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Show WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 4-90_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 12/5/12 9:38 AM Page 30 uTAH HISTORICAL QuARTERLy ingratiated himself with the miners by frequenting the saloons and making himself “a ‘good fellow’ among ‘the boys.’” After winning the miners’ trust he was elected as the union’s recording secretary, a position that made him privy to the union’s plans and gave him access to its records. Like Riddell, Siringo was eventually identified as a spy, but not before he had spent several months dispatching valuable information to the agency, which helped keep the owners a step ahead of the miners. After learning that armed union men were gunning for him, Siringo decided it was time “to emigrate,” and he escaped the mob by crawling beneath the boardwalk of Coeur d’Alene’s main street. Although it first appeared the miners had achieved an unequivocal victory throughout the mining district, Idaho Governor, Norman B. Willey ultimately declared martial law and sent six companies of the national guard into the area to quash the rebellion.14 The success of the mine owners’ associations in crushing local unions in the West created a movement for region-wide associations of unions.15 After the controversial events at Coeur d’Alene, delegates of local unions from Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Colorado and Utah met in Butte, Montana in 1893 and organized the Western Federation of Miners, the WFM, “a great federation of underground workers throughout the western states.” The Eureka Miners’ Union, which was established in 1886, was one of the local unions that sent representatives to the convention.16 By 1903, the WFM had recruited thirty to forty thousand members with approximately two hundred local unions throughout half a dozen states and parts of Canada. In Utah, between the years 1900 to 1916, approximately thirty-five locals affiliated with the WFM.17 Although it was later perceived as an extremist organization, the WFM initially vowed to establish a positive relationship with employers through the use of arbitration and conciliation to settle disputes.18 The vow was soon broken, however, in response to western mine owners’ militant anti-unionism, the socialist leanings of WFM officers, and economic pressures brought on by the national panic and depression of 1893. The panic resulted in a decline of silver and lead prices, which exacerbated the existing tensions between management and labor when some mine owners decided to lay off workers, reduce wages, and increase their attacks on unions.19 14 Charles A. Siringo, A Cowboy Detective, (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Co., 1912), 135-52; Lukas, Big Trouble, 101-103. According to Lukas, the miners had first begun to unionize in Coeur d’ Alene in 1887. 15 Rodda, Go Ye and Study the Beehive, 209; Michael Neuschatz, The Golden Sword: The Coming of Capitalism in the Colorado Mining Frontier (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 28. 16 Lukas, Big Trouble, 104; Philip F. Notarianni, Faith, Hope and Prosperity: The Tintic Mining District, (Eureka: Tintic Historical Society, 1992), 39; Paul A. Frisch, “Labor Conflicts at Eureka, 1886-97,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (Spring 1981): 155. 17 Lukas, Big Trouble, 221; Schirer, “Western Federation of Miners,” 632-33. 18 Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 172. 19 Rodda, Go Ye and Study the Beehive, 256; James C. Foster, ed., American Labor in the Southwest: The First One Hundred Years (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 33; Notarianni, “Tintic Mining District,” 30 |
