Mining Wars
of 1892 & 1899

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One of the reasons I decided to settle in Spokane, Washington, was because of my deep interest in the labor history of the Inland Empire, which includes not only the Silver Valley, Kellogg, etc., but the old miners, organizers, and agitators whose lives extended all the way back to the bullpens. As a storyteller, folk singer, and songmaker, I found the recollections of these old ones who had survived the work to be exactly what I needed to breathe life into what otherwise would have been a dry narrative. The Coeur d'Alenes are a mythic place, a place of deep memory, hardened by the pragmatism of billy club, dynamite, and collapsing stone. If there can be a summary of the heroic and often contradictory struggle of American labor, it might well be found [in] the heart of the Coeur d'Alene.

U. Utah Phillips (email, May 21, 2007)

The change from gold to silver mining in the Coeur d'Alenes district in the late 1880s meant not only a transformation of the independent, self-employed prospector into a wage-earning company man, but also a complete change in mining techniques and equipment.  While the gold prospector used pans, rockers, sluices, and hoses to get at his metal, the silver miner used dynamite, drills , mine cars, and hoists.  The trek from the gold-rush placer mines of the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River to the hard-rock silver and lead mines of the South Fork was an irrevocable step from the American frontier to the benefits and restrictions of the industrial revolution.  Those who did not -- or could not -- make that step had few places left to 'rush' (Hart and Nelson, p. 27).

The excitement generated by the gold rush into the Coeur d’Alene mining district was over by 1886. Fortunes were made after that time — but not by individual prospectors panning and sluicing gold from streambeds, and indeed not from gold at all. Rich deposits of silver and lead in the district were being mined profitably by heavily capitalized corporations employing  hundreds of hard-rock miners.

The classless, anarchical society of the gold-rush boom towns was coalescing into recognizable groups aware of their own interests. Professional managers were running the deep-shaft mines for absentee owners, some of whom were financiers from the East and West coasts. The miners, a mixture of nationalities and origins, were usually unmarried men. Many were experienced veterans of Colorado and Montana mining camps. Early merchants and professional people in the towns of the district identified themselves with the miners who were their chief customers.

The miners were the first members of the community to join together for the advancement of their economic interests. A partially successful local strike was directed at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine in 1887. However, not until 1890 were the unions secretly organized in all the major mines of the district. While wages were their first concern, the miners also banded together to change the conditions of their employment. They especially hated the companies’ rules requiring them to live in company boardinghouses and buy at company stores. in addition, they wanted the mine owners to make the mines safer and thus reduce the large number of underground accidents, many of them fatal.

On January 1, 1891, the separate unions gathered together to form the Central Executive Committee of the Miners’ Union of the Coeur d’Alenes. Their first major collective effort was not a strike but a hospital. The owners had been deducting $1 a month from the miners’ wages, in return for which the companies provided medical care that the miners thought inadequate. The miners wanted to control their medical care and, through the new unions, contracted to build a miners’ hospital at Wallace. They wanted the deducted dollar to go to their hospital instead of the company doctor.

When the unions did call a strike in 1891, they were successful in bringing all underground wages up to $3.50 a day, except at the Bunker Hill. In the meantime, while the miners enjoyed their first victory, the owners secretly organized the Mine Owner’s Protective Association (MOA). Led by Victor Clement, the manager of the Bunker Hill mine, the MOA was formed to fight high railroad rates on the one hand and the unions on the other.

Thus the battle between capital and labor was joined. The conflict over wages for the men working underground was typical of the difference between the interests of the two sides. The owners wanted to realize economic benefit from new technology, in this case the introduction of machine drills in the mines. They could do so by lowering the wages of the unskilled underground workers, such as muckers and shovelers, to $3 a day. The miners, however, wanted to keep the wages of all undergroud workers at $3.50 a day because they believed all workers were exposed to the same hazards.

The unions won the first round in August, 1891, when they forced Bunker Hill to go along with the other mies and pay a $3.50 uniform underground wage.  Then, on New Year’s Day of 1892, all of the mines were closed down by the owners, with the intent of forcing the railroads to lower shipping rates. Silver and lead prices were rapidly, and the owners could not afford the current rates.  For the miners, it meant being put out of work middle of the North Idaho winter, without wages to buy fuel or food.

In March, the owners got their reduced railroad rates and announced that they would go back to their old differentiated wage scale underground when they reopened the mines on April 1. The unions refused to return to work, and the owners kept the mines closed until June 1. The MOA attempted to bring strikebreakers in from Missouri, Michigan, and other states; but the union men met trains, sometimes at the Idaho border, and forced the hated “scabs” to turn back. The MOA did succeed in running a secret train straight through to the Gem mines, where it unloaded strikebreakers.

