A professor of history at the University of Calgary, Elizabeth Jameson offers insights about the Cripple Creek, Colorado conflict and the rise of the Western Federation of Minders.






I want to start out with the notion of what the period was like during the era. It's hard to envision coming up on the new millennium what was happening right before the turn of the 20th century? With increasing industrialization, how was life changing for workers?

Well, in the country as a whole from after the Civil War on you see increasing industrialization. Now what that meant for working people and their families was a number of things. If you were a farmer, you kids probably weren't going to be farmers. The biggest migration is from the farm to the city. So families are splitting up that way or people are following each other to cities. Work is changing. If you think about the workplace just before or just after the Civil War, you're thinking of a place with maybe a master worker, workman, maybe a couple of journeymen, maybe a couple of apprentices. But it's a small workshop. Probably at most twenty-five people. Where folks make things by hand and they make the whole product. Or if you're mining it's a small mine, and you're in there with a small force group getting out probably coal by the time.

But increasingly as the work process industrializes workers are doing only a small part of the task, they aren't really seeing the whole product through from start to finish. Imagine the difference say from cutting out a whole shoe and stitching it together to fit one person's foot to suddenly you're just running a machine that cuts out the top upper. To fit a standard size, you never see the finished shoe. Instead of working all day to make a product and then selling the product. You're working for an hourly wage. And someone else owns the factory. Now the transition is that the workers have less and less control over the work process. Work is working farther and farther away from the family household. It's becoming more and more wage work. And people become dependant on folks that they never even meet to pay them a daily wage. And it gets easier and easier to resent these folks because in fact more and more they don't work, they simply can own a workshop or a factory because they're very rich. And they get richer and richer. And there's a growing gulf between rich people and poor people. And not surprisingly a fair amount of anger about that. The machinery where people work is often dangerous. So you work very hard, you die young, and it's not a particularly pretty picture.

How does this industrialization affect miners?

In mining, if you go to the era of the California Gold Rush, beginning with the discovery of gold in California in 1848, what you see in the United States is a rapid industrialization of mining. You start with a period that is very brief, and highly romanticized. And that we seem to be thinking about a whole lot right now because it's the hundredth and fifth anniversary of the Gold Rush. We're in our romantic fantasy: there's this guy out there with his donkey, right? And a mining pan. And they go out and they shift some metal in a stream. And they, by God, get gold. And you can go there and work hard. And there's gold in them there hills. And you can get rich if you're lucky. Well, that was never really how it worked. The mining itself was harder. It involved hydraulic drudging, harder labor than we can imagine, so you could mine only for a very brief period. But you were in fact dealing with precious metal that had eroded from the hillsides, which were pure gold or pure silver. Well, there's not a whole lot of that stuff. But it's trail does lead you to the underground source of the ore. And so very quickly we're looking if there's enough ore at deep shaft mining. Where you need some capital to pay for what's called the dead work. A sinking the shaft, putting in the timber, putting in the hoist. And getting down to an ore body, which is likely not to be pure metal. It's not pure gold or pure silver. So you have to mill it and refine it.

Now, you get into this industrial phrase of what is called load mining or quartz mining. This industrial operation requires huge amounts of capital to pay for the dead work, for the machinery, to bring in railroad to get the ore out, and to get it back to where its going to be refined. Finally, capital is also needed to pay the smelting and milling costs. Suddenly, we no longer have this solitary romantic prospector, but a work group formed of skilled of miners coming in from all over the world. Miners came from Eastern coal mines, Cornwall, Ireland, China, and all over the world to learn how to blast the ore most effectively out of this particular mine. And this is dangerous work. So what is going on by the 1890's, is a workforce that's been forming in the West, and reforming from one mining camp to the next since the 1850's. They've been through a series of conflicts with owners over the length of the workday, over how much they're going to be paid, over whose going to work with them, and can they keep people they don't like out of the mines.

We hit the early 1890's, when we are in the middle of huge depression beginning in about 1893. Many folks believe the depression is tied directly to the fact that the United States decided to no longer to back money with silver, and silver mines throughout the Rockies are closing. So you have a very volatile situation both because in hard rock mining, and in any mining, ultimately the stuff underground is going to run out. You're never building a permanent city where five centuries hence your family might still be living there doing the same work. So, you have a mobile labor force that's very, very mobile, and very poor in the early 1890's, that is continually being rebuilt by incoming younger people who are hoping just to earn a decent living. They're not really dreaming of getting rich anymore.

Specifically how does industrialization change the relationship between owners and employees in mining?

