Excerpt from Red Jack: The Life and Times of Jack London
Jack London came to the mining town of Cripple Creek in April 1899. He was only two months back from his two-year long sojourn to Klondike, and naturally still wary of recognition and arrest for his spectacular would-be assassination of three years earlier. ‘John Chaney’ was long dead, and he would never use the name again. He traveled often and quietly, later claiming, “if I failed to cross a state line at least four times a year, I was moving too slow.” He took unskilled jobs of every sort, working as a timberman in Washington, a fruit picker in California, and now a miner, in Colorado. “My hands were horny, and my back still ached,” he would say, after the rigors of the frozen far north. But he was glad to be back in his country, and eager to reacquaint himself with it.
The intense manhunt launched after his daring escape from San Quentin had long died down. The frontier had closed at long last, but the west was still a broad and often lawless land. So long as he maintained a low profile, he could live indefinitely in those wide-open spaces.
But it was not in London’s nature to keep a low profile.
It had been barely a decade since gold was first discovered at Cripple Creek. The town was founded on the spot in 1890, and like so many boomtowns, enjoyed an explosive growth in the following years. The population swelled from nothing to nearly 30,000, including thousands of men who trekked west to hack their living from the hard, sunbaked Colorado earth.
There was no single method of mining gold in the region. Some men worked in the hard-dug underground tunnels carving raw ore out of the rock with hand and pickaxe, by the light of guttering lanterns. Others worked in the less-claustrophobic open mines, which were pits dug ever deeper and narrower, with staggered walls, so that they resembled sorts of inverted pyramids. Regardless, it was hard, grueling work. Injuries and deaths were commonplace. But it was profitable.
By 1899, Cripple Creek was one of the largest towns in Colorado and turning out more than $2 million worth of gold per year.
Many of the miners felt they were not seeing their proper share of the produced wealth. The men who toiled in the pits were often unskilled, impoverished migrant workers (either from abroad or other parts of the country) with no real personal ties to the settlements in which they worked and lived. Pay was not good, usually averaging at less than $3.00 a day. The old, conservative craft unions that had characterized the now-banned AFL tended to disdain such ‘unskilled’ labor, leaving these workers in the cold.
It was a recipe for radicalism. And that incipient radicalism found its first real incarnation in the Western Federation of Miners.
The WFM was formed in the aftermath of the bloody 1892 Coueur d’Alene strike in Idaho, where thousands of gold and silver miners went head to head with the powerful Mine Owners’ Association. It had ended in five deaths, the arrival of federal troops and defeat for the strikers, in a pale foreshadowing of the Red Summer.
WFM president Edward Boyce did not intend for his new union to be of a kind with the timid, reformist AFL or the Knights of Labor. Those unions were, accurately or otherwise, seen as largely the preserve of skilled workers who had found a comfortable spot and would fight to keep it. The common laborers of the WFM had no comfortable spots. In fact, they had nothing to lose at all.
As Boyce himself was to later say, in the end, “there can be no harmony between capitalism and labor”. The ultimate goal of the WFM was not to win for the workers a greater piece of the pie, but to smash the oven and bake a new pie.
The WFM grew quickly, its ranks swelled by the discontented miners of the west. Its first great success, in fact, was in 1894, in Cripple Creek.
There the gold miners had walked out en masse, when the owners connived to slash wages by fifty cents without a commensurate reduction in hours.
The owners attempted to raise a private army under the auspices of county Sheriff Bowers, to either compel the strikers back to work or shunt them aside in favor of nonunion labor. Fighting broke out.
Naturally, the state militia was called in. But in 1894, Colorado’s governor was Davis Waite. Waite was a firm Populist, and deeply sympathetic to the miners. Amazingly, the militiamen did not break up the strike—they defended it. In the end, the owners were forced to capitulate. Wages rose by nearly a dollar. It was a seminal victory, and the WFM grew accordingly.
But this happy episode was concluded only months ahead of the outbreak of fighting in Chicago. And the hideous carnage in the summer of ‘94 made all but certain there would never be such a felicitous ending to a work stoppage again.
When Jack London arrived in Cripple Creek in April of 1899, there were already whisperings that the mine owners were soon to launch another offensive, this one under the mantle of the Red Act.
London easily got a regular job as a common miner—the mines were always looking for more hands. Viewing himself as a sort of radical spy behind enemy lines, he noted with some satisfaction that it “is an easy thing working under the master’s nose”. He took up residence in a ramshackle shack on the outskirts of town, dwelling alongside many hundreds of his fellow workers.
Eager to spread the socialist gospel to the ostensibly ignorant proletarians of Colorado, London was shocked to find that much had changed since his arrest and self-imposed exile. In his own words, “these men were far ahead of me.”
