WE NEVER FORGET: Martyrs of the Wardner Bullpen, June 1899-Mike Devine, Mike Johnson, & Miles McMillan

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Quote Mother Jones, Pray for dead, Ab Chp 6, 1925
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WNF Labor Martyrs, Wardner ID Bullpen, June 1899———-

WE NEVER FORGET
The Martyrs of the Wardner Bullpen
Who Lost Their Lives in Freedom’s Cause During June of 1899

Following the Battle of Bunker, Mike Devine, Mike Johnson, and Miles McMillan were rounded-up, along with about 1,000 men of the Coeur d’Alene District, most of them miners and members of the Western Federation of Miners. They were all herded into the military bullpen near Wardner, Idaho. Reports from those imprisoned with them indicate that Mike Divine and Mile McMillan died from the effects of exposure due to the brutal conditions of the bullpen. Mike Johnson was deemed a “lunatic” by his captors. He was killed while attempting to escape as he was being transferred from the bullpen to the “lunatic” asylum.

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Hellraisers Journal: Summary of Moyer-Haywood Case From Current Literature: Socialist Press & “Undesirable Citizens”

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If they hang Moyer and Haywood,
they’ve got to hang me.
-Eugene Victor Debs

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Hellraisers Journal, Saturday June 8, 1907
Current Literature on Moyer-Haywood Case, Part II

HMP, Gooding Steunenberg, Current Lit June 1907

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THE murder of ex-Governor Steunenberg, as viewed by the state authorities of Idaho and by most of the daily papers of the country, came as a sequel to a long series of labor troubles between the miners and the mine-owners of the Coeur d’Alene district in Idaho. This district, twenty-five miles in length and one to five miles wide, contains rich mines of lead. Trouble began in 1892 and continued for seven years, off and on, with all the usual violent accompaniments of a war between labor and capital in a region where the forces of government are none too strong and the leaders on either side none too scrupulous. There were pitched battles between the union men and the non-union men. Dynamite was used to wreck mills, men were assassinated, and on May 8, 1897, the feeling had become so intense that President Boyce, of the Western Federation, advised every local union to organize a rifle corps, “so that in two years we can hear the inspiring music of the martial tread of twenty-five thousand armed men in the ranks of labor.” The trouble reached a climax in April, 1899, when the $250,000 mill of the Bunker Hill Company was destroyed by the miners with dynamite.

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Hellraisers Journal: From the Montana News: Ida Crouch-Hazlett in Caldwell, Idaho, Interviews Mrs. Steunenberg

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There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday March 15, 1907
From the Montana News: Ida Crouch-Hazlett Reports From Caldwell

GOV. STEUNENBERG’S WIDOW
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Interview by Ida Crouch-Hazlett

Ida Crouch-Hazlett, Socialist, Montana News, Aug 3, 1904

Since the kidnapping case has been put off till the close of Steve Adams’ trial, which is simply the preliminary skirmish of the same conflict, I took the time on March 5 to walk out to the Steunenberg residence, and have a talk with the widow of the bull-pen governor. The house stands at the extreme edge of the little country town of Caldwell, it is modest modern cottage with no signs of great wealth about it, but an air of comfort and indications of sufficient means to cover ample middle class wants. Mrs. Steunenberg is a pleasant-faced, portly woman, short in stature of those general characteristics that are ordinarily called “motherly.” She was not averse to giving any information asked for and indeed seemed to think it her duty to satisfy the public curiosity. She is an ardent adherent of the Adventist faith, and seems to reconcile everything with the idea that it is “God’s will.” She says she knows nothing of papers and politics.

A neighbor who sometimes did little chores about the house was at first arrested for the terrible crime. She always strenuously opposed any suspicion being laid upon this man. She showed me the fragments of clothing that were gathered up about the fatal spot. The largest one was not over six inches long. She said she had formed no opinion as to the perpetrators of the deed, that there were those whose business such matters were and she left everything to them.

The depth of the class struggle between the economic forces of society is nowhere more evident than in this calm, placid woman, who has no idea that her husband’s actions in the brutal Idaho war were anything but necessary and fully justified by the circumstances. The father is looked upon as a martyr to public service, and the young children of which there are four, have each full sets of his pictures. The entire forms of bourgeois thought must be shaken from their adamantine strongholds before even a suspicion of justice can find lodgment in the social consciousness.

The very fact that such a heinous, insensate, cowardly crime should have been laid at the doors of men banded together to better and uplift the conditions of the workers, who have nothing to gain by crimes, but everything to lose, that these men should have been followed so relentlessly by the iron hand of all the machinery that the employing class can use shows the desperate straits to which this robber class will go to maintain the prerogatives and retain the slave.

Men who work, awaken. There is no peace or security for you, except as you arise and give battle for the common rights of all human beings.

IDA CROUCH-HAZLETT.

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