The owners were prohibited by the state constitution from bringing armed men into Idaho without specific legislative permission, so they could not use armed guards on the trains. The two-year-old state government could offer little help to the owners because the Idaho militia was almost nonexistent. President Benjamin Harrison refused to send federal troops to help the owners unless there were a clear cause for action, such as violence.

The MOA was not defenseless, however. In addition to obtaining federal court injunctions prohibiting various union actions, such as interfering with the strikebreakers, the MOA hired a Pinkerton spy, Charles Siringo, to infiltrate the union ranks. So successful was Siringo that, under the name of Leon Allison, he quickly became the secretary of the Gem Miners’ Union and thus privy to all of the union’s plans and secrets. By means of a letter drop in St. Paul, Minnesota, he kept the owners fully informed of all union moves.

By the 4th of July, 1892, tension between the union men and the mine owners was very high. Arms had been brought into the district by both sides, and armed guards patrolled behind log barricades to protect nonunion miners at several of the larger mines in Burke Canyon. On July 7, word of the surrender the previous day of a force of Pinkerton detectives to workers at the Homestead steel plant in Pennsylvania reached the district. The union men were exultant.

During the weekend of July 10 and 11, armed union miners converged on the town of Gem on Canyon Creek, and in the hot, still July evening, nonunion miners were attacked and beaten on the streets of Gem and Burke. The fuse had been lit on this potentially explosive situation on Friday evening, when the unions discovered Leon Allison’s real identity and occupation. Early Sunday morning, July 11, rifle fire began between the heavily barricaded Friscd mine, near Gem, and union miners in the surrounding hills. In midmorning, the miners sent an ore car full of dynamite down the incline toward the old Frisco mill, but it blew up short of its goal. Undeterred, they tried again an hour later, sending the dynamite down the sluice into the mill and blowing the four-story wooden structure into match sticks.

The battle was short-lived. One nonunion worker died before the nonunion men and their guards surrendered under a white flag. The explosion at the Frisco was followed by the surrender of the nearby Gem mine, also under siege since early that morning. At Gem the fighting had been more fierce and the shooting more accurate: three men were killed on the union side, two on the owners’ side.

Siringo hid at the Gem mine when the shooting started. As he told the story in his autobiography, Rzata and Spurs, he escaped from his boardinghouse in Gem by sawing a hole in the floor of a back room. He dropped through the hole when the miners started banging on his door and crawled for half a block under the house and boardwalk, where union miners stood. From there he ran under the saloon to a creek, and on to the mine. When fighting got too hot at the mine, he slid out the back and hid out in the hills.

After the violence at the Gem mines, the rest of the district fell under armed union control without further violence. The unions paid special attention to the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine because of its past history of anti-union activity. There a union delegation, backed by some 500 armed miners in the hills around the mine, successfully convinced the owners to move all of their nonunion workers out of the district within forty-eight hours. With the valuable Bunker Hill concentrator under their control and :hrea:ened with destruction, the union’s demands were met. The nonunion miners were sent out on the next train west.

The victory of the union miners in the Coeur d’Alene mining district in July of 1892 was a limited one. For three days following their dynamiting of the Frisco mill and the gunfight at the Gem mine, union men held sway throughout the district. By July 12, however, both state and federal forces had already been set in motion to terminate union control.

The first countermeasures were taken by Governor Norman B. Willey, himself a mine owner. On July 12, he asked President Harrison for federal troops. That same day. Colonel William P. Carlin, commander of the federal troops at Fort Sherman at the city of Coeur d’Alene, received orders from the Department of War to move his :roops to the “scene of the disturbance.” He promptly loaded four companies of the Fourth Infantry on a steamboat bound for Harrison, where they spent the night.

That same night at Cataldo, at the head of navigation of the Coeur d’Alene River, an unknown number of unidentified men attacked and robbed groups of nonunion miners who had been forced by the unions to leave the district and who were waiting for the steamer leaving the next morning. Initial reports in the Spokane newspaper stated that a “massacre” had taken place, that the river was red with blood, and that the unions were responsible. No evidence of a massacre, or indeed of any deaths at all, at Cataldo, or of union involvement, was ever found.

Colonel J. F. Curtis, Inspector General of the embryonic Idaho National Guard, joined Carlin in Harrison as the personal representative of Governor Willey. He reported that 500 union men armed with Winchesters were waiting to contest Carlin’s entrance into Wardner. Not surprisingly, Carlin and his 168 men advanced cautiously to Cataldo on July 13. Concern about the safety of the various :roops under his command led Carlin to order Captain W.I. Sanborn to move Sanborn’s three companies, which had advanced as far as Mullan from Fort Missoula, back to Missoula and then take the railroad around the area to join him on the west side of the mining district. The companies met on July 14.