In the five years since Chicago unionist and even socialist sentiment had seen growth rapid enough to rival any boomtown. London later recalled that “we had a song we would sing, when we could get away with it.” He referred to a work song of unknown provenance, which included the lines:
Debs was a howlin’ red, they said
And so the bosses shot him dead
He fought for home and life and bread
And so they filled him full of lead.
But when we paint this whole place red
They’re gonna miss
ol’ Eugene Debs!
A crude song, with primitive rhyme, but indicative of the growing mood among western miners, soon to prove some of the most radical workers in the country.
In the saloons of Cripple Creek, where the miners tended to congregate after the day’s work, London was first introduced to the WFM.
He could not join fast enough.
In the spring of 1899, there were rumors that the bosses were gunning for another pay cut. Waite wasn’t governor anymore, and if the militia was called out again, it would not be on the side of the strikers.
The country was still reeling after Wilmington, and if there was ever a time to cry ‘red!’ as an excuse for a labor crackdown, this was it.
London attended his first WFM meeting in early May. It was, he would later recall, the first time he ever heard ‘
the Internationale’. Almost unknown in America before 1894, in the aftermath of the Red Summer the song was suddenly on ‘everyone’s lips.’ Though he had considered himself a convinced socialist since ’94, it was here he was first introduced to the concept of industrial unionism. “It made sense,” he would say. “That the workers ought to run things in proportion to their
contribution to things. The miners ought to run the mines, and the steelworkers the steel mill. But it made still more sense that we ought not to split ourselves up as laborer, or blaster, or crusher. A miner was a miner.”
London became well-liked by his fellow miners. On the edges of the open gold pits or during the brief, punctual lunch breaks, he entertained his comrades with memorized lines from Kipling and original compositions satirizing the mine bosses. He soon made friends with John Welch, a leading member of the Vinidicator Mine’s WFM local. Welch showed London his SLP party card with a sense of pride—outright membership in the party was still rare at that point, even as sympathy grew.
On 15 May, the dreaded came to pass. The United Gold Mines, in collaboration with their counterparts leagued together in the Mine Owners’ Association, announced a reduction of 25% on the wages of unskilled workers, dragging a day’s pay from $3.00 down to $2.25, nearly undoing the gains of the strike in ’94.
Similar pay cuts were made in mines across the state.
The executive committee of the WFM immediately called a strike in protest.
On 19 May, miners walked en masse out of the Vindication Mine and out of a dozen other mines across Colorado. A strike committee was formed, and out of the 800 or so common laborers at Vindication, London was elected to the council of fifteen.
The Mine Owners’ Association had expected as much, though some of the bosses had hoped vainly the workers might acquiesce meekly.
In Cripple Creek, the WFM worked quickly. Its members, like the rest of the country had watched as the troops marched into Chicago and New Orleans. They had flinched at the bloodshed in Lattimer. They had looked on in horror as the carnage in Wilmington unfolded.
They prepared for the worst.
Then Bill Haywood arrived. Haywood, the WFM’s treasurer and without a doubt its finest orator and organizer, had been in Crested Butte at the time, waiting for the wage cuts and the resultant strike he knew were coming. As soon as it came to pass, he made for Cripple Creek, the sight of that rare labor victory five years before.
He arrived on foot three days after the beginning of the strike. London ‘knew Haywood was coming’, but he, like most men didn’t know what he looked like. So, when, leaving a conference of the strike committee in one of the town’s many saloons, and upon seeing a heavy, bulldog-faced man in a slouch hat and a dusty overcoat trudging into town, it did not even cross London’s mind that this might be Big Bill himself.
“Imagine my shock when the fellow I figured for a tramp came out at the meeting later that night, stood up, and introduced himself as Bill Haywood.”
The meeting in question was held in the same saloon and attended by nearly 100 miners and a number of local sympathizers, all crowded into the rickety little bar.
London was mightily impressed with Haywood’s earthy, straightforward style of discourse. He didn’t put on airs. He was most amused by the man’s illustration of the critical difference between the old craft unions and the ideal of industrial unionism. “The old unions—the AFL—organized like this,” Haywood said, raising a hand with the fingers splayed. “We’re gonna organize like this,” he went on, and curled that same hand into a great, mighty fist.
Haywood met with the strike committee after the speech, and London introduced himself.
“Good to know you, son,” was the first thing he heard from Big Bill himself, London would remember decades later.
In the backroom of the saloon, Haywood informed the committee that he had just come from Colorado City, where word was already that the MOA was begging Governor Peabody to have the militia called out.
“We ain’t even killed nobody yet,” one of the committee delegates protested.
Nevertheless, it was decided the miners ought to organize along paramilitary lines themselves if they were to survive the onslaught that was sure to come.
At Cripple Creek alone (never mind the sympathetic strikes in Colorado City and elsewhere) there were upwards of 900 mine workers on board with the strike, and another 100-200 sympathetic men from town.
The committee divided these men into six ‘divisions’ of about 150. These divisions were further divided into five ‘squadrons’ of about 15. The divisions were each commanded by an elected ‘captain’, and the captains would in turn elect the commander of their ‘division’.
