THE CONFESSIONS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
HARRY ORCHARD

CHAPTER THREE

WE BLOW UP THE BUNKER HILL MILL

ON the morning of April 29, 1899, I got up at six o'clock, as usual, expecting to go to work in the mine. As I was going to the place where I took breakfast I was told that there would be no work at any of the mines that day, and that there was going to be a meeting at the Miners' Union Hall at seven o'clock, and that every one must attend. The first notice that anybody had of the meeting was that morning. I think the central union did not dare to give it out before, because if they had, a great many of the conservative men would have left town before they took part in what they did that day.

After breakfast I went over to the hall, and it was crowded, and in a few minutes Paul Corcoran, the secretary of the Burke union, called the meeting to order and began to explain the object of holding the meeting at that unusual time. He told the men that the central union had held a meeting the night before at Gem, and had decided that the unions should go to Wardner on that day and blow up the Bunker Hill-Sullivan mine, and I think he said hang the superintendent. I am not sure whether he spoke openly of the latter, but I know that it was generally discussed in the crowd. He told about the trouble the miners' union had always had with this mine, and said that the union men at Wardner were breaking away from the union and going to work there, and that scabs who had been driven out of the camp from time to time were coming back there. So the central union had decided the only thing to do was to go down and blow up the mill and end the strike once and for all. Then he explained to us about the plans for taking possession of the Northern Pacific train and going down to Wardner that morning.

While he was doing this, Mike Devy, the president of the union, came in very angry and wanted to know why he had not been notified of the meeting, and what it was all about. When Corcoran had explained it to him, he talked strong against it. After he had done this a good many of the conservative men backed him up. Corcoran answered that they had nothing to fear. He said the governor would not do anything, because they owned him, as the district had voted solid for him. The only thing to be afraid of was the Federal Government, and that the only thing that could make it do anything was to interfere with the United States mail, and they had plans so as not to interfere with that.

They took a vote after a while. They did this by dividing the men on either side of the hall and counting them, and it was very close. If it had been taken in the usual way, by raising hands, I don't think it would have been carried. A great many of the conservative men were bitter against it, and said it was a shame; yet, after they voted to go, there was not anybody who wanted to stay at home. Everybody went right out of the hall and began to get ready. We were all supposed to get a piece of white cotton and tie it around our arm, as this was the mark of the Burke union, and each one was also supposed to get some sort of a mask.

It is a peculiar thing to say, but when they were once started nobody seemed to think anything serious was to be done. It was more like going on an excursion. I do not even remember myself which way I voted in the hall. When the Northern Pacific train left Wallace that morning at eight o'clock, all the telegraph wires had been cut, and when it left Burke, five or six masked men with rifles boarded the engine and directed the trainmen to put on extra cars. Paul Corcoran was in charge of the men who did this. The train was made up of box-cars and flat-cars, one or two passenger-cars and a baggage-car. The men got on board here, and we started down the cañon. I was in one of the passenger-coaches. The train stopped at the Frisco Magazine, a mile from Gem, and about forty or fifty boxes of dynamite, each one of which weighed fifty pounds, were loaded in one of the box-cars, and the train then went down to Gem and stopped in front of the miners' union hall. A number of Burke men got off the train and went into the hall, where some new rifles and ammunition were distributed to them. Then they thought we would not have enough dynamite, and they brought the train up again to the magazine, and put on forty or fifty more boxes. Then we ran back to Gem and stopped at the union hall again, and the men from Gem got on the train and we ran down to Wallace. The union men from Mullan had walked down to Wallace, which is about ten miles, and they got on the train there. We lost some time at Wallace, and then switched over on to the Oregon Railroad & Navigation track and ran on down to Wardner. They had no permission to run this train over another railroad's track, but the men in the engine compelled the engineer to do this.

The train was crowded, men sitting on top of the box-cars and crowding inside of them. While they were going down from Gem a good many of the men put on masks, and still more after we left Wallace, but a great many of them did not mask at all. At Wallace Jim Young, the sheriff, and Tom Heney, former sheriff and then a deputy sheriff, got on the train at Wallace, and though I did not hear them, I was told they were advising the men on the way down to Wardner how best to do the work and not get into trouble over it. The sheriff got off in front of the crowd at Wardner and demanded that the mob should disperse and go home. Everybody knew this was a bluff, and that he really would make no attempt whatever to stop them, and they were laughing and joking about it.

