by Bill Albert
I’ve heard it said that the best defense is attack. Maybe so, if you’re big and tough enough. For me the best defense has always been running. You’ve got much better odds of keeping your teeth and besides, I can move pretty quick and slippery if I need to. When those men started in beating and kicking at poor Harry that’s exactly what I did. Like a jackrabbit out of a box, I was away up the street.
I didn’t write out anything to Mrs. Orchard when I got back home. It wouldn’t have done her disposition any good to know that her wonderful Christian Harry was stealing, drinking, gambling, and had just been beat senseless for one if not all of his sins.
He pulled himself in about an hour later, a few bruises on his face, his coat pocket torn but not looking as bad as I thought he would, and still smiling like he’d won the turkey raffle.
“Harry! Oh, Harry! What’s. . . !”
“Now, Ida don’t go on. Just had me a fall off the back of the platform on the Electric. Ain’t hurt bad.”
“It’s OK, Herbert,” he told me that evening. “A misunderstandin is all it were. Don’t fret.”
I asked him if they were the detectives Neville had seen in the saloon.
“No. Weren’t them. Like I said, mistake it was. Thought I was someone else. Happens all the time.”
He wouldn’t tell me any more than that.
The next day, August the tenth, the Federation called out all the miners in Cripple Creek. The strike saved Harry and the others from having to make up their minds about the high-grading. At the time I reckoned it saved me. But as it turned out it was only saving me for something far more dangerous than high-grading.
9
The Cripple Creek Strike of 1903 and 1904, the story that McParland is after me to tell him, was a sorry confusion to me at the time. As it rolled on I got more of a hold on the whys and wherefores, but a year and a half since it finished there are still more questions than answers.
Of course, I heard how the downtrodden smeltermen over in Colorado City were suffering and how their brothers in Cripple Creek had to help them out. I listened to union men going on about how an eight-hour day would plant a few roses among the thorns along the rocky pathway the smeltermen had to trudge between the cradle and the grave, or how it was that the rustling of the silk dresses of smelter owners’ wives couldn’t drown out the hollow clatter of babies’ skulls. When I heard such talk it made me wish I was a miner so I too could defend with my life’s blood those poor smeltermen and their poor starving children. But I wasn’t a miner, and when I thought more on it I was glad for that.
In any event, Cripple Creek was the strongest union district in the whole state of Colorado, and I reckoned the miners could take care of themselves without my help. From there I worked it around to the idea that the best thing I could do was to help myself. Glove would have been pleased to know I was applying one of his many invaluable lessons.
“Don’t venture your neck on anyone’s account,” he was fond of repeating. “There’s absolutely no percentage in it.”
So, I decided to pack up and get out before there was any serious trouble. The serious trouble was Harry had other plans.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t be askin. Be only a week at the most ‘til I get my arrangements fixed up. Then ya can get to wherever it is ya want to be gettin. Seven short days ain’t much to ask after all we been through together, is it?”
Sitting on the front step on a warm evening about a week after the strike had started, watching other people sitting on their front steps watching other people sitting. Mrs. Orchard had gone off to a prayer meeting. Harry and I were having a smoke and he was laying on the soft soap until I was fairly foaming with it.
“It’s her disposition, ya understand, Herbert. With all what’s goin on I can’t just up and leave her alone, can I? Tell ya what, ya stay here the week and sorta look after things for me and ya don’t have to pay but two dollars, half of the ordinary. Can’t say better, can I? One old veteran to another, huh?”
Harry wouldn’t tell me more than he had some urgent business to attend to up in Denver. Whatever it was he was packed full up with the importance of it and when he broke the news to Mrs. Orchard he kept winking and nodding at me like we were sharing some aproned Masonic secret. The mystery of his forthcoming trip seemed to impress her mightily, confirming as it did that someone in the state capital had recognized her Harry for the special person she knew he was.
He went off to Denver and I stayed to look after Mrs. Orchard and her disposition. The days I spent in the saloons writing letters, although with so many out of work the letter-writing business was none too buoyant. The nights weren’t much of an improvement. I spent those listening to Mrs. Orchard’s lives; her tragic past, the troubled present, burdensome without her beloved Harry, and the delightful future waiting for her in the Glorious Hereafter, if only she did enough of the right kind of praying.
Sunday was Mrs. Orchard number one praying day but for me it was the best letter-writing day of the week. On this particular Sunday I was on my way down Myers Avenue to see if I could set up in Crapper Jacks, a most excellent saloon for letter writing, especially first thing when folks were suffering the morning-after melancholy. Crapper Jacks saw a tidy parcel of sinning. It was my job to put those sinners in touch with better times and more understanding faces somewhere else.
“You there, boy!” a man shouted as I stepped down to cross over the road. “Want to make yerself a fast four bits?”
“A fast four bits” generally means only fast trouble and the man offering it to me looked all of that and more. Under a dark, beetling brow, his eyes swiveled anxiously left and right and his feet dancing an impatient jig put me in mind of old Mike Furlong when Jesus was full upon him. I knew more than enough to know that I surely did not want this man’s four bits. Besides, by his accent I figured he was from Joplin and that was the same bad news it had always been.