Well, first of all, it means that the owners in the pre-industrial era, or in the early industrial era, actually live in the same towns. People know who each other are, and there are faces to put to the names. I think that makes a huge difference. As industrialization occurs, the owners get richer and they are also more distant. Either they never lived in the mining towns, or as soon as they get rich, they move away. The daily relationships are with miners and resident superintendents, or shift bosses and foreman, some of whom have themselves mined so they still know what's going on. They can kind of buffer the relationships between owners and miners. But it becomes very easy for the miners to blame these faceless distant greedy guys for what's wrong in their working situation. And it is equally possible for the owners not to confront the fact that, for instance, the lack of safety in a mine, is really affecting Tom, Jim and Joe. And their families.

Mining itself becomes more dangerous. They're using new technology very quickly. Part of what makes mining profitable in the 1890's is new fining processes. That use cyanide and chlorine. And the people who work in the smelters are undergoing incredible health risks. They also tend to die pretty young. The machinery itself is dangerous. Guys are breathing rock dust everyday. They're using new big machines that are literally called widow makers because you're not going to live very long breathing the dust from them. To make mines profitable, unethical economies are used sometimes. They don't put in enough timber in the mine shaft caves. For example, in Cripple Creek, they brought in electric hoists, which either they don't know that they should ground, or they ignore that they should ground them. As a result, many miners get electrocuted during the first lightning storm because the hoist isn't grounded. It becomes very easy to see the owners who don't work there as living off the sweat and blood of miners.

How do mine owners view their role at this time?

There are two fundamental differences between labor and management that have to do with what work is and what occupation is. In the old mining camps, the miners defined ownership of a mining claim as requiring occupation and work in good faith. If you didn't live on a claim and you didn't work it, you didn't own it. The owners see workers in the industrial age as simply another unit of production. One of the many costs in addition to timber, machinery, railroads, and so on. They see lots of things going in to putting value in gold, and it's their investment, including their investment in wages. From labor's perspective, without them down there putting out the physical energy and the skill to get the ore out of the ground there is no value. So, from labor's perspective work creates value, and from capital's perspective investment creates value and the right to profits.

Describe how this created conflict.

Well, the workers feel ripped off. The owners don't think that labor has the right to demand as much as labor thinks it does. And its very simple in a way when your product is not shoes, but gold or silver. When you are making gold or silver, what you're making is money. Money is your product. So it gets very simple for labor to look at the difference between profits and wages and realize what is being lost between their labor and the mine owner's profits. And they believe that labor creates all wealth, and wealth belongs to the creator there of. So they resent the fact that people who don't share the risks of mining and don't live in mining towns get the majority of the profits.

Could you talk about the notion of Social Darwinism in terms of the owners? That perspective is very different from one today's company owners might have. What was their view?

Well, it's very interesting. The views of many mine owners are influenced by a philosophy known as Social Darwinism, which was popularized by Herbert Spencer. It was based extremely loosely on the work of Charles Darwin, who said that the species that survived were the ones most fit to survive in an environment. Now, what this sort of becomes translated into as Social Darwinism, is the notion that the people who survive are the fittest, which is actually not at all what Darwin was talking about. But what this allows some owners to believe is that if they are richer than everybody else, it's because they are fitter than everybody else. The owners believed that it is not a good thing to pamper less fit people or help them to survive by giving them too much. Because then you will insure that less fit people survive to populate your society. So there is this notion somehow that scientific selection is at work in allowing the fittest people to be the wealthiest and most privileged. Now some people soften this in a variety of ways, including a belief that their wealth is evidence of God's favor. John D. Rockefeller believed that certainly they deserve the money because they earned it, but part of their obligation is then to make opportunities available that will allow the potentially fit people among the workers to improve themselves.

The era we're looking at was a time of great change, a time when people were trying to hammer out what the relationship between owners and workers would look like. Describe that sense of the possibilities of change and creating a New World order, so to speak. The possibility that you could create a different kind of relationship.

I think one of the things that's always difficult for historians to convey given that we think we know what the end of this story is. There are many possible endings to a story. During industrialization workers were not simply feeling totally dispossessed because they brought with them an understanding of their own power in the pre-industrial work place. They believed in their skill, knowledge, and the importance of what they brought to the work endeavor. They also believed in democracy, in political democracy. Therefore, they believed that they had the power to influence industrial social relations. There were a whole variety of social movements and responses to industrialization. That tells us just how many possible outcomes people dreamed. The Knights of Labor, one of the early labor unions, dreamed at one point of something they called the "cooperative common wealth." It had many meanings to different people, but fundamentally it meant that people were going to cooperate to share wealth and insure a more equal kind of society. For some people, it might mean that labor would own all of the means of production, such as the factories, mines, and mills. For other people, it might mean socialism, at least of big industry. The Populous Party, which flourished in the West in the 1890's, advocated that the government should own, run, and operate the railroads, telephones, and telegrams. Other people had all sorts of dreams for what would happen if you could manipulate the money supply.