London was elected commander of 3rd Division, which was tasked with guarding the northern road out of Cripple Creek for scab labor or hired thugs.
Living in the rough and tumble west as they did, many if not most of the men already owned weapons. For those that did not, the WFM pooled resources and purchased Winchesters and revolvers from local gunsmiths or sent for them from as far away as California.
Soon, Cripple Creek was filled with patrolling squadrons of armed miners with red rags tied around their arms.
Attitudes towards this were mixed. Some of the town’s residents were in full support of the strike, hanging red flags from their windows or wearing red armbands themselves in shows of solidarity. London recalled a young girl of about fifteen pinning red ribbons to the lapels of gruff-faced, pistol packing mine workers.
Many were less than amused by the mood and glowered down at the strikers from their windows or refused to serve them food and drink. One saloon operator put up a sign announcing he would not sell alcohol to anyone wearing a speck of red.
In the last week of May, the MOA attempted to bring scab labor into Cripple Creek, protected by Pinkerton men. 3rd division met them on the road out of town and turned them back at the point of rifles.
A dozen mines across Colorado had joined in the action, but the miners at Cripple Creek were without a doubt the most militant and best organized.
The WFM garrisoned Cripple Creek for the next two weeks, brusquely keeping those miners who did not wish to join in the strike away from the mine. Warning shots were fired, and a few men were beaten, but there was no real bloodshed. Not yet.
The MOA grew desperate and finally Governor Peabody consented to call out the National Guard.
Meanwhile, London and Haywood established an increasingly tight working relationship. Haywood often came along with his younger comrade and 3rd Division on patrol of Cripple Creek’s outlying roads. In downtime, he shared with London his vague but glowing idea of
one big union, a union that would not only unite all of the workers in a given industry, but all the workers
everywhere.
“You describe,” London said. “Essentially a government.”
“That’s exactly it,” Haywood said, beaming.
Meanwhile, the nation watched, on edge, as it always was when some whiff of labor trouble carried on the breeze. Ever since Chicago.
Congress ferociously debated whether the WFM was in contravention of the Red Act. Representative Henry Gibson from Tennessee rose and read off a list of outrages committed by the Cripple Creek miners, real and imagined.
The fifty Socialist congressmen, led by DeLeon himself, attempted to drown him out by singing ‘the Internationale’ at the top of their lungs, until they were ruled out of order.
The
New York Times declared ‘Anarchy in Colorado!’
Frick’s
Voice naturally, was very loud. Under the heading ‘Red Horrors at Cripple Creek’, Pennsylvania’s industrious governor unfolded a lurid account of a town under a communistic reign of terror. Women assaulted, property burned, workers who were content with their wages threatened away from mines at gunpoint, beaten bloody if they did not comply.
Some was true, some was not.
Frick ended his editorial with a plea for federal intervention. Pointedly, he printed an open letter to President McKinley (who was increasingly coming to dislike him), asking if he was ‘president or not?’
McKinley had indeed slept very little in the past two weeks. His popularity had taken a severe hit after Wilmington, and the accusations flung at him from various quarters (including many in his own party) charging him with being ‘soft on radicals’. He was beginning to wonder if his own party might not turn him out ahead of the 1900 election, as Cleveland’s had tried to do. Even if they did not, would the Republicans
survive the upcoming election? The grim example of the Democrats, pathetically clinging to life in their shrinking southern strongholds, was sobering.
Wilmington would have been bad enough? And now this?
When Governor Peabody finally decided to call out the National Guard, McKinley could only pray it would end peaceably.
400 National guardsmen arrived at Cripple Creek on 3 June, under the command of Brigadier General Sherman Bell. Bell had served in Cuba and was known for his humorless and brutal disposition.
Bell marched down from the north, flags flying, himself astride a muscled black horse in a brazen show of intimidation. He was met on the road just outside of town by four squadrons from the miners’ 2nd Division, under the command of John Welch. The guardsmen defiladed and readied their weapons. The miners did the same.
In the distance, the soldiers could see red flags snapping in the warm summer breeze over the dusty roofs of Cripple Creek.
Welch emerged from among his men with a white flag of truce and was allowed passage through the lines to meet with Bell. But Bell was not interested in negotiation.
“I am not here to negotiate, I am here to do you goddamned anarchists up unless you give yourselves over immediately,” Bell brusquely informed a stunned Welch. “You are unlawfully interfering with the operation of privately owned mines, you are unlawfully holding this town—you will relay this message to whatever rascal you have got in command of you all: you and every man who calls himself a member of the WFM has got twelve hours to lay down his arms and remand himself into the custody of the Colorado National Guard, or else we will use force—lethal force—to clear you from this town and these mines.”
Welch, angered but unsurprised, nodded and departed.
