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Show WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 4-90_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 12/5/12 9:38 AM Page 25 Labor Spies in Utah During the Early Twentieth Century By dAWN RETTA BRIMHALL ANd SANdRA dAWN BRIMHALL W hen George W. Riddell came looking for work in Utah’s Tintic Mining District in 1905, the boomtown where he settled, Eureka, was the district’s business and civic center. Eureka had a population of approximately thirty-five hundred, and was home to more than ninety businesses and four major mines— the Bullion Beck and Champion, Centennial Eureka, Eureka Hill and Gemini—and later the Chief Consolidated Mining Company. A few years earlier, Tintic had been heralded by The Salt Lake Mining Review as “among the leading mining sections of the intermountain region,” and the Eureka Reporter had boasted that the district, which had produced approximately The Pinkerton Labor Spy, an thirty-five million dollars in ore from 1870- exposé of the use of labor spies 1899, was “carving its way into becoming one to disrupt and gather information of the richest and largest producers of the on western labor unions. The book was published in 1907. entire country.”1 Dawn Retta Brimhall teaches high school history and geography at City Academy in Salt Lake City. Sandra Dawn Brimhall is a writer and amateur historian who lives in West Jordan. 1 Eureka Reporter, September 15, 1905. The Tintic Mining District is located approximately seventy miles southwest of Salt Lake City in Utah and Juab counties. Eureka had a population of 3,325 in 1900 that grew to 3,829 in 1910. Philip F. Notarianni, “Tintic Mining District” in From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah, ed. Colleen Whitley (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006), 342, 353-54. Eureka’s population experienced ebbs and flows between census years due to the transitory nature of the mining town. 25 |