In fact, the period from about the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century was a period of monetary deflation. The government had printed a lot of green backs during the Civil War to finance the war, and it withdrew them from circulation. So money was becoming more and more valuable throughout this era. Therefore, a lot of farmers were having to borrow money to buy land, fences, new farm machinery, and fertilizer. Then they had to pay this money back in dollars that were worth more than the dollars they had borrowed. So they were advocating printing more money, putting silver behind the money supply, or doing other things to inflate the value of money. What is interesting about this to me is that people as a matter of daily course studied political philosophies and economic philosophies, and you could walk into a bar in a mining town and listen to people debate whether you should have a miner's cooperative, or socialism, or whether capitalism was really the most efficient way to do things. The passion with which they debated had everything to do with the fact they had some notion that they could influence the outcome.

Unlike anything today.

As I look at my students, I wish they had that same kind of sense that it mattered what they thought and what they did. I still believe that we all make history. We either make it by default or we make by getting involved.

They certainly got involved back then. In terms of the labor wars, we were talking earlier about explaining them in terms of the development of the notion of what industrial relations look like, the progression from one incident to another as seen in terms of a broader context. Explain that to me, what's the broader context you think that these viewers should be looking the mining labor wars.

Well, I think that from the1860's forward, or from the development of silver mining on the constock load, what you're looking at is the development of the first small regional and then national mining economies that involve an increasingly regional and national labor force and increasingly integrated mining companies. What's going on in capital side in increasing consolidation, so that larger and larger single ownership groups control all aspects of mining. Not just one mine, but a lot of mines in addition to the railroads that link those mines, and the milling facilities. A few large ownership groups by the end of this period will be cooperating to control things like smelting charges, freight rates, hours of labors, and what they're paying their workers. On the labor side, you've got smaller groups of miners, some of whom have hoped that they're just going to work for a brief period of time and strike it rich, or at least strike it solvent. I think this is really the hope. However, the group of guys who emerge see themselves as a permanent work force who are passing on their history and their lore to incoming workers even as they teach them the increasingly complex skills of underground mining. They organize first locally, and then regionally, and then nationally to control daily issues like wages, hours of labor, and working conditions. They were also trying to have some control over health, benefits, and safety regulations that require state control. Ultimately some of them are dreaming very big dreams of controlling who owns industry and who controls state power, which is also becoming part of these labor conflicts as governors and occasionally presidents, send in troops to manage a strike situation and laborers begin to realize that they need to have some influence in the state as well as in the industry.

So, let's look at the three players who are trying to hash out what this relationship is going to look like, we've got the mine owners, the union miners, and the state or the government. How did they see their roles and what is the division?

Well, when you have a strike situation there are three major public players. First, there are the owners, who are often themselves divided, competing for control of the industry. There are the workers, who will generally appear very united during the strike, but who may be keeping out other workers on the basis of race or ethnicity. Then there is the state, which often holds the balance of power. But state power can be divided between local government, which is often controlled by the miners, and state government which usually serves capital, but occasionally is on the miners side. Now, before we get to the strike, other players are involved who continue to be powerful during the strike such as the local merchants, who either extend credit or don't during the strike when people aren't being paid. There is also the hidden factor of families which is very important in two ways. First, they frequently are providing the basic strike support in terms of women doing laundry, housing other miners, and generally keeping everybody going during a strike. Whether or not a man is married and owns a home may determine how he acts during a strike. For example a single man might leave town during a strike and simply find work elsewhere. However, if you're married with a wife, kids, and a house, you're much more likely to stick with the union because you are going to fight to protect the home and community to which you're committed.

There is this notion of progression as you move from strike to strike, and I know you don't always like that interpretation. But it seems like there are lessons to be learned in terms of strategy, you see a progression in how the WFM, the union miners, and IWW, it seems like each strike there seems to be some kind of growth or a lesson. Explain that to me, how did the miners grow what did they learn from each union, and strike.

