Introduction — Comment by webmaster

Chapter One — My Earliest Life In Ontario

Chapter Two — Union Rule in the Cœur d'Alenes

Chapter Three — We Blow Up The Bunker Hill Mill

Chapter Four — I Go To Live In Cripple Creek

Chapter Five — The Big Strike Of 1903

Chapter Six — The Militia Come To Cripple Creek

Chapter Seven — The Explosion In The Vindicator Mine

Chapter Eight — My First Visit To Headquarters

Chapter Nine — How We Tried To Assassinate Governor Peabody

Chapter Ten — The Shooting Of Lyte Gregory Before The Convention

Chapter Eleven — How We Blew Up The Independence Depot During The Convention

Chapter Twelve — How I Went To San Francisco And Blew Up Fred Bradley

Chapter Thirteen — Our First Bomb For Governor Peabody, And Other Bombs For Street Work

Chapter Fourteen — Our Further Plans For Governor Peabody And How I Set Bombs For Judges Goddard And Gabbert

Chapter Fifteen — How I Started After Governor Steunenberg

Chapter Sixteen — The Assassination Of Governor Steunenberg

Chapter Seventeen — My Experience In Jail And Penitentiary

Chapter Eighteen — My Reason For Writing This Book

 

THE CONFESSIONS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
HARRY ORCHARD

book image

CHAPTER TWO

UNION RULE IN THE CŒUR D'ALENES

WHEN I had been in Spokane a few weeks I had only $50 left, and I saw that I would have to go to work. One day I noticed a card in the window of an employment agency. It was for a man to drive a milk wagon in the Cœur d'Alene mining country for a firm of the name of Markwell Brothers. I wrote them first and then went over there the next week and got the place. This was in April, 1897.

The Markwell Brothers had a milk ranch about two miles west of Wallace—the principal town there —a place of about two thousand people. Above this the valley that all the towns were located in split, and one branch of the Cœur d'Alene River went up to Mullan on the right, and one branch on the left, that they called Cañon Creek, went up to Gem and Burke. There were big lead and silver mines at all these places but Wallace, which was a kind of marketplace for the district; and down below it about ten miles there was another big mining-camp called Wardner. Gem, Burke, and Mullan each had from seven to nine hundred people living in them, and there were probably fifteen hundred in Wardner. My work was to deliver milk at Burke, the town up at the end of Cañon Creek.

The country seemed to me at first a kind of gloomy place to live in, especially Cañon Creek and Burke. In the first place the cañon was very narrow, and the mountains on both sides were very high and steep. They went up at an angle of maybe forty per cent, and they were about a thousand feet high, so that the days in there were very short. In the summer-time the sun would go down at about four o'clock, and in the winter there wasn't more than five hours of sunlight. Of course you would see the sun on the sides of the mountains long before it came up and after it went down; but I mean real sunlight. There was very little wind there, it was so deep and narrow; and in the winter-time, when it snowed, you would notice the snow came straight down, and not on a slant as it naturally does in other places.

The first impression you got of Burke was that it never stopped. It was going day and night and Sunday. The mines worked all the time, and it was the same with the saloons and such places. They used to say that the only way you could tell it was Sunday in Burke was that you had a chicken dinner then.

The cañon was only about one hundred and fifty feet wide at the bottom, so it was hard work to squeeze in the town. There was only one street, and the two railroad companies' tracks ran up through the middle of that to the Tiger-Poorman mill. The stores sat on the south side, and had to be built out over the creek, which they had to run through a flume. On the north side they had to cut away the hills to set the buildings in. There were maybe a dozen stores, barber shops, etc., but more saloons than anything else. There were six of these, and they had all kinds of gambling lay-outs in the back rooms—such as roulette, faro, and black-jack and stud poker. Beyond the stores there came the mill, and then the sporting-houses. There were about ten of these, with a dance hall in the center, and then came the residence section, without any break. The school-house was only about a hundred feet away from the red-light district, so that the children could hear the women singing and cursing down there. There wasn't any church in the town, nor any library or theater.

As I had been brought up and lived all my life in a farming country this place struck me at first as pretty peculiar. But of course when you get to living in a place you get used to it.

Almost the first thing that Fred Markwell asked me when I applied for the job with him was if I had ever had any trouble with labor-unions. I told him no, and I didn't know anything about unions at that time. Then he warned me whatever I might see or hear about their going not to criticize them. He said they had driven his father out of business because he talked against them.

I soon found out that nobody could live in the district, and especially Cañon Creek, and do anything or say anything against the unions. There were two unions there. The men who worked above ground in the mines belonged to the Knights of Labor, and all the miners belonged to the Western Federation of Miners. This last union they said really started from this section, and this was the one that ran the district. They had all the mining towns but Wardner under their control, and if any man opposed them they "ran him down the cañon."