Of course, the strike committee did not consider surrender, voting 12-3 against it.
The guardsmen set up camp on the hills to the north of town, within sight of the open pit gold mines, to wait out Bell’s twelve-hour ultimatum. He had essentially read the WFM men the old English riot act. Headlines were already being slammed out that read, ‘BELL GIVES SHORT SHRIFT TO MINERS’. Now there was only to wait for those miners’ reaction.
That reaction was hotly debated. In the saloons and shops where the miners had set themselves up, men argued fiercely the merits of continued resistance or surrender.
It was clear they could not win. This was not Wilmington, where the presence of the Populists and Republicans provided a note of legitimacy to the armed resistance. If it came to a fight, they would simply end up like the boys in Chicago. More martyrs. And, as London put it to the committee, “one live scoundrel is worth ten dead heroes.”
But even as the debate raged on and as Bell watched his stopwatch tick down, more miners began to trickle in from El Paso County and Colorado City. It was clear that Cripple Creek was where the statewide strike would be decided. And so, it was here the most militant of the WFM wanted to be.
They brought their own arms, extra ammunition, and even dynamite. When they marched through the dirt streets of Cripple Creek, they were greeted with the raucous cheers of their comrades and sympathetic townsfolk. Those not so sympathetic thought it better to keep silent than boo or hiss. For their own safety.
The strength of the miners was soon raised to more than 1200.
But even if the miners had outnumbered their foe 10:1, the odds of victory would have been slim.
Then a mad plan was hatched. It is unknown who hatched it. Both London and Haywood later disclaimed it, though considering its ultimate conclusion, this cannot be taken as proof positive of their lack of involvement. It may have been Welch.
The miners could not win a pitched battle. What they needed was bargaining power. Thus, developed idea of taking Bell hostage. After a further two hours of heated debate (three hours out from the end of the allotted twelve), it was decided to go ahead with it, though one committee delegate complained that “if we care to kill ourselves I know a good gulch only a few miles west we can leap into.”
Nevertheless, initially the hare-brained scheme went along well enough. The soldiers had camped in a narrow valley to the northeast of the town, just below a craggy range of hills. They did not show the caution one might expect of soldiers on the battlefield. They severely underestimated their opponents, who they took for drunken rabble.
Under cover of darkness, two of the miners’ divisions converged on the guardsmen’s camp. Three remained in town and at the mine to guard against sabotage.
London’s 3rd Division crept over the hills, approaching from the east. 1st Division looped around from the gold mine to the south, thus forming an axis of approach at 90 degrees.
Once the state troops were successfully invested, with their not even having noticed, a team of ten men was handpicked to carry out the mission.
They crept into the camp with the object being Bell, wherever he was. Though they were instructed to refrain from violence if at all possible, they started off their infiltration by slitting the throats of two sentries.
They did not get much further than that. A soldier spotted them slithering through the tents, and someone opened fire. Soon the camp was up and in a panic.
Realizing things had gone sideways, the miners forgot their plan and simply attacked.
The guardsmen may have had an advantage in training and equipment, but they were outnumbered and taken utterly by surprise. Squeezed in from two sides, fired upon from the elevated hills and from their obvious escape path to the south, the guardsmen panicked.
In the ensuing gunfight, some 30 guardsmen were killed or wounded, for a price of only 14 miners.
The rest were easily swept up and taken prisoner by the force more than twice their size.
The victory was almost unbelievable. The miners had not only defeated their foe, they had captured more than 300 prisoners of war.
The bitter guardsmen, headed by a scowling Bell, were marched through the streets of Cripple Creek. Onlookers pelted them with stones and rotten fruit, while the miners howled with laughter and fired their weapons into the air in celebratory elation.
After the triumph, the prisoners were rounded up and herded into the mines. 2nd Division was assigned to guard them.
“We felt like conquering heroes,” London said. “We had licked them.”
Haywood immediately telegraphed Denver, informing Governor Peabody that he and the strike committee of Cripple Creek held in their hands the lives of several hundred Colorado National Guardsmen, and that he and the Mine Owners’ Association had best be prepared to negotiate.
Peabody is supposed to have smashed his office window in rage.
McKinley is supposed to have nearly fainted upon hearing the news.
The hysteria in the national press was unmatched by anything since the Red Summer. Hearst’s
New York Journal cried, ‘REDS HOLD KNIVES TO THROATS OF US SOLDIERS’.
And McKinley, too, decided enough was enough. He was going to show the country that, yes, he
was the president.
It was General John ‘Blackjack’ Pershing who was detailed to take care of matters in Colorado. He had just returned from counterinsurgency work in the occupied Philippines, the burdensome prize the US had inherited from Spain. Pershing’s troops had spent the past year on the islands fighting a grueling, bloody war against native insurrectionists. The men were personally brutalized and not inclined towards respect for the niceties of ‘civilized’ warfare.
