The Colorado Labor Wars: Cripple Creek, 1903-1904

By Pikes Peak Library District

This publication contains papers contributed by the presenting authors during the June 5, 2004, symposium at the Pikes Peak Library District and contributes to the scholarship regarding the events that occurred in the Cripple Creek District during the Colorado Labor Wars. Photographs include Western Federation of Miners (WFM) members who were arrested and held by the Colorado State Militia, then deported from the state as a consequence of their union affiliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pikes Peak Library District
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781567353297

Book preview

The Colorado Labor Wars

Cripple Creek

1903–1904

A Centennial Commemoration

Edited by

Tim Blevins, Chris Nicholl & Calvin P. Otto

Published by

Pikes Peak Library District

The Colorado Labor Wars: Cripple Creek 1903–1904

A Centennial Commemoration

Copyright 2006 Pikes Peak Library District.

Smashwords edition.

All rights reserved.

This publication was made possible by private funds.

For additional copies or DVDs contact:

Pikes Peak Library District

P.O. Box 1579

Colorado Springs, CO 80901

Smashwords e-book ISBN 978-1-56735-329-7

paperback ISBN 978-1-56735-225-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006901084

Parts of Elizabeth Jameson’s History, Memory, and Commemoration: The Cripple Creek Strike Remembered and Talking the Walk: The 1903-1904 Strike Centennial in the Cripple Creek District in the present work appeared in All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek, © 1998 by University of Illinois Press.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many people who made the symposium and this book possible. We especially want to thank Elizabeth Betsy Jameson, Larimore Nicholl and Katherine Scott Sturdevant for their editorial assistance. We wish to also thank Betsy for proposing the symposium commemorating the Cripple Creek Labor Wars, resulting in this publication. The Editorial Committee extends its appreciation to the Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections staff who all worked hard to make this event possible. A special thanks to Dee Vazquez, Community Relations Officer, her staff, and Steve Antonuccio, Multi-media Center and Production Studio Manager, for video recording these lectures. We are also grateful to Mary Ellen White for her assistance in preparing this book for e-book formats.

The Editorial Committee

Pikes Peak Regional History Symposium

Sponsored by

Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District

Pikes Peak Regional Labor Council

In partnership with

Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum

Cripple Creek District Museum

Western Museum of Mining and Industry

Regional History Series

Editorial Committee

Tim Blevins

Chris Nicholl

Calvin P. Otto

Cover and Book Design

Nancy Thaler

Project Director

Chris Nicholl

Pikes Peak

Regional History

Symposium Committee

Chris Nicholl, Co-Chair

Calvin P. Otto, Co-Chair

Steve Antonuccio

Tim Blevins

Ed Hunter

Linda Lemieux

Jan MacKell

Matt Mayberry

FOREWORD

The purpose of the first Pikes Peak Regional History Symposium was to commemorate the centennial of the Cripple Creek Labor Wars (1903–1904) and to detail the causes and consequences of one of the era’s violent labor strikes that spread throughout the Colorado mine fields. Secondarily, our purpose was to publicize a portrait collection, housed in the Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections, of ninety Western Federation of Miners members who were arrested and held by the Colorado State Militia; many were deported from the state as a consequence of their union affiliation.

The free public symposium, held on June 5, 2004, was a collaborative effort involving Pikes Peak Library District’s Special Collections, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, Cripple Creek District Museum, and Western Museum of Mining and Industry, with financial support from the Pikes Peak Regional Labor Council. The daylong program took place in the 1905 Carnegie at Penrose Library. The event was completed the next day with an early-morning vigil and an afternoon walking tour of the major strike sites in Victor, led by Dr. Elizabeth Jameson.

This publication contains the symposium papers presented by the authors and is intended to contribute to the scholarship regarding the events that occurred in the Cripple Creek District during the Colorado Labor Wars. We are appreciative of everyone who contributed their research to the symposium and this publication, as well as to those who attended the events. The program was videotaped for screening on Adelphia Channel 17—The Library Channel, and DVDs are available for purchase from the PPLD Multi-media Center and Production Studio.

Paula J. Miller

Executive Director

Pikes Peak Library District

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

History, Memory, and Commemoration: The Cripple Creek Strike Remembered

Meet Me at the Ballot Box: Women Voters, Striking Miners, and Colorado Labor Politics

Is Colorado In America?: Emma Langdon, Polly Pry, and the Colorado Labor Wars

Prostitution During the Cripple Creek District Labor Wars, 1904

High-Grading: Theft or Wage Supplement Right?

John Harper, Deported Miner: The Cripple Creek Strike as Family History

Talking the Walk: The 1903-1904 Strike Centennial in the Cripple Creek District

Selected Bibliography

Symposium Contributors

About Pikes Peak Library District

Back to Contents

Memory: The power, act, or process of remembering. The length of time over which remembering extends. Fame after death; posthumous reputation.

Remember: To have (an event, thing, person, etc.) come to mind again; think of again. To bring back to mind by an effort. To keep in mind with some feeling, as of pleasure, gratitude, etc. Remember implies a putting oneself in mind of something, often suggesting that the thing is kept alive in the memory so it can be called to conscious thought without effort.

Commemorate: To honor the memory of by a ceremony, etc. To preserve the memory of; serve as a memorial to.

Dismember: To cut or pull to pieces; separate into parts. To remove the limbs from.