When we reached the Wardner depot, where the Bunker Hill mill was, the men all jumped out of the train and got ready to attack the mill. W. F. Davis, who was a leader in the Gem union, had charge of them. The mill was about a half mile from the depot, and we got ready to attack it. Everybody supposed it was full of armed guards or militia, and Davis and the other leaders planned the attack on it. In fact Paul Corcoran had told us in the meeting that morning that there would be perhaps as many as four hundred militia at the mine, but he said we could easily whip them. The way they attacked this mill was foolish. They sent twelve men with rifles up on the side hill to the south of the mill to fire at it and draw the fire of the guards, if there were any. Then they formed the men in line. All the unions were marked in a particular way, a piece of cotton cloth on their arms or in their buttonholes, etc. Davis and the other men started lining them up; the men with Winchesters went first. They called out each union in turn for this; the Burke union first—" All men from Burke with long guns this way," and so on. There must have been about four hundred men with long guns. Then they lined up the men with revolvers after them. I suppose there were twelve hundred men in the crowd. Then they marched them right straight up to the mill, two by two. If there had been anybody in the mill they could have killed half a dozen at a time, shooting down through the line.

I didn't get into the line myself, as I waited at the depot restaurant to get something to eat. I had only a small revolver anyway and wouldn't have been any particular use. Pretty soon I heard them let loose shooting, and some of the fellows that were there with me said, "They've started at it," and we all ran out. It seems that Davis and the other men had sent the twelve men round above the mill without telling all of the crowd, and these men had begun shooting at the mill, and the crowd, thinking they were scabs, began shooting at them. It was a queer thing to see the crowd break up and run and get behind cover when nobody had shot at them at all. The twelve men stood about three hundred yards away from the crowd, and about half the crowd began shooting at them. I could see, from where I stood at the depot, the stones and dirt flying up all around them; but although there were probably two hundred people firing at them, they only hit one man named Smith. They shot him through the body, and he died right off. All he said was "I'm hurt," and fell over on his face, and the other fellows held up their hands, and the leaders told the crowd who they were, and they stopped firing.

The crowd caught a young Scotchman named John Cheyne, who was a watchman at the mill, and another man, and they told them that there was nobody in the mill. So they got ready and began to take the powder up and put it in under the mill to blow it up. About eighty or ninety of us who were at the depot, each took one of the fifty-pound boxes of the dynamite and carried it on our shoulders down to the mill. I remember even then I didn't understand who those fellows on the hill were, and I said to Gus Peterson, who was carrying a box of dynamite beside me, "What do they let those scabs stay there for? They will be shooting at us and blowing up this dynamite before we know it." Then we left the dynamite down there and I stayed around near the mill.

While we were doing this the crowd that had captured the two men shot Cheyne. I didn't see this, but as I heard it, somebody told them to hike and get out of the country, and they started to run away, and then somebody else began to holler, "Scab, scab!" and a lot of the fellows somewhere else hollered, "Where, where, where?" and began shooting at them. One of these men shot Cheyne in the hip, and grazed the lip of Rogers, the other man. Rogers ran and got away, and a woman came out and helped Cheyne and kept the men from killing him, but he died a day or two later in the hospital.

All this time the men were putting the powder into the mill, with Davis in charge. There was about forty-five hundred pounds of this, and they planned it all out, where would be the best place to put it. There was a charge on top, underneath the ore bin, where the ore comes into the mill, then there was another charge down under the tables in the middle, and then at the bottom, in the boiler room, there was the charge like what they call a lifter in a mine. Then when they got these all set they fired them with fuses so that the top would go first and the middle next, and the bottom one last, so this would finish the job from the ground up.

When they got the powder in the mill, they wanted volunteers to set off the fuses, and, though I was only a new hand in the mines, I was near by at the time, and I said I would set off one of them. So I went down in the boiler-room with another man, and after a while Davis came and put his head down through a trap-door, and called out to us to light our fuses, and we lighted them, and ran out of the building. We tried to go up a stairway first, but the door was locked, so we had to hurry and get out of a window, and run across a switch track, where some freightcars were standing. Then the powder exploded and the building was blown all to pieces.

They also set fire to a big company boardinghouse and the house of the superintendent and some others about the mill. I looked into the superintendent's house just before they set it going, and it was furnished up fine. They had thrown kerosene all over the inside and had set it off.