The general told McKinley that he unless he received an immediate and unconditional surrender, he would ‘treat these men like Moro rebels.’
Pershing embarked at Washington DC. His train steamed westward, seen off by a cheering crowd waving the Stars and Stripes.
Meanwhile, the strike committee nervously awaited the next turn of events. Most of the other strikes, such as that at Independence Mine and those in Colorado City had fizzled out, either for lack of enthusiasm or in fear of sharing the imminent fate of Cripple Creek.
But here, there was no sign of flagging morale, much less of surrender.
“We were ready to go it alone and go it alone as long as needed be,” one miner would recall at his trial.
London rushed to and fro in preparation for the arrival of federal troops. He also helped erect an open-air pen in which the National Guardsmen were held. They were not treated poorly at first, and indeed many established friendly relations with their captors.
“They weren’t bad guys,” a striker said. “They were just doing what they had to do, same as us.”
Haywood ordered that they be given rations in accordance with those taken by everyone else in town.
A notable exception to the prevailing congeniality was General Bell himself, who seethed with shame at his capture and with hatred for his jailers. He promised to see Haywood and the rest of the strike committee strung up from trees and to see that the rest of the men never worked again. Soon enough, the miners ceased to take him seriously, and he became a figure of fun instead.
By 6 June, Pershing and his 2,000 troops had reached Colorado Springs, and were now marching on Cripple Creek.
Haywood posted four squadrons of miners on the road out of town, same as they’d done to greet the National Guard.
But taking into account what had happened when Bell had attempted to give an ultimatum and an opportunity for surrender, Pershing did not make what he viewed as the same mistake. Instead, he stopped his march two miles out form town. He unlimbered the 2.5-inch guns he’d brought along on the march, loaded with HE shells.
His gunners sighted their target—the collection of miners milling about on the road just beyond the town lines. They fired.
The shells struck home.
Some 40 miners were killed in the initial barrage. The remainder broke and ran back into the perceived safety of Cripple Creek’s streets and buildings.
Pershing’s gunners adjusted their sights upwards and fired again. The next round of shells struck the rickety wooden homes and stores of the town.
But Pershing had bad intelligence. He had been informed that the miners had forced most civilians out of their homes and towards the rear of the town (either to hold them as extra hostages or for their own safety—reports were conflicting). But this was untrue. Thus, when his HE shells found their marks this time, they killed very few armed miners, and very many unarmed townspeople.
Pershing could not know this at the moment. He imagined he had wiped out the miners’ vanguard, so he ordered his troops to advance into the smoke and flames that were quick devouring Cripple Creek.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“You imagine this is what it was like at Chicago?” Jack asked, arms crossed. He stood on a rocky promontory just to the southwest of Cripple Creek. He could see the town laid out in the distance, like a little toy settlement built on the floor of a child’s playroom. He could see the little ribbons of flame enveloping stores and houses, throwing up sheets of thick smoke into a darkening Colorado sky. And still further, the blue snake of federal soldiers slithering southward into the ruin. Beyond that, the ragged, whitecapped peaks of the Rockies stabbed into the horizon. It was almost a lovely sight.
“I imagine,” Bill answered acidly.
Jack heard the guns roar again. He swore.
Both men sat astride ‘appropriated’ horses, for a better vantage point of the unfolding battle. Jack looked to his right. To the south of the town, he could see the open mines where he’d worked for the past two months. He could see the figures of the miners scurrying back and forth up and down the ledged sides of the pits, the barrels of their rifles glinting in sunlight.
A little further. The hastily built pen, ringed with barbed wire, that held the national guardsmen. They didn’t seem much moved by the spectacle. From this distance looked like little tin soldiers in their uniforms, stripped of their arms. A skeleton detachment of forty armed miners guarded them.
Jack dug his heels into his horse’s flanks. He turned to Bill. The man looked back at him with his bulldog face. His good eye fluttered closed for a second. The other, scarred and milky, stared ahead.
“I’m off, Bill,” Jack said. “See how long we can hold them up.”
“I’ll keep everything in order back here,” said Bill.
“If I catch a bullet,” Jack touched the brim of his hat. “In the by and by.”
“Ain’t no such thing.”
“Right.”
Jack spurred his mount down the hill. He whipped to the north and then the east, charging towards the stiff outline of Cripple Creek, starkly silhouetted by the growing flames.
When he galloped into town, great puffs of dust racing behind him, the first thing he had to do was yank the reins
hard. A stream of terrified townsfolk streamed past him, rushing west,
away from the fight. A woman rushed by, carrying a bundle in her arms that he imagined was a babe. The woman tripped over her skirts. She went to the ground, only just kept from crushing the baby between herself and the dirt. An older man rushed by without stopping to help, clutching a hat in his left hand like it was the most precious thing in the world. The woman rose again and continued running.
Jack roughly forced his horse through the crowd.
“They’re shelling the goddamned town!” someone howled, as if that were not obvious.