Wiley declared martial law in Shoshone County on July 13, therebv effectively bypassing the authority of any county officials who might be sympathetic to the unions.  He appointed Colonel Carlin as the state authority in the county, with orders to arrest anyone who was involved in the Frisco explosion and the various armed confrontations.

Early on July 14, Colonel Carlin moved slowly forward up the Cocur d'Alene River and peacefully took possession Wardner, Wallace, Burke, and Gem, watched, as he put it, "by serveral hundred idlers ... lounging around the depot."  That night, federal troops occupied all the towns of the mining district and set up their camps. Several county officials, such as Sheriff Richard A. Cunningham, Justices George A. Pettibone and W. H. Frazier, and Postmaster G. W. March of Mullan, were arrested and accused of aiding the unions. On behalf of Governor Willey, Colonel Curtis appointed Coroner Dr. W. S. Sims as sheriff in place of the arrested Cunningham. Sims and Curtis then proceeded to sweep each town, accompanied by federal troops, to arrest and (in the governor’s words) “safely keep all persons known to have been engaged in acts of destruction to human life or property.”

During the next few days, three more companies of the Fourth Infantry from Fort Spokane joined Carlin’s force, as did 225 men of the Twenty-Second Infantry from Fort Keogh, Montana. In addition, 192 members of the Idaho National Guard arrived from southern Idaho. In all, 1,500 federal and state troops were brought in. With their help, state authorities arrested 600 men and put them in hastily constructed concentration camps or “bull pens” in Wallace and Wardner. In addition to guarding the stockade-like bull pens, which were used to hold prisoners, and to helping arrest Union men and sympathizers, the federal troops were also used to guard the mines, which were reopened with scab labor.

State authorities soon came under pressure from two sides. On the one hand, conditions in the bull pens were primitive. With inadequate sanitation, poor bedding, and weak diet, complaints grew louder about the treatment of the union prisoners. On the other, the cost of keeping so many prisoners wore very quickly on the small treasury of the young state. The governor wanted the state to pull out of the district but was persuaded by the mine owners, with the support of Colonel Curtis, to maintain martial law until November 19, on the grounds that military occupation was necessary to prevent a recurrence of violence.

On July 29, the state succeeded in transferring custody of some of the prisoners to federal hands. The rest were released, with or without bond. Of the 600 who were arrested, 25 were cited for contempt for violation of the federal court injunction of May 28 prohibiting interference with nonunion miners. Fourteen were tried in federal court for conspiracy, and 42 were indicted in state court for murder.

In the contempt trial, thirteen were convicted by Judge James H. Beatty and sentenced to short jail terms in the Ada County jail in Boise. In the conspiracy trial, four were convicted by a jury and sentenced to terms of fifteen to twenty-five months in the federal House of Correction in Detroit. In the state’s murder trial, all were freed by a Kootenai County jury.

By the end of March, 1893, none of the union men were in jail. Those convicted in the various courts had either served their short terms, been released, or had their convictions overturned by the United States Supreme Court.

The mining war of 1892 on the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene had one short battle, six fatalities, four months of martial law, and no victors. At its end, the owners were operating their mines on their own terms but had not broken the unions. On the contrary, the thirteen union members jailed in Boise came to the conclusion that they needed a larger and stronger organization with which to fight the influence and power of the mine owners.

Some of the imprisoned miners took their plans from the Ada County jail to an organizational meeting in Butte on May 15. Forty-three delegates from seventeen western mining camps convened there to found the Western Federation of Miners. For the next decade, the Federation was to be in the forefront of the union struggle against mining capitalists in the West, and then was to be one of the strongest pillars on which the Industrial Workers of the World was founded.  In the beginning the Western Federation of Miners was a conservative organization, bent on obtaining higher wages. better working conditions, fewer Chinese in the camps, and the eradication of the company store.

As early as the spring of 1893, the mine owners were again in trouble. Though the unions had lost momentum. they were still effective, calling strikes that closed many of the mines. National activity affected the district as well. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, ending federal price supports for silver. The panic of 1893, which swept the whole country into depression, lowered the price of silver by 25 percent and caused several local bank failures. The owners were not in a financial position to pay $3.50 a day for all underground work, as the unions wanted. The mines opened and closed with the fluctuation of lead and silver prices throughout the year. On June 20. 1893, less than a year after the dynamiting of the old Friscc mill, Gem Miners’ Union #11 astounded the district by striking the Frisco and Gem mines for the $3.50-a-day wage. But prices for silver began to improve and the railroads offered a two-dollar-per-ton reduction in freight charges in August. By the end of 1893, all of the mines, including the recalcitrant Bunker Hill and Sullivan, were paying the union wage.