The way they did this would seem peculiar to a stranger who was not acquainted with the country. There was a miners' union in every town, and each union had a gang of men who ran the non-union men out of the district. Every miner who would not join the union was warned to get out, and if he didn't, he was "run down the cañon"; that is, this gang of men, with masks and Winchesters, would go up to his room some night and take him down on the railroad track and march him out of the cañon. When they got him out, they warned him if he came back again they would kill him. They generally marched them out in front of them with guns. Sometimes it was claimed they put a halter on their necks and led them out. Several men who wouldn't leave were killed.

The unions were so strong that they weren't satisfied with only driving out the "scabs," but they did the same thing with bosses or superintendents they did not like. For instance, there was the case of Mr. Whitney, who was foreman of the Frisco mill. They sent a letter to him and told him to leave the camp or he would suffer the consequences; but he did not leave. Awhile after this a gang of masked men with Winchesters went to Mr. Whitney's room in Gem one night a little before midnight and started to drive him down the cañon.

I talked with a woman who saw them taking him out. They came marching down the street at Gem under the bright electric lights, and when people began sticking their heads out of the windows, she said these men with guns told them to go back in again or they would shoot them. They took Whitney down the railroad, and as he was a young man and rather spirited, he tried to get away from them down a little way below Gem. There were some boxcars down there, and he thought if he could run back of these in the dark he could escape. But they shot him in the hip and left him there, and somebody else got him and took him down to the hospital at Wallace, and he died there a few days afterward when they were operating on him. Mr. Whitney's relatives were wealthy people, and they and the State offered $17,000 reward for the men who shot him; but nothing ever came of it, and nobody was ever arrested, though a great many people must have known who did it. Nobody in Cañon Creek ever dared to testify about a thing like this. They knew if they did they would be killed themselves.

It might seem a strange thing about that country that nobody was ever punished for assaults or murder like this. But after you were acquainted there it was easy to see why this was. The fact was that all the peace officers—the sheriff and constables and deputies of the peace—were elected by the unions and were in with them. The miners made up their minds whom they were going to nominate and vote for, and when they did this, they voted almost solid for their men. The peace officers, of course, always sided with the unions. And whenever a non-union man got into the camp and got beaten up and they took him before the justices of the peace, they would fine him or send him to jail. George A. Pettibone was justice of the peace at Gem back in 1892, and used to tell how he did this.

In fact, it was difficult to convict anybody who had friends in the cañon of anything, even murder. It was strange how little account they took of murder in that country. I think for one thing the people got used to seeing men killed in the mines. They would get blown up in blasting, so that they had to be gathered up in a sack or basket, or sometimes they would get badly hurt. The men who were killed would be taken down to Wallace and buried, and the men who were hurt would be put onto a pushcar on the railroad and slid down to the Wallace hospital. When they saw them being carried out, the miners would say, "It was too bad," and then everything would go on as if nothing had happened. All this seemed to make human life cheap, and, of course, almost everybody had a six-shooter, although they didn't always carry them, and there was more or less shooting. I remember there were two murders besides Whitney that I knew of while I was there. One man was acquitted, and the other one was given a year in jail.

I worked steadily on my milk route and saved some money during 1897, and that fall I bought a sixteenth interest in the Hercules mine near Burke —the mine that has made Ed Boyce, the former president of the Western Federation of Miners, and his wife so wealthy. They are said to be worth nearly $1,000,000 now, and my share, if I had kept it, would be worth over $500,000. It was only a prospect then, and I paid $500 for my share, a part down and the rest with a note, which I was to pay off in instalments.

I became tired of my milk route, and I gave it up on Christmas, 1897. Then I went to Burke and bought a wood and coal business there. I had to borrow $150 to do this. The business was a good one, and I would have made a big living out of it, if I had attended to it, but I soon got into bad habits. There didn't seem to be much else to do for amusement. A single man boarding in that country would have a small room, generally without a stove, which was very cold in the winter, and very close and hot in the summer. So everybody went into the saloons, where it was comfortable. I have often thought that these millionaires who were giving libraries and such things might do a good thing if they would give a little to the mining-camps just to give the men some place to go to. It was the same with me as with hundreds of others. I got started going into saloons, and finally I got to gambling.

I lost so much money at this that it kept me continually broke, and in the spring of 1898 I had to sell my interest in the Hercules mine in order to pay my debts. Dan Cordonia bought it of me for about $700.

In the summer of 1898 I had to take in a partner. This was a Scotchman named James McAlpin. We were in partnership until about March, 1899. I stopped gambling and tried to straighten up. But I used up so much money paying off my old debts that when we made a settlement I found I had overdrawn my account several hundred dollars, and finally I offered to sell my share of the business to McAlpin for $100 in cash. He accepted this offer, and in this way I went out of business for myself.