A girl and her sister very nearly got themselves crushed under Jack’s stallion. He veered hard to the left and missed them. They stumbled along, and he continued his push against the flowing river of humanity.
As soon as the gunfire was near enough that he could taste powder, he leapt from the animal’s back. He slapped the horse’s haunches and sent it off galloping in the way it’d come. Then he drew his revolver, bent his head into the burning wind, and plunged into the fray. As he pushed further towards the fight, the crowds grew thinner. Everyone who could flee already could.
Jack bounded past a barber’s shop wreathed in flames. Looked like one of the army boys’ shells had scored a direct hit. He heard screaming from within. Or maybe it was just splintering wood and crackling fire.
The first of his comrades he ran into was a boy. Or at least he looked as much. His smooth cheeks and chin were splattered with dust. A trickle of blood poured down his forehead. The red armband on his right arm was nearly invisible beneath all the grime of the fight. He staggered aimlessly towards the rear.
Jack gripped his shoulders.
“Hey! Hey!” The boy stared blankly ahead. “
Hey!” Jack repeated, harder. “Boy!”
“Wha—”
“What’s your unit?”
He felt silly like this—asking units and barking orders.
“Seventh squadron, 3rd Division,” the boy said, sounding distant and quiet.
“Right,” Jack said. “That’s mine. Come on. You’re back in the fight.”
“I—”
“
Now!”
The boy listened. Together they charged down the street until they found what they were looking for. One of the barricades that had been strung across the road the night before. Piled up wood and stone and mortar. Jack ducked as a bullet winged over his head. The buildings on either hand were in flames.
Some twenty men in dusty overalls manned the barricade. One dipped down and worked the lever on his Winchester while the other fired. Then the other took the chance to reload while his fellow fired. So, the men worked. They were well drilled for miners. He was almost proud.
Jack rushed to the barricade. He threw himself flat against it, as the soldiers wreathed in smoke on the other side sent another barrage overhead. The miner beside him, working a Winchester as fast as his hands would allow, turned to Jack and scowled.
“You gonna shoot or sit there, boy?”
Jack decided not to reveal himself as their on-paper commander. What was the point?
Instead, he poked his head up over the barricade. In the swirling smoke he could see the blue coats of the soldiers rushing back and forth. One huddled in the window of a smashed-up chemist’s shop to the left. He leveled his pistol and fired. God knew if he hit or not.
His heart walloped in his chest.
“Goddamn the army!” he shouted, and then whooped with laughter.
The boy he’d brought back stared at him as if he was mad. But the lad had recovered his nerve and was firing into the oncoming soldiers along with his fellows.
The soldiers were attempting to avoid the open road by moving down through the buildings on either side. Except half the buildings were on fire.
Jack saw two men sprint across the street, toting their heavy rifles. He identified them as corporals both, by their chevrons. They were making for the smashed in doorway of a listing apartment building on the other side of the way. He expended the rest of his cylinder in their direction. Two shots missed. Another struck corporal number one in the head and the top of his skull was torn away. His pal skidded to a stop in shock. It was long enough for one of the miners on the barricade to drop him. He fell beside his friend.
The responsible marksman raised a fist in celebration—and then was promptly himself felled by a US Army bullet.
Jack winced as the miner’s corpse tumbled backwards. His comrades paid it no mind for the moment. They kept firing.
“I’m dry!” one man howled.
Jack tossed him a pack of rounds.
Then he sprang back off of the barricade, just as a wall of blue came rushing down the street, glinting with bayonets. He snatched up the fallen miner’s rifle.
“Where the hell you goin’?” one of the miners demanded.
He paid the man no mind and sprinted off, around another corner. The building he was looking for. Ah yes. There it was. The saloon. It wasn’t on fire. Not yet. He bulled through the door, smashing it open with a shoulder. Vacant, of course. Empty or half-empty bottles littered tables and the floor. He kicked them aside and rushed up the stairs.
The first room to his left, the one the proprietor rented out to travelers, possessed a broad window overlooking main street, up through which came the soldiers. Just what he needed. He could see the troops moving below in a narrow line, like an arrow, towards the barricade, oblivious to his presence. He breathed, hard.
Jack remembered the wind rushing into his face as he clung to the side of a train in south Canada. A ship pitching beneath him in the dark waters off of Japan.
None had got his heart racing like this.
He shouldered the rifle and drew a bead on another corporal.
Crack! The man went down, chest spurting bright red. His comrades sprang aside. He lined up another shot and narrowly missed a captain’s head. The man did not even notice his brush with death amid the din, even though the passing bullet tore his cap off.
Still focused on the barricade just ahead, the troops hadn’t yet realized they were being fired upon from above. Jack aimed again. This time he missed. The bullet dug into the earth, sending up a spray of dust around the feet of the panicked soldiers.
