Deep Resentment Many In Silver Valley Recall Intervention By Black Soldiers In Labor Uprising
Was the waitress delivering a warning? Or just sharing information?
She drew up to the table where black historian Quintard Taylor and his wife had come for a meal and respite from the road.
“A lot of people in this area are still angry over the black soldiers who came here in the 1890s,” Taylor recalls the waitress saying.
This was 1971 in one of the small roadside towns dotting the Silver Valley. Maybe Mullan, Taylor says. Definitely North Idaho, a region whose reputation for producing precious metals was soon to be supplanted by its reputation for harboring white supremacists.
Taylor was fresh out of the University of Minnesota and headed for a teaching job in Washington State University’s black studies program. But he was not yet immersed in the history of blacks in the American West.
“I had no idea what she was talking about,” he says.
The waitress was talking about exploding mills, angry mobs and the last great labor uprising of the 19th century. She was relating the region’s collective memory of the federal government using black soldiers to put down its citizens - striking white miners.
Emotional dynamite
It started with a union meeting in late April 1899 that most people figure simply got out of control, says Katherine Aiken, a University of Idaho history professor. A batch of angry miners hijacked a Northern Pacific train at Burke and steamed down the valley for the Bunker Hill & Sullivan Co. mill at Wardner, picking up more liquor and men as they rolled.
Animosity was the watchword, fear the fuel. Bunker Hill’s Protestant partners openly slandered the Irish Catholic miners who dominated the Silver Valley and the union leadership, Aiken says.
A new drilling technology was spreading through the shafts. That reduced the need for miners who traditionally chiseled the dynamite-charge holes by hand and increased the need for muckers - the men who shoveled waste rock out of the way after the rock was blown. The company was demoting miners to muckers and, facing a tougher market, wanted to reduce their daily wages from $3.50 to $3.
“Violence is often a response when people feel helpless,” Aiken explains.
By the time the stolen train hit Wardner about noon April 29, 1899, there were 1,000 “armed, masked and desperate” miners, The Spokesman-Review reported. Three hours later they fled back up the valley on their stolen train, the Bunker Hill mill “blown into a million pieces with the aid of a ton and a half of dynamite,” the newspaper claimed.
The Bunker Hill offices in Kellogg also were hit, a more devastating loss to the company because its records were destroyed, Aiken says.
One man was dead and two others wounded - one shot in the hip, the other in the lip, the newspaper reported.
The mining uprising of 1892 was being repeated, down to dynamited company buildings. The government’s reaction likewise would be nearly identical. But the consequences of the 1899 clash reverberated for decades.
A call to arms
Most miners nonchalantly returned to work the day after Bunker Hill’s mill was blasted, apparently not expecting retribution. “It was a party atmosphere,” Aiken says.
But when word of the bombing reached Boise, Gov. Frank Steunenberg wired President William McKinley for federal troops. Then Steuenberg dispatched state auditor Bartlett Sinclair to deal with the conflict.
“Two companies of very-dark colored infantrymen from Fort Wright near Spokane were the first to arrive,” Sinclair wrote in his memoir. The sight of the black soldiers was an “aggravating spectacle” to the striking miners. As one man spewed to Sinclair, “to send us these `naggars’ in here where we never let a Chinaman set foot was the thing that hurt us most.”
The U.S. Army intervened in hundreds of labor disputes from the 1870s to 1900. In the West, that meant black troops - one of four divisions Congress created soon after the Civil War and sent to deal with Indians, protect railroad workers and, eventually, subdue white strikers.
Black troops first went up against white workers in 1892, during the bloody Wyoming battle between small and large ranchers known as the Johnson County War, says Taylor, who chronicles such events in his book, “In Search of the Racial Frontier.”
Dubbed Buffalo soldiers by Indians, the black troops were requested by the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association - the club for the big, rich ranchers. The Stockgrowers figured black soldiers would have no sympathy for the Texas cowboys building competing cattle outfits in the state, says Taylor, head of the history department at the University of Oregon.
A few months later, black soldiers from the 25th Infantry marched west from Fort Missoula to help squash the Silver Valley’s 1892 labor riots. Seven year’s later the all-black 24th Infantry came east from Fort Wright for the same task.
Although blacks were purposefully used to divide white union workers in other places, both Taylor and Aiken say they don’t think the federal government was playing the race card in the Silver Valley. These were violent, desperate upheavals. Miners hoped, and mine owners feared, news of the Silver Valley insurrections would ignite nationwide labor wars.
Someone had to intervene before the labor conflict spread. Black troops, especially in 1899, were the most available. Idaho’s militia had been dispatched to the Spanish-American War. The only remaining militia - in Harrison - refused to march on the Silver Valley, Sinclair’s memoir recounts.
Bullpen misery
The black infantry marched into Kellogg in early May 1899 and was ordered to arrest every man even suspected of befriending the union. A large bullpen was thrown together and more than 1,000 miners, friends, neighbors and saloon owners were held - some for six months - without trial, charges or legal recourse.
Nearly everyone in the Silver Valley had a relative in the bullpen and ended up visiting the squalid, temporary prison. Incarceration there became a symbol of martyrdom, says Aiken, who has done extensive research on the labor wars.
When she interviews people today, even those who became mining executives, they mention their grandfather or other relative was “in the bullpen” with the same breath they introduce themselves, she adds. That’s how deep the wounds run, how resounding the government’s response was.
There were few places in labor history where entire communities were surrounded, arrested and shackled with martial law. And martial law was not lifted in the Silver Valley until the spring of 1901, Aiken notes.
Unresolved mysteries
A century later, there are more hard feelings than answers. For example, no one was ever fingered for blowing up the mill.
The company was accused of blowing the Bunker Hill mill to frame the union. But anyone could have easily lit the fuse. Nearly everyone in the valley was mining, had access to dynamite and the expertise to use it.
In the end, the explosion benefited Bunker Hill far more than the miners. The company built a more modern mill - something stockholders might not have supported had it not been leveled, Aiken says.
The mill’s destruction and the government’s response ruined organized labor for 40 years. Unions effectively were sidelined in the Silver Valley until World War II, and never regained full strength.
Today Bunker Hill is in the custody of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, because of extensive mining contamination. Much of the hatred and suspicion of the EPA likely dates back to the federal government stepping in to stop the labor fights of the 1890s, Aiken says.
It’s a stretch to tie the black troops marching on the miners to Idaho’s current racist reputation, she says. When people talk of the old days, “the focal point of them looking back isn’t that those troops are black,” Aiken says. “The focal point is the labor-management conflict.”
Taylor says he cannot produce a solid link, yet he is haunted by the waitress’s comments.
“The waitress didn’t say this area hates blacks because they are black,” he explained. “She said there was a lot of resentment because of what the black soldiers did. There was a very specific incident and it was tied to the region.”
That memory alone may have prepared the way for hate groups, Taylor believes.
“One wonders, for instance, if there’s an older generation that might have asked more questions about the white supremacists,” Taylor says, “but simply looked the other way because of their own local history.”
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