle of generalized symmetry as borrowed from the sociology of translation, endeavors to give an account of these relations, to run through the chain of associations by means of which peasants and coal have simultaneously shaped each other. In doing so, they constituted a “socio-natural” complex. Thus coal mining activity by peasants rests on four associations. The first is the relationship with coal and its naturalization as coal suitable for the market. The second is the “communalist” appropriation of State-based coal mining concessions. The third association is the stabilization of a sociotechnical mechanism offering a third way to the socio-economic choice faced by mountain populations, that is, either to emigrate or to stay and suffer the hard labor of industrial mining. The last is an instrumental relationship with technology, i.e., the practical and discursive equipping of the rational and industrial coalmine introduced by mining engineers.