The Bunker Hill lowered their wages again the next year, providing yet another cause for ill feeling between it and the miners — a feeling that increased through the rest of the decade. Not only was the Bunker Hill the only major mine in the district to remain nonunion, but it began using Pinkerton detectives and other spies to purify its labor force of union sentiment. Reluctant to rely upon local enforcement for protection, the Bunker Hill organized its own Idaho National Guard unit among its nonunion workers and paid for it with company funds.

Popular opinion was on the side of the miners. A local coroner’s jury in 1894 held Bunker Hill at fault in the death of three men and the injury of two others in a mine accident. The pro-union Populist Party swept the county elections that fall. Edward Boyce, soon to be the president of the Western Federation of Miners, was elected state senator, and Adam Aulbach, outspoken unionist editor of the Coeur d’Alene Sun, became a county commissioner.

While daily life in the Coeur d’Alene mining district settled down, the tension left from the 1892 war occasionally surfaced in violence. The miners were still bitter. On July 3, 1894, a group of forty masked men carrying rifles, their coats turned inside out, visited John Kneebone at his smithy at the Gem mine. The group was seeking revenge for Kneebone’s testimony as a state witness against the union men in the 1892 trials. When Kneebone tried to escape, he was shot and killed. Four others were taken at the same time to the Montana border and told to stay out of Idaho. That same month, Bunker Hill guards thwarted an attempt made under the cover of darkness to blow up the mill.

There were other cases of people being run out of the district, and at least one man — Frederick D. Whitney — was killed in 1897 during a forced emigration. More significant, in light of later events, were a second unsuccessful attempt on May 10, 1896, to blow up the Bunker Hill mill and the successful theft by six armed and masked men of forty-six Springfield rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition from a makeshift Idaho Guard cache on May 13, 1897

As the mine owners’ prosperity increased toward the end of the century, so did the militancy of the unions.  Coeur d’Alene’s own Edward Boyce was elected president of the Western Federation of Miners in 1896. He quickly built the organization into the strongest union force in the western United States, with hundreds of local unions and thousands of members. Affiliation in July of 1896 with the American Federation of Labor lasted less than a year; the Western Federation of Miners then broke away to follow its own more radical course.

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In the spring of 1899, the Coeur d’Alene unions were as strong as the management of the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine was stubborn. In the seven years since the 1892 fight, every mine but the Bunker Hill had been unionized. Through a combination of persuasion and intimidation, the unions had obtained $3.50-a-day wages for all underground workers.

The Bunker Hill remained a constant irritation to the unions If they could not force it to pay wages in line with the rest of the mines, how could they answer the arguments of the other mine owners, who maintained that the lower wages at the Bunker Hill gave that mine an unfair advantage in competing for investment capital and in producing profits? The unions had helped elect county officials, including the sheriff, who were friendly to their cause. They had strong locals and a solid regional federation. Yet as long as the Bunker Hill held out, they were not secure.  The Bunker Hill was doing more than holding out. The management of the company was dedicated to preventing the union from getting a foothold in their mines. For years, they had succeeded in ferreting out pro-union miners and firing them. The unions finally decided to unionize the mine secretly and by early April of 1899 they had carefully enrolled 250 Bunker Hill miners in the union.

On April 13, 1899, the union locals at Wardner met and decided to move openly for a union at the Bunker Hill. Edward Boyce was present to help formulate the union’s requests for higher wages. The manager of the Bunker Hill, Frederick Burbidge, at first refused but then acceded to the union’s request upon discovering its strength. Yet at the same time that he agreed to raise all wages to $3.50 a day, Burbidge refused to recognize the union and demanded that all the union miners quit the mine. Several hundred quit after April 23, and others stayed on but refused to work. The tension increased.

The union put a guard on the mine’s tramway and asked the mine to discharge all of its nonunion employees. Burbidge cabled Governor Frank Steunenberg on April 26, appealing for troops on the grounds that some miners were being prevented from working in his mine. The governor in turn asked Sheriff James D. Young of Shoshone County for information and received the reply that all was quiet and that there was “no armed mob.”