The last of March, 1899, I got a job through Lewis Strow, a shift boss I knew well, as a "mucker"—that is, a shoveler—in the Tiger-Poorman mine at Burke. I had to join the miners' union right away, and then for the first time I became acquainted with the workings of this union.

When I first came to the Cœur d'Alenes I thought —as everybody outside seems to think about the Federation of Miners—that the whole union was responsible for the outrages that were committed there. But that is a mistake, as a great part of the men knew no more about it than I did, and I did not know anything then. This is the case everywhere, as I have found since. The miners get the credit for all the leaders do. I can count the men who were really responsible for the troubles at Burke on the fingers of my hands, and the membership of that union must have been over four hundred.

It was common talk almost from the first in the Cœur d'Alenes that there was an "inner circle" which ran the district. There were unions at Gem, Burke, Mullan, and Wardner. All these sent delegates to a central union—that is, a board that was supposed to govern the whole district. But the "inner circle" was supposed to be a few men that were really back of the central union, and planned all the rough work, as they did later in the Federation. George Pettibone was one of these when he was there in 1892, and later Ed Boyce and L. J. Simpkins and Marion W. Moor, who later were in the "inner circle" of the Federation. I have no doubt they got this idea for the Federation from the Cœur d'Alenes, for the Federation started just after the first fight there, and a good many of the men in the Federation "inner circle" came from there.

Ed Boyce, who was president of the Federation for a long while in its early years, had more to do with getting it started than any other man. He began the "Boyce policy" soon after he was elected; that is, he advised that every union man should arm himself with a rifle, because they all might have to go out and fight the capitalists before long; and that nobody in the union should join the militia. The leaders of the different unions took this up, and I have heard it advised in unions time and time again by the officers that every union man should buy a good rifle and plenty of ammunition, for the time was coming when they would need it. And nobody would join the militia. It was considered a "scab" organization run by the mine owners.

When the leaders would give this radical talk, there would always be a number who would get up and applaud very loud. A great many of these radical fellows were what we called "ten-day men"— that is, the men who only worked part time and lay around the saloons the rest. A good many of these men were regular saloon "bums." The conservative men, who worked hard and had homes, did not like this policy. I have often heard them talk against it privately. But these men did not attend the meetings the way the radical ones did, and generally they could not express their thoughts very well in public; and if they started to talk against such an idea, they would hardly get on their feet before the radical element would begin to holler "Sit down," or "Put him out," and they would get rattled and stop talking. Then nobody else would dare get up and support them after seeing what happened.

But it is true that after a while even the conservative ones got to thinking that what the leaders said was probably all right. In a town like Burke you heard nothing else and had no chance to. You couldn't even read anything else. I remember the unions boycotted the Spokane Spokesman, and they passed a rule so that you had to pay $5 fine to the union if you were caught reading it. We were all anxious to, too, especially when the Spanish War was on, as this was the only daily newspaper which came into the district the same day it was printed. Now anybody gets to feeling the same way when he hears nothing about the labor question except from people who talk about the millionaire mine owners, and how pretty soon we will all get to be like the cheap laborers of Europe, and peons, and how we must defend the unions by arms if necessary, because that is the only defense we have. It was just one thing they talked, and that was war.

When you look back at it all, the trouble did start in a kind of war—that is, the fight of July 11, 1892, when the miners blew up the Gem mill and drove out the "scabs," and hired deputies, and the United States troops came in and put the miners in the "bull pen." They always celebrated the anniversary of the day every year at the union cemetery at Wallace, around the graves of the miners who were killed then. This celebration really took the place of the Fourth of July in that country. The mines would all close, and the union men would go down on special trains to Wallace and march out to the cemetery. A stranger might expect some solemn memorial service; but if they did they would be much mistaken; for there was only talk of the most radical kind by Boyce or speakers like him. They would start by reminding the miners how cruelly and cowardly their brothers had been murdered. Then they would go on to say that they, too, did not know how soon such a death might come to them, if they did not prepare themselves to resist it; and the only way to prepare was to get a good gun and plenty of ammunition and be ready to fight, and not wait until the other fellow shot you down as they had your brother.

A great many of the men really did arm themselves—with rifles when they could. I think there was quite a number of guns left over from the fight of 1892, and I know there were some shipped in. George Pettibone has told me that he sent in rifles from Denver in 1899 for the union men. He sent a hundred of them in piano boxes, and ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and addressed it to Jim Young, who was sheriff at that time, and was in deep with the unions. Then in 1898, the guns which belonged to the militia, that had disbanded at Mullan, were stolen one night by masked men. The union denied having done this, but a good many of the guns showed up in the hands of union men when we made our raid on the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mill in Wardner, on April 29, 1899. All these guns which the union men used were cached in places known to the union leaders, so that when the time came to use them they could be dug up and given to the men.

NEXT: We Blow Up The Bunker Hill Mill