The artillery roared in the distance. He felt a rush of heat over his face, and then a cloud of ash came rolling from the next street over. Pershing had let off the big guns again. Bastard.
He focused on his targets. One more shot. He worked the lever on the Winchester. The shell clattered at his feet. He fired. This one caught another blue coat in the shoulder. The man went down, howling, only Jack couldn’t hear his screaming over the hissing flames and the thundering howitzers.
Then one of the soldiers’ head swiveled up. He was pointing. At Jack up on the second story. They’d seen him. He sprang away just as a fusillade smashed in through the window and pockmarked the surrounding wall.
Ah, they were going to lose. He knew. He’d known since the army showed, of course. And there would be much blood. Maybe more than Chicago. But he’d never felt more a living man. Finally,
finally they were fighting back. And the bosses, the troops, the presidents could not hold them down forever. One day they would run out of bullets.
Jack sprinted back down into the street. And then away from the battle. He did not see the soldiers break through the barricade he had helped man, nor watch its defenders cut down in a flurry of machine gun fire.
He raced towards the rear, where he’d left Bill.
They’d make it out. They’d make it out. He’d slipped out of San Quentin; he’d slip out of this. They’d make it out, and they’d come back. This was only the start. The fire was kindled. It would spread and spread.
As he ran, buildings crumbled alongside him, consumed by the fire. Rifles sizzled and snapped. Artillery continued to grumble.
He could taste smoke. Taste copper.
The day was here.
He could taste it.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Battle of Cripple Creek lasted only five hours, not the days it took to recapture Chicago.
But in at least one major respect, it was far worse.
What happened precisely remains a source of extreme controversy.
What is known is that at some point just before nightfall, presumably as they realized the day was lost, some of the miners began taking their National Guardsmen prisoners into the mines in batches and shooting them.
In the aftermath, some of the executioners claimed Haywood himself had ordered the deaths of the prisoners, lest they be rescued by the advancing federals.
Haywood, to his dying day, denied ever having given such an order.
The truth will likely never be known.
Regardless, when Cripple Creek was in ashes and the surviving miners rounded up at gunpoint, Pershing’s troops entered the gold mines and found heaps of corpses in National Guard uniform. Notably not among them was General Bell, who survived his captivity, with a renewed hatred for radicals of all stripes.
All in all, nearly forty National Guardsmen were killed, most of them slain by singular bullets to the head, ‘like cattle’.
The discovery precipitated a great rage in the soldiers, who decided to repay in kind. Some thirty unarmed miners were dragged out of line and shot before Pershing was able to restore order.
It was about this time that Pershing learned that he had been mistaken in his belief there were few to no civilians left in Cripple Creek when he shelled it. The general watched, utterly horrified, as the charred bodies of women and children—victims of his artillery—were hauled out of the smoke and ashes.
Reportedly, Pershing spent nearly twenty-four hours in his tent. He sat in utter silence, ignoring the subordinates that came to coax him out and the telegrams from Washington demanding updates as to the situation.
He attempted to keep photographers from the scene, but to no avail. Within two days, lurid reproductions of the carnage, from burnt homes to overflowing mass graves, graced the front pages of half the newspapers in the nation.
The final death toll, including civilians, National Guard, rebel miners, and federal soldiers, was reckoned at somewhere between 800 and 1,000.
Not quite a Red Summer, but it was close. Too close.
Bill Haywood was in Mexico by the time the federal government really started looking.
Jack London had vanished. In fact, within two weeks, he was working as a logger in western Oregon under the name Charlie Green.
Their flight was—depending on who was asked—a cowardly abandonment of their comrades, or their only alternative to a kangaroo count and a firing squad a la Debs.
It was a rather theatrical opening act to Jack London’s life as a revolutionary—and it was just that, an opening.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the aftermath of Cripple Creek, most Americans broadly agreed that enough was enough.
Of course, not everyone could agree on
what they’d had enough of. Was it anarchistic lawlessness or the persistent tyranny of the capitalist class?
The Daily People and other Socialist-aligned papers presented the tragedy as yet another example of capital’s relentless aggression against peaceable working people. They seized upon the fact that Pershing had dropped shells on women and children to portray him as a deranged soldier brutalized by his experiences overseas. He was a ‘Battle-crazed madman who whetted his martial appetites on the poor, primitive tribesmen of the Philippines and has now slaked them with the blood of American girls and babes’. They pointedly ignored that, though it was a terrible misunderstanding that had led to the 100 or so civilian deaths in Cripple Creek, it
was ultimately a misunderstanding
Frick’s
Voice along with the
New York Times and other publications that leaned conservative of course maintained that ‘the sad drama in Colorado is only the latest of the very many acts of blatant subversion directed by the forces of disorder and ochlocracy against the most basic foundations of American constitutional liberty. Coupled with the horror in Wilmington, one almost suspects organized conspiracy against our republic.’