The men began to shout and shoot off their rifles after the mill blew up. A little while later we got on the train and started back to Wallace. I sat on the outside of a box-car. The men were all feeling pretty happy and still kept shooting their rifles. There was a big flume up the hill that carried the water to the Bunker Hill concentrator, and they would shoot into this so as to see the water squirt out where the balls broke through into the wooden flume.

By and by there was the whistle of a locomotive down below, and the leaders stopped our train and made everybody stop firing. They said there might be troops on that train coming in from Spokane, and anyway they would very likely need the cartridges if there was going to be any fight. This was about the only thing I heard that day about anybody coming in to trouble us. As I said, it was more like going on an excursion than anything else, and nobody seemed to be afraid of the consequences. We stopped at Wallace on the way back, but I don't remember much about that except that some of the men were drunk, though I think they had closed up the saloons before we got there. That evening I went back home and went to bed as usual without thinking much about it.

I worked in the mine three or four days after this. There were all kinds of stories, and finally we knew the Federal troops were coming in. The men began to get out of town, most of them going over the trail to Thompson Falls, Mont.

I went down in the mine to work the morning the troops came, but I saw so few left that I had no heart to stay, so I quit and got my time. I could not get my pay that day, so I went up on the hill on the north side of the town, as most of the snow was off there, and it was warm. There were a good many up there in the same fix I was.

About three or four o'clock the train came creeping up the cañon loaded with Federal troops. We had made arrangements with a business man to give us a signal from his house, if it was safe for us to come down. But we got no signal, and we could see for ourselves what they were doing. They were rounding up men like a bunch of cattle, and loading them into box-cars. We sent two men down after it got dark to find out what we could. The town was all picketed with soldiers, but they managed to reach some of the houses, and learned from the women that they had arrested every man in the place, business men and all, even to the postmaster.

About fifteen or twenty of us slept in a miner's cabin that night, and part of us made up our minds we would leave the next morning for Thompson Falls. In the morning they all backed out, except Pat Dennison and myself, so he and I started about five o'clock. It was forty miles over there, and the snow was still deep. We made good headway for three or four hours, and then the sun had thawed the snow so that we would sink away down into it. But we were going down hill then, as we had crossed the summit, and after we got down a ways the snow was all gone. We got to Thompson Falls about ten o'clock that night. We left the next morning on the three o'clock train for Missoula, Mont. When we arrived there, we found others there we knew, but we soon had to scatter from there, and we found out we had left Thompson Falls just in time, as they had sent soldiers over there to head any off that came across the range from the Cœur d'Alenes, and they did arrest some there. The soldiers that had been sent to Missoula had scab deputies with them that knew nearly everybody from that country, and we left there and went up the Bitter Root Valley, and stopped there with a friend of some of the boys that were with us. There were about ten or twelve of us. We stayed there a few days, and one of the boys and myself went on up the valley about ten miles farther, as I knew a man up there who drove the milk wagon for Markwell Brothers before I took it and was running a farm there. We got him to go over to the Cœur d'Alenes, as he was acquainted there, and get our trunks and collect what money we had coming, and we worked in his place while he was gone. He told us how things were over there; that they had several hundred in the bull-pen, and were still looking for others.

We left there after he came back, and returned where we left the other boys, and later came to Missoula, where we stayed a few days, as the soldiers had all left, and from there we went to Butte, Mont. This was the headquarters of the Western Federation of Miners, and we found hundreds of the miners there from the Cœur d'Alenes. I was taken sick going from Missoula to Butte, was sick several days after arriving there, and did not feel well all the time I was there.

I went up to the Western Federation of Miners headquarters and got a withdrawal card, so I could go into another union any time. The president, Ed Boyce, told us he wanted us all to come back to the Cœur d'Alenes as soon as the soldiers left, by all means. He said the trouble would soon blow over. I stayed in Butte about a month, and the trouble in the Cœur d'Alenes looked as though it had hardly started. They had about a thousand in the bull-pen, and about five thousand Federal troops scattered over the district, and had patrols day and night. The bull-pen was at Wardner, and they took them there from other parts of the district.

