You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 10, 1906
From The Labor World: George Shoaf on the Cripple Creek Situation
From the Duluth Labor World of June 9, 1906:
MINE COMPANY STORES
AND IMPORTED LABOR
—–
Mine Owners Association of Cripple Creek
Now Preparing to Discharge Scabs
—–
Fellows Who Helped to Deport Union Men
to Be Dismissed By Mine Bosses.
—–
BY GEORGE H. SHOAF.
Staff Correspondent Appeal to Reason.
—–
Denver, Colo., June 7.-I just returned from my trip to the Cripple Creek district this morning. Conditions commercially in that community are really worse than were pictured in this week’s Appeal. The howls from the business men are loud and long. On every street corner groups of men gather and discuss the situation and outlook. In the restaurant conversationalists openly threw off the mask and spoke their mind. They cannot sell their possessions and they have no place to which they can go. They are barred from all other western mining camps-and they dislike to return east and take chances with the unemployed. Where I stayed at night-and I changed rooming houses every night-the men about the stove talked hard times, cursed their luck and admitted their folly in helping the Mine Owners’ association drive the Western Federation from the district.
But worse is to come. The Mine Owners ‘association is going to introduce company stores and compel their employes to accept scrip instead of cash, and exchange their wages for products sold and handled by the company stores. This will effectually drive all the remaining merchants out of the district. You can now quickly see why the business men are registering such almighty kicks.
And that is not all! District Attorney C. C. Hamlin has just returned from Europe and Italy. After the introduction of the company stores the Mine Owners’ association have it on their program to cut wages in the mines one-half and increase the hours of labor from eight to ten. If the present force of scabs object to this program, cheap labor from Italy and Greece will be imported and thrown into the district. Arrangements to import this cheap labor have been made, and Hamlin is able to start the immigration movement from Southern Italy at a moment’s notice.
The scab miners in the district realize the inevitable and they are howling even louder than the business men. They will be up against it worse than the merchants. They can work in no other western mining camp, and the only thing left for them to do is to go into the coal mines, stay where they are at reduced wages, or join the army of tramps and criminals.
The Mine Owners’ association and Sheriff Bell and his band of deputized thugs will continue to control the district, as they are now doing. Next on the program will be to handle the railroad situation in the district as the big coal mining companies handle the roads out of Trinidad, in Southern Colorado. There, to visit the coal mining camps, a person must undergo a rigid examination at the depot by company detectives. If the prospective visitor can give no plausible excuse for desiring to visit the mines he is turned back at the depot and not permitted to proceed. If the visitor tries to go to the coal camps by some other route, his life is apt to pay the forfeit for his temerity. Such will be the situation out of Colorado Springs and Canon City within two years. No one will be permitted to go into the Cripple Creek district unless by the grace of some member of the Mine Owners’ association.
—–
[Photograph added.]
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SOURCE
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-June 9, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/49587270/
IMAGES
Citizens’ Alliance Terror in Cripple Creek Strike
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66990747/
Colorado Mine Owners Ass by Ryan Walker, AtR, Jul 30, 1904
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66990929/
See also:
The Cripple Creek Strike
-by Emma Florence Langdon
Denver, 1904-05
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/langdon00.html
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Colorado Strike Song – John McCutcheon