“Come on,” he urged harshly. “An hour is all. Ain’t much time. Easy work, easy money. Y’all take these here. Go on, y’all take ‘em.”
He shoved a mess of handbills at me, followed by a twenty-five-cent hammer and a paper bag full of cut nails.
“Y’all post these along the street here and up on the poles along Bennett. Here’s that four bits. Don’t stand there starin stupid like, get goin. Go on! And y’all mind me good, ya do the postin, all of it. I’ll catch up with y’all if’n ya don’t. Y’all don’t want that, now do ya? Go!”
I shook my head and made to give everything back, but the man turned and walked off rapidly. I read one of the handbills.
unjustified outrage it screamed out across the top. It was from the mine owners. They claimed they didn’t have any dispute with their workers, and this was to let them know that if union men wanted to do something as foolish as strike for no good reason they would simply hire other men to take their places. Those new miners would have the owners’ full protection as well.
I didn’t want the mine owners down on me nor the nervous Joplin slugger, so I began posting the handbills along a deserted Myers Avenue.
I finished with Myers and had just started at the bottom of Bennett when I was stopped by a man declaiming poetry at me.
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
“This,” he said, smacking the handbill with his fist. “This is a declaration of war! This will let slip the dogs! This will open Hell at our feet! An eruption, an explosion, a time of deadly reckoning, a time of most fearful suffering when no one will be spared! Sure as the day follows the night! You can’t have scabs working under armed guards in a union district like Cripple Creek. It simply cannot be done. Even a young and tender flower like you should know that.”
George Kyner was the editor of the Victor Record, a thin, dapper man with a pencil mustache, who looked more like an eastern greenhorn and sounded more
like a stiff-armed stage actor than a mining-town newspaperman. Still, I was lucky it was him rather than some union miners who caught me nailing up those handbills.
“Poor boy!” he said when he caught sight of my neck. “Life does extract its toll. But you know the saying, don’t you? ‘There is no wisdom like silence.’ So take heart! But then, silence will not protect you in this dangerous business upon which you are engaged. Who gave you these damnable handbills anyway? Let me see what you’re writing . . . Ah. A damned scoundrel, a blackguard! No, don’t you worry about a thing. The district is union, one hundred percent union. You’ve nothing to fear from him or the owners. If you have any trouble at all you come see me straight away, George Kyner, over at the Record in Victor.”
Nothing happened right then. No eruption, no explosion, but walking out in the district, the tension brushed up against your face like thick cobwebs. Streets that were usually crowded with people and wagons and noise and dust stood half empty and more than half quiet. Even Myers Avenue was subdued, the saloons and dance halls more like funeral parlors, the girls left to kick their heels. Striking miners stood in groups on the corners, heads down, talking low, swapping stories and waiting for something to happen. It wasn’t long in coming.
“You look here,” Kyner said tapping his inky finger on the freshly printed front page of the Record. “They’re going to try to open the El Paso with scabs and armed guards. Imagine! That’s the dogs loosed, son. Sure as the day follows the night, that is the fuse well-enough lit. It’s as if you can almost smell the stink of that wax smoke.”
He sniffed loudly.
“Smell it, do you?”
I can’t say that I did, but I sniffed the air along with him and nodded my head anyway.
The very next day Mr. Kyner found me a job.
“You still have that hammer, Herbert? Here, you post these bills here in Victor and then come back and I’ll give you some more to take over to Cripple. Now this is the proper job of work for a lad like you in a union district like this.”
To Loyal Federation Miners of the Cripple Creek, District Union No. 1, the handbill read. If men so far overcome their principles to take a position against you, who are striving to secure to them their rights, you will be doing nothing but harm to your position by resorting to means that will be in violation of the laws, and we advise you, implore, and plead to the members of the organization that they do nothing which is in violation of the laws of the State. It was signed by Charles Moyer, president of the Federation.
I had posted the mine owners’ handbills. I was now working the other side of the street, but I knew for dead certain the handbills wouldn’t do any good, especially with such highfalutin language. Miners are how they are no matter what the union tells them they should be. Like nature with a vacuum, a union miner hates the job-stealing scab worse than poison. I figured that eventually, and soon too, George Kyner would be proved right. I might not have smelled the wax smoke, but I was beginning to hear his damn dogs barking. I wanted to get out of there before they started tearing at me. But, a long week went by and still Harry hadn’t returned.
“Oh, dear Lord, I pray to You that nothing has happened to him! These are sorely troubled times. So much bad feeling. I just know that the Devil himself is surely loose in this sinful world of tears. Surely he is. Will you pray with me, Herbert? Pray with me for my poor Harry?”
I put my hands together and closed my eyes while she implored the Lord Jesus to watch over Harry and deliver him home safely. I found myself actually praying along with her, praying for Harry Orchard’s deliverance and for my own.
The praying didn’t do the trick, at least not right off. I joined Mrs. Orchard on my knees every night before supper and every night I prayed harder, for reasons of persuasion bypassing Jesus and praying straight through to God Himself, that Harry would come back.