Well, miners learn in between strikes what it may be like either to be out of control or in control. They learn the difference that union control or political control makes in their daily lives. But as we move from strike to strike, there are a series of lessons. First, the Comstock in the 1860's taught the lessons of what it means simply to be able to control wages and hours, and to act in a united way to enforce those wishes because a single miner doesn't have much power compared to a very wealthy mine owner. When we get to the Coeur d'Alene strike of 1892, one of the lessons was the importance of regional control. Miners also learned the significance of control of the state, because it is state power that in effect breaks that union. While the miners are sitting there during the Coeur d'Alene strike, they get to talking to each other and realize that they need a national union to support each other regionally. The Coeur d'Alene strike leads to the formation of the Western Federation of Miners in 1893. Cripple Creek, which is the first major strike victory of the Western Federation of Miners in 1894, taught several lessons. First, it taught that even in the middle of a horrible depression, when there are lots of unemployed miners, that if miners hang tough and support one and other that they can win a strike. It shows the importance of state control because it's the only miners strike of this era in which state force was actually used to keep civil peace. The governor during that strike was a Populous named Davis White, who many of these miners had known in from a silver mining camp in Aspen. He used state force essentially to protect the right of miners and to get an eight-hour day and a three-dollar daily wage.

A period of building follows this victory, in a sense both locally but also throughout the mining West, as many people try to follow the example of Cripple Creek by getting a strong miner's union that can organize workers in other trades and control local politics. By1899, in the second Coeur d'Alene strike, we again learn the significance of state power, which is used to break the unions there. But from 1899 to 1903, there are a series of strikes and organizing efforts in milling and smelter unions because the miners have been able to organize the mines themselves. They were trying to extend that power to the new mills and smelters, where workers are working longer hours for less pay in extraordinarily dangerous situations. The efforts to organize the mill workers will lead to some of the strikes called the Colorado Labor Wars in 1903 and 1904. The governor, an intensely anti-union, pro-business man named James Hamilton Peabody, sent the militia into strike area after strike area with very little provocation, and very little justification. In fact, some of the mine and smelter owners involved in this conflict were made honorary colonels in the state militia. The conflict ends with unions being smashed all over the state of Colorado.

Well, labor learned a number of lessons from this strike. First of all, Governor Peabody had been elected because there was a three way contest for Governor in which the moderate to progressive vote was split between democrats and populists, and miners learned that it may be worth it to compromise politically in order to ensure that the unions don't get smashed. They also draw the lesson that they must have a strong national organization, and it would be advantage to be able to bring about a merger of coal miners and hard rock miners because both hard rock miners and coal miners are involved in these strikes. This eventually leads to both the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and to a long-term effort to merge with United Mine Workers of America. Finally, there's a debate for labor about whether to concentrate their efforts on work place organizing because some people believe that no matter what you do, the state will use violence to take control of the political process.

So, there's a sophistication in how to conduct a strike.

The miners learn how to have strike support in place. They begin at a very local level early in this period where not all the mines are closed. In Cripple Creek, a minority of the mines are involved in the first strike. The miners who are working contribute roughly fifteen dollars a month to support the ones who aren't working. Then industry wide support follows. Finally, the development of strike funds that are managed through the Western Federation of Miners Headquarters in Denver. The strikes continue past this point, and managers and owners throughout the mining West begin to cooperate. The result is a series of more and more stylized confrontations between union leaders who are thrown out of one mining town after another by the state. But they go on to the next mining camp and they organize and who they face are the same hired gun thugs, literally gun thugs, ah, that mine owners pass on from one to the next and often the same mil, militia guys. And so these are folks who've seen each others time and time again. And they understand that they are involved in a regional and industry wide ah, struggle for control of the mining industry and control of the local community.

The mine owners learn a series of tactics, such as violence. I personally think that there is a lot of evidence that the mine owners hire out the violence. For example, in Cripple Creek, the mine owners hired a detective to take some railroad spikes out of the tracks. They warned the engineer to stop the train before he gets to this section of track so no one gets hurt, but then they can arrest a bunch of union leaders and accuse them of trying to derail a train. I think occasionally the real violence that occurs is planned staged violence that wasn't suppose to hurt anybody but goes wrong. The violence becomes the pretext for calling in state troops, arresting union leaders, and holding them for months without end on bogus charges or without charges at all in an effort to demoralize and break the strike. After the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when women and children were killed, the mine owners learned that you can be just as effective by simply tying up the unions in court rather than killing people. The mine owners learned that they could brand the unions as mindless anarchists, dynamiters, or potentially violent people and maintain their own image as owners who are using law to control the industrial process.

You obviously don't like the mine owners in these conflicts.