287 men and women were brought to trial for their part in the bloodshed. Again, the charges were insurrection and treason. They were indicted under the Red Act. 73 were ultimately set at liberty. 172 were sentenced to prison terms ranging from a year to a lifetime. 41 were condemned to the hangman’s noose.
It was the largest single issuance of death sentences since ’94, which had seen more than 200 sentenced to die (though a great number of these had been commuted).
Naturally, popular opprobrium fell largely on the SLP and the STLA. The tactless DeLeon did not help matters when he gave a blistering speech in congress in which he essentially intimated that the soldiers and National Guardsmen dead at Cripple Creek deserved to die. He finished by calling the horror ‘an opening act’, even as his fellow Socialist congressmen Demarest Lloyd attempted in vain to restrain him.
On 30 June, a few weeks after the end of the battle, the offices of the Chicago SLP, the party’s largest national branch, were raided by police and its functionaries arrested. The offices themselves were ransacked and trashed. There was no real cause for the arrest besides the recent bloodletting, and the Socialists were released from jail within the week. But it well illustrated the prevailing moods.
In many more radical communities, enmity towards the US Army and other ‘forces of order’ was growing quickly. Most Americans had always had a respect for servicemen, even when they disagreed with a particular war or particular deployment of military force. That was changing.
In Pittsburgh, three young soldiers returning from the Philippines were attacked and beaten while walking through a slum populated primarily by immigrant ‘hunky’ steelworkers and their families. One was shot, though he survived. The incident was initially taken for a routine robbery, but the soldiers and some bystanders then reported that the assailants had shouted ‘long live Debs!’ which gave the whole affair a new dimension.
Of course, it provided much grist for anti-immigrant editors who inveighed against ungrateful, violent aliens attacking wholesome young patriots just returned from active duty.
But incidents like this soon became, if not common, at least common enough that they no longer merited national attention. In various neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, or Pittsburgh, it was advised that men in federal uniform or even policeman’s garb avoid certain areas unless in force, lest they catch an insult or a bullet.
As for the WFM, it was naturally proscribed within weeks. By a stroke of luck, the WFM had not yet affiliated with the STLA at the time of the battle, though preparations were underway. Thus, the SLP could disclaim any direct connection with the massacre, and thus maintain a stringent legality.
That legality infuriated many.
Majority leader Sereno Payne said in the House, directly addressing the Socialists, that it was ‘this country’s shame that men who think and act in accord with the criminal doctrines of Marx and Robespierre are allowed to sit in this very congress alongside the representatives of the people’.
George Boomer, a millworker by trade and Socialist representative from Washington, lost his temper, jumped up, and shouted that Payne ‘had better watch his goddamned mouth.’ He was quickly ruled out of order.
Even if Cripple Creek had not occurred, tensions would have risen sharply. After all, next year was 1900. Election year.
Perhaps no one was as distraught as President McKinley. Beginning his presidency as a broadly popular leader, especially in the aftermath of the disastrous Cleveland administration, his approval had been slowly eroded over the next two years.
When McKinley had come to power, he had hoped to oversee the recovery from the crisis of ‘93 that had wrecked the country’s economy. Such a recovery had begun in ’97 but was creeping along far too slowly for the liking of most. It was summer 1899, and unemployment was hovering at 11% and had hardly budged in nearly a year. Some of his advisors, including New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, suggested this was at least in part thanks to the slashing of wages in industry that had become ever more common since ’96 and the Red Act. McKinley agreed that this might be the case. But he feared moving decisively against business and the ever-fattening trusts. In the current political climate, he did not want to be seen as friendly to or supportive of ‘radical’ labor. A plan to create an ‘Industrial Commission’ headed by Roosevelt to root out corruption and wrongdoing in the industrial economy was scrapped after the Battle of Wilmington.
The result of this timidity towards capital and unwillingness to act in favor of labor cost McKinley much of the support he had maintained among workers in 1896. Many of these disillusioned laborers filled the ranks of the SLP.
Thus, in 1899, McKinley was vastly less popular than he had been less than three years prior.
The ones Clarence Darrow mockingly referred to as ‘the good people’ increasingly began to fear anarchist assassins in every shadow. Clearly the Red Act was not enough. They wanted to feel safe.
Henry Frick’s attacks on the administration’s supposed unfitness in the
Voice became ever more strident and aggressive. “Mr. President,” he began one editorial. “The republic has a red knife to her throat.
What will you do for her?”
Frick was beginning more and more to grate on the nerves of the president, and on those of Mark Hanna, the Republican Party’s chief power broker. His
Voice had reached a circulation of nearly 600,000, and he had amassed a huge and loyal readership.
It was when Frick finally outright asserted that “Mr. McKinley is no longer acting in the best interests of the country,” that Hanna realized, as he said to McKinley, “my God, the man wants to be president.”
Sure enough, in September of 1899, Governor Frick announced he would be seeking the Republican nomination in 1900.