History: The account of what has happened. Narrative, story, tale. All recorded events of the past. The branch of knowledge that deals systematically with the past; a recording, analyzing, co-ordinating, and explaining of past events. A known or recorded past.¹

History, Memory, and Commemoration:

The Cripple Creek Strike Remembered

Elizabeth Jameson

This essay was prepared to commemorate the centennial of the Cripple Creek strike, one of a series of strikes known as the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–1904. A weekend commemoration organized by the Pikes Peak Library District, exactly one hundred years after the strike’s dramatic climax, included a symposium on June 5, 2004; a 2 A.M. vigil June 6, 2004, below the former Independence, Colorado, townsite; and a tour of the strike scene in Victor, Colorado, on June 6. These events linked the sites most directly involved in the conflict, bridging the divisions of interests and ideologies that fueled it and emphasizing the different meanings the Labor Wars carried for the participants and their descendants.

Commemoration implies a shared understanding of events, a shared set of symbols, a common cast to memorialize. Histories of the Colorado Labor Wars establish no such common ground.² Selective memories and erasures recorded different versions of this history.

Open a history book and look for the Cripple Creek District. Most U.S. labor histories mention Cripple Creek, and the district has written romantic and bawdy chapters in local Colorado lore. The cast of characters includes the romantic failure: Bob Womack, a hard-drinking ranchhand who spent twelve years prospecting before finally, in 1890, striking paydirt in a secluded cow pasture, who sold his claim for $500 and a case of whiskey because he couldn’t afford to develop it. It includes the lucky winners: Winfield Scott Stratton, James Burns and Jimmy Doyle, the trio of working guys who struck it rich on Battle Mountain. And those who won in the long run: Charles Tutt, Spencer Penrose, Charles MacNeill, and Albert Carlton, memorialized in local histories as the lovable roguish youngsters who built their empires by day and played equally hard at all the amusements Cripple Creek’s bawdy Myers Avenue offered young men with gambling spirits. And the women who worked the vice district: Hazel Vernon, Belle McCluskey, Leo the Lion, romantic, colorful, one-dimensional caricatures of real women who earned their livings in the local sex trade.³

Open a labor history and there they are again, locked in an equally romantic conflict with Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners, the forces of law and order battling a faceless band of miners blindly following their socialist leadership. So add to the cast Big Bill, taking on the capitalists, sending his troops into a losing battle. And the Colorado governors, separated by a decade and a class divide. Gov. Davis Bloody Bridles Waite, aging Aspen Populist, swung the power of the state behind the miners in the first Cripple Creek strike, in 1894, and won for them the right to belong to a union, an eight-hour day, and a $3 minimum daily wage. Gov. James Hamilton Peabody, Cañon City banker, sent the militia back in 1903–1904, led by local mining superintendent Sherman Bell who announced his mission to do up this damned anarchistic federation.⁴

These colorful characters told the story of Cripple Creek for generations. But they aren’t the people I first remembered when I thought about what we commemorated, whose stories I honored, who remain the reason the rest of it matters. For me, the centennial evoked memories of Leslie and Ruby Wilkinson, who built the road to the top of Mt. Pisgah outside Cripple Creek; of Beulah Pryor, who came to the district during the 1903–1904 strike when her stepfather was recruited as a strikebreaker; of Charlie Gatheridge, who came in 1905, just after the district became a non-union camp. I thought of Kathleen Welch Chapman whose parents were union activists in both Cripple Creek strikes, and whose family story encapsulates the union side of the history.⁵ They were all in their 80s and 90s in the 1970s when they shared their memories with a very green young historian with a tape recorder who asked impertinent questions. Most of all I thought of May McConaghy Wing, born in Leadville in 1890, the daughter, wife, and mother of hardrock miners, the keeper of local memories who ran the Victor Museum from the time she was 70 until she was 90.⁶

May Wing voiced the challenge of writing this history. I lived the history that I can tell, she told me. And of course, the history today in books that’s written a lot, is not really the true thing, as it was lived.⁷ The imperfect connection between history in books that’s written a lot, and history as it was lived, lay at the heart of the strike commemoration.

For May Wing and countless others, Cripple Creek was more than the name of a dramatic strike. It was home. Known as the World’s Greatest Gold Camp, by 1900 the district’s ten towns housed some 32,000 people, most of them miners and their families drawn by the promise of steady work at good pay. The district was, from 1894–1904, a stronghold of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), renowned for its strikes, its endorsements of the Socialist Party, and its leadership in founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Founded in 1893, the WFM’s first major victory was the Cripple Creek strike of 1894. The victorious miners supported other crafts, and by 1902 helped organize a majority of all workers in all trades in some fifty-four local unions.⁸

The unions influenced wages, hours, and working conditions, provided for the health and welfare of their members, established libraries and reading rooms, published a daily newspaper, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press, which boasted that it was The Only Daily Newspaper Owned By Organized Workingmen. They organized the local holidays, and wielded considerable political influence. Labor’s power ended with the Cripple Creek strike of 1903–1904, when, for fifteen months, miners struck to support smelter workers who were fired and blacklisted for joining the union.

View of Anaconda, Colorado, with houses, tailings and the Mary McKinney and the Morning Glory mills on the hillside. Photograph by L. C. McCLure, from Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District.

Much of that time the district was under military occupation. The strike ended with a tragic explosion at the Independence railroad