No, I don't. Well, I like some of the mine owners but they tend to be the ones who don't win in the long run. In Cripple Creek around 1894, a period began where you really have a bunch of different competing ownership groups, but these break down into about three major groups. First, a group of fervently anti-labor mine owners, who for the most part are people who've never mined themselves. One family, the Woods family, are sort of benevolent paternalists who do believe in returning wealth to the district, and they built a new big clubhouse for their workers to take showers and to play pool. They also built a huge amusement park for the whole camp, and the workers felt generally pretty good about them because they returned some of their profits to the place that they came from.

Then you've got a small group of owners who themselves had worked at various trades, and happened to strike it rich, and they are generally pretty cordial in their relationships with labor. I mean they're still certainly capitalist, they're certainly devoted to private property. But during the first strike they agree very quickly to recognize the union, and agree to pay three dollars for an eight-hour day. They also stayed open during the strike. The biggest of these mine owners, a guy named Jimmy Burns, stays open through the second strike but by this time he's engaged in a struggle for control of his own company. He's got people in his own company who don't like how friendly he is with labor. They win by the end of the strike, and occupy Burns' mines with the militia and force him to re-open as a non-union mine. He was forced to lose control of his company. So, there a number of mine owners throughout this period who are trying to bring about some reasonable agreement with with labor, but for the most part they are also fighting against anti-union mine owners. Unfortunately, usually the anti-union mine owners win in the long run.

There was violence on both sides. I don't want to paint either side as being all black or all white. What is the culture of violence that exists during this time?

See, I think it's really interesting that a lot of historians have gotten into a false debate in my view about who was most violent. Everybody was violent. Work was violent. Daily life was violent. There is a culture of male violence. I can't tell you exactly who did what in what scuffle--everybody had their own witness about who blew up a mine, or who pulled a gun on who, but what I can tell you is that everybody routinely prepared for violence. The miners carried guns. The mine owners either carried guns or hired people to carry guns. When the owners weren't just hiring an informal army, they brought in the state. Mining itself is a violent occupation. From the miner's perspectives, there was this false notion that if you hit a man who insulted you on a train, or beat up someone who was a scab, that was somehow more violent than when you saw your best buddy blown up in the mine before your very eyes. What the miners would say is that no one cared when violence happened to them on a daily basis. When we drill into a miss shot. Or a cage drops to a bottom of a shaft. Or the more minor violence like I hit myself in the thumb while I'm drilling a hole. Therefore I can't mine for a week, and this isn't a time when there's not workers comp. And there's not disability. And you hit yourself on the thumb and you can't support your family for a week. It is the union that will help you or your fellow workers who will each donate a day's pay to support your family.

At the same time and I don't know want to overdraw this into a notion that by gosh, mining is violent. And the miners never fight back. Of course they fight back. I'm certain that the miners in the era I know well beat up a deputy who was trying to undermine them in the first strike. I am certain that they beat and ran people out of camp, particularly people from Southern and Eastern Europe. That was the way they maintained what they call a "white man's camp." So I don't want to falsify this history by saying either side were saints or demons. What the miners and owners were, were real people who were struggling for control of their daily lives. And they were no more angelic or demonic than you or I am. They were simply in their view doing what they needed to do--either control and protect their profits, or to control and protect their communities. In the middle of the Cripple Creek strike, a non-union worker accidentally drew a mine cable into the shelve wheel and cut it, and the cage plummeted to the bottom of the shaft. Fifteen people were killed. Well, from the miner's perspective, this is violence born of corporate negligence, and born directly of the mine owners' attempts to win this strike by hiring incompetence. As you know, the strike ends with a blowing up of a train depot. They killed thirteen non-union miners. What I am sure of is that violence was not union policy. It was not union policy. However, it was the mine owners' policy to use the armed power of the state to break strikes.

Was there anything particularly Western about this struggle?

Yeah, it took place in the West.

Was it just part of a bigger context of what was going on?

I think so. I think part of what happened was two things. I mean obviously it happens against a Western landscape, and from an Eastern imagination you can see these isolated Rocky Mountain mining camps and they're Western, right? That's the picture we got. But there's a false image that they were more violent than the rest of American labor. Or indeed than the rest of international labor. And that that happened because out there the frontier was violent. It was a violent place. Now this has more to do with our national mythology of the Frontier. Western labor relations and Eastern labor relations and railroading led to the same kinds of violent confrontations, and in fact the same use of state troops. The same kinds of confrontations happened in Australia and New Zealand and all over the world. You're really looking at industrial confrontation, that occurs actually not during the Frontier period at all, but as the Frontier closes. I think that it's become much too easy for Americans to want to believe that this was sort of an odd blip on the industrial radar screen, an oddly Frontier aberration in which people got violent. Industrialization was a violent event.