While it is clear what happened next, it is not clear why it happened. The miners’ unions met throughout the district early in the morning of April 29 and organized a mass movement of miners to Wardner Junction, where the Bunker Hill mill was located. Gathering momentum and numbers as they went, the miners took over the Northern Pacific morning train at Burke at 10 AM, and commanded the engineer to move it down Burke Canyon, stopping to pick up miners along the way. Some of them were masked, some were armed, and many had white strips of cloth around their arms for identification.

Their intent became known when they forced Levi Hutton, the engineer, to back his train of three freight cars and one passenger coach up to the Frisco powder house, where they loaded sixty cases of fifty-pound boxes of dynamite onto the train. With this explosive cargo, the “dynamite express” (as it was later called) continued down Burke Canyon toward Wallace.

Near Wallace, where Canyon Creek runs into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, the train was stopped and 200 men who had walked down from Mullan joined their compatriots on the train. This group had reportedly stopped slightly north of Wallace and unearthed a large supply of rifles and ammunition, possibly the arms stolen from the Idaho National Guard several years earlier.

Word of the miners’ approach spread rapidly through Wallace but did not get cabled to Wardner Junction because the wires had been cut. When the train reached Wallace, some of the miners got off and searched quickly for more guns and ammunition. While it was no secret that the miners, now numbering 800 or more, were going on to the Bunkcr Hill, it was unclear what they were intending to do there. In the engine’s cab, Hutton was urged at gunpoint to switch his Northern Pacific train to Union Pacific tracks and take it down to Wardner Junction.

It was a bright spring day, and the train had much the appearance of an excursion as it slowly made its way down the South Fork canyon. The train was swarming with miners, many wearing their best clothes. Flushed with the anticipation of confronting their enemy, the union miners hung onto the passenger and freight cars in every fashion, some sitting on the roofs and others riding the coal car.

Word finally reached Wardner of the approaching union force, and the Bunker Hill management and its nonunion workers quickly evacuated the company buildings. The management was later ridiculed for the quite reasonable decision to hightail it out of town. Burbidge had no force with which to combat hundreds of determined miners. Resistance would have meant only a bloody, and losing, battle.

In the confusion following the arrival of the train at Wardner Junction, some of the men started shooting. Jack Smythe, a miner in the Frisco mine, was killed instantly, and James Cheyne, a worker at the Bunker Hill, was shot in the hip and died several days later in a hospital in Spokane. It was never proven who did the shooting, or why, but it was generally believed that these two were shot for being “traitors” or “scabs.”

The shooting soon ceased, and the action focused on the new mill west of Wardner Junction that the Bunker Hill had completed the previous year at a cost, according to the mine owners, of $250,000. One of the most advanced lead and silver concentrators in the world, it was the pride of the company. It was also an attractive target for a group of embittered miners.

As the Idaho State Tribune described the scene in its next issue May 3:  "The work was planned and executed by men who received the training of a lifetime in the handling of dynamite."  In a methodical and careful fashion, the miners placed the pilfered 3,000 pounds of dynamite in three locations under the mill.

At 2:26 P.M. the first explosion went off, followed immediately by the second and the third.  The huge mill was blown to splinters in an enormous fireworks display that sent pieces of lumber and sections of machinery flying out over Kellogg a mile away.  A total silence followed, broken finally by the gunfire of the miners celebrating their handiwork. 

The immediate aftermath was quiet and uneventful.  The miners piled back on the train for the trip upriver to Wallace, where they dispersed to their homes.  The mayor of Wallace had closed the saloons, although there was little rowdiness.  The destruction of the mill had been enough excitement for everyone concerned.

In retrospect, the excursion to Wardner that day was a fateful one.  The miners, in destroying the Bunker Hill mill, had also destroyed their union's strength.  The forces of political authority and economic power could not ignore such a blatant exercise of union power.  The counter-reation that was already in motion that night would weaken unionism in the Coeur d'Alene mining district until well into the twentieth century.

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Large-scale internment of striking workers and supporters took place in a number of disputes.  For instance, to break the silver-lead miners’ strike in the Coeur d'Alene district of Idaho in 1892, hundreds were rounded up and placed in crude stockades. The Idaho state militia kept activists confined in these so-called bullpens in Wallace and Wardner, Idaho, for weeks with disregard for legal due process. (p. 34)

Strikes are important for showing the pattern of intense conflict between unions, company operators, and the federal government between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries caused by industry competition as well as the risk to health and safety on the job. Some early strikes resulted in unusual treatment by management such as those in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (1892) and Paint Creek, West Virginia, (1912-13) where strikers were confined to bullpens for weeks.

The Coeur D'Alene strikes are a pretty easy call --they are actually used as examples in the NHL study.  Plus labor history is a recognised blank spot in Federally recognized sites.