They were starting up the mines again, and had inaugurated a card system and an employment office, and all men looking for work at the mines had to go to this employment office and get a permit before they could get a job at the mines. The mine owners of the Standard and Mammoth mines sent two representatives to Butte to hire 600 men and offered to pay the same scale of wages that had previously been paid up the cañon, which was the union scale. They also wanted the Butte union to get them these men, and they would pay their fares over there and guarantee them all work. They wanted them to all have union cards and be in good standing. I was in the union hall at Butte the night this was brought before the union, and they would not have anything to do with it. They thought perhaps there might be some trick in it to get them in trouble through the permit system they had put in force in the Cœur d'Alenes, as they required every one taking out one of these permits to renounce all allegiance to the Western Federation, of Miners and make an affidavit to that effect. Some wanted them to do that and to go, but others did not like it, as they thought there might be some catch in it. These men that came to hire them said there was no catch, but they would rather have union miners, as they had been instructed to come to Butte first, and they knew that practically all the miners in Butte belonged to the union. They said if they could not get them there they were instructed to go to Joplin, Mo., which was a non-union camp. As the Butte union would have nothing to do with the proposition, they left for Joplin, and the next I heard from there they were sending men from there by the car-load.

I left Butte and went to Salt Lake City, stayed there a few days, and went out to Bingham, Utah, and went to work in the mines. I met a good many men that I knew from the Cœur d'Alenes, most of them going under an assumed name, for if it became known that a man was from the Cœur d'Alenes, he would have a hard time to get a job, as the Mine Owners' Association had sent out a black-list of the men that had worked in the Cœur d'Alenes the time the Bunker Hill mill was blown up and left there afterward. One of the mine superintendents that I knew in Bingham told me if it was known a man was from the Cœur d'Alenes he would have a hard time to get a job in any of the mining-camps. That was the chief reason for men changing their names. Some, no doubt, were afraid of being taken back, but it was soon known that the authorities were not looking for any one.

I worked in Bingham until the Fourth of July, and went from there to Salt Lake to spend the Fourth, as it is only twenty-four miles. There was no miners' union at Bingham at that time. I went out to the mouth of Little Cottonwood Cañon to work for some contractors that were sinking a shaft there, worked a couple of months, and then got in on the contract. I worked there until Christmas, and then went back to Bingham and worked that winter. I worked in and around Salt Lake City until the next fall, and then went to San Francisco. I went up to Lake County, California, stayed that winter, took a trip from there to Los Angeles, and then went back to Salt Lake City. I drove a milk wagon there the next summer for the Keystone Dairy, went to Arizona the next winter, and worked in a mine there until about March, when I returned to Salt Lake City. I then went to Nevada and worked in the mines a short time at State line, then came back to Salt Lake again and took a short trip up into southern Idaho with a party to look at some prospects, but only stayed a short time.

During all this time I did not save any money, though I worked nearly all the time and always got the highest wages, and contracted some and made good money. I made many good resolutions, and often saved up a few hundred dollars and thought I would get into some little business for myself. When I would get away from town, as I often did, in some out-of-the-way place, I would save my money and make good resolutions; but how soon I would forget them when I would strike town and see a faro game running, or a game of poker; my money would burn my pocket. There were many other attractions, and money always soon got away. I always bought plenty of good clothes and lived well.

I will now relate the results of the Cœur d'Alene strike. There was martial law there for the best part of a year. I think there was only one tried, that was Paul Corcoran, secretary of the Burke union. He was sent to the penitentiary for seventeen years, and was pardoned in about that many months by a new governor.

The fact is clear that the head officials of the Western Federation of Miners did not have the best interests of the union men in the Cœur d'Alenes at heart. They surely must have known they could not forcibly take possession of a railroad train, and twelve or fifteen armed men run that train twenty miles and take dynamite from a magazine and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of property in broad daylight in a civilized country like this, and nothing be done about it. This was one of the best organized districts, with the exception of Wardner, that there was in the country. Mullen, Gem, and Burke, and all the mines close to these towns paid the union scale of wages and recognized the union, and all the secretary had to do to stop anybody from working that did not belong to the union was to tell the foreman at the mine, and if he went to work they would fire him; but there was hardly anybody that attempted to go to work if he did not belong to the union. If he did not have the money to join, the secretary would take an order from him, and the company would hold the money for him and pay him pay-day. To be brief, they had everything they asked except at this one mine at Wardner, and they took this course to make them come to terms, and thus for revenge on this one mine they disrupted the best organized camps in the country; for they could not be more thoroughly organized. This strike broke up every union in the district for a good while. They have some unions organized there again now, but there is only one mine in the district, the Hercules, where a union man dare say he is a union man or attend a meeting, and hardly any of the old miners ever got work there again, except at the Hercules mine, and the manager of this mine was mixed up in this strike.

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