I suppose I could have left without waiting for Harry, but I felt obligated. Mrs. Orchard might not have been the best at weighing up a person’s character, but not far underneath all that praying and all that disposition she was a kind woman and treated me like I belonged.
I was stuck fast by Harry’s leaving, but like anyone with an ounce of sense, I could see that the tide was set to come rushing in.
10
That tide finally rushed in good and proper the first week in September.
“Will you just take a look at that,” Mr. Kyner bellowed. “We’re being invaded. No less than that, son!”
I was standing with him and a crowd of other people near the depot in Victor, watching National Guard soldiers clattering down from their special train. Officers shouted orders and dust swirled as they rushed to form up. A few kids waved small American flags, but most of the people just stood and stared.
“Bought-and-paid-for mercenaries they are,” Kyner declaimed loudly, sounding every bit like Aunt May. “Hessians, hired, mine-owners’ thugs, a woeful disgrace to the uniform of the United States of America.”
“And you, sir, are speaking out of turn! It is you who are the disgrace!”
Mr. Kyner stepped back at the ferocity of the man’s attack. He was florid and portly, wearing a well-cut suit and a freshly blocked bowler hat.
“Don’t you know,” he said, double chins thrust out, “can’t you see that the reign of terror has to be ended? Why, without those soldiers no one is safe, no one’s property is safe!”
“And what reign of terror would that be, pray?” asked Kyner in a mild tone, eyebrows slightly raised.
“The Federation, man, the damnable Federation! Why an honest man can’t work for their damnable intimidation.”
“I can see, sir,” replied Kyner, “that you are absolutely correct. I can’t see why an honest man like you should not be allowed to work down a mine, if that’s your preference.”
A few miners in the crowd laughed. The portly man’s dignity remained unruffled.
“And those communistical stores they’ve opened. That, sir, is a true disgrace! It’s un-American is what it is!”
“Ya had better shut up ‘bout that!” a miner shouted at the portly man. “Ya had better!”
“You see!” the man said to Kyner. “Intimidation!”
The miner and a few others with him started to move towards the man. Kyner raised his hand for them to stop.
“Come on, boys. Come on now. The man has a right to his opinion. It’s in the Constitution. So, let it be. Just let it be.”
“Thank you, sir,” the man said, pulling down at his lapels. “I see that you are a democrat after all.”
“Of course I am. I firmly believe that even a damn fool should have his say. Good day to you, sir.”
He touched the rim of his hat. The miners and some women standing with them laughed loudly. The portly man huffed, but retreated into the crowd. Kyner smiled broadly. He smoothed his mustache with a dainty finger.
“And, you see that man on the black horse?” he said, pointing. “See him? Do you know who that is? That, my young Herbert, is the famous General Sherman Bell, a dyed-in-the-wool union hater if there ever was one. A Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Rider too, at least that’s what he says he was.”
After that he cavalry settled in and took to patrolling the roads and harassing striking miners, while soldiers with fixed bayonets guarded the mines. They put big searchlights on some of the hills and at night played them back and forth across the town streets to frighten people. A Gatling gun was brought in all the way from Wyoming. Every day the soldiers moved it so everyone would get a chance to see it was there waiting for them. Within a couple of days the district had been set to rumbling and coughing like that old volcano that used to hold the whole place in its mouth.
Then the soldiers began to arrest union leaders. A few days later they were arresting anyone who spoke out against what was going on, including Mr. Kyner and the entire staff of the Victor Record. Even some of the
newsboys who shouted at the scabs were taken in and thrown in an old jail in Goldfield. It felt like the Coeur D’Alene starting up all over again.
In the middle of all these ructions, some time about the third week in October, Harry returned. His one short week had stretched to six.
“Didn’t ya get my letter?” he asked a sobbing Mrs. Orchard. “No! Well, I’ll be. Ya just can’t trust to nothin no more.”
“Oh, Harry! The boy and me prayed every night, I had the prayer meeting praying for you too. Our Lord Jesus heard. Praise be! Oh, Harry!”
“Calm yerself, Ida dear. Everythin’s gonna be swell from now on. Ya can count on that. Herbert, stout-hearted fellow that ya are,” he said clasping my shoulder and giving me a hearty man-to-man eye-to-eye. “I want to thank ya for standin by Mrs. Orchard like ya done. White of ya for sure.”
Harry didn’t say what he had been doing all the time he’d been away. Mrs. Orchard was so relieved to have him back she didn’t ask. The only thing I cared about was that he was there and I was free to leave. That evening I packed my Gladstone.
After supper Harry asked Mrs. Orchard with unaccustomed formality if she minded if “her two boys” went out for a stroll.
The moon was coming up as we set off down the hill.
“What do they say about there bein blood on the moon, Herbert?”
I shook my head.
“Damn me, but I can’t remember. Good omen, bad omen? What’s the odds anyway?”
We got down to where Neville’s saloon had been. It and the stores on either side were a jumble of blackened timbers. Not far away by the depot some soldiers sheltered in a doorway from the sharp wind. The few people on the street hurried by, silent and anonymous. Harry kicked at a burned piece of wood.
