by Bill Albert
“Get her going, Al,” said an Irishman, who I later found out was Paul Corcoran, secretary of the union in Burke.
Al didn’t waste any time arguing. He pulled back on the throttle, hit a long blast on the whistle and we set off down the canyon. All along the grade more miners appeared. Over the noise of the engine and the clattering of the wheels you could hear them shouting up to those on the train and the answering shouts coming back. Some men ran alongside and jumped onto the slow-moving cars.
It was cramped and tense in the cab. Harry had started off funning with Al. He was told to shut up by Corcoran. Benny’s eyes were swiveling every which way trying to see how to escape, but Al was calm as cold toast and Bert just stayed bent to his stoking. It was when we got to the Frisco Mill, just north of Gem, that we began to get some idea of what was going on.
“Over there, Al, so as those boxcars fit right up close to that magazine.”
Al did what he was told. One of the men jumped down and directed operations. With an iron bar they busted off the lock, threw open the doors and then a line of men passed wooden boxes from one to another and loaded them onto the train.
“Now, boys . . . Now . . .” Al started.
Corcoran held up his hand.
“Not a word, Al Hutton. Not a word. Ain’t nobody alive knows better how to handle dynamite than do these here boys.”
The train moved down the line to Gem where we stopped again and took on another couple of hundred armed miners. All the time it was looking less like dime-novel desperadoes and more like gearing up for a full-scale war.
I signed to Benny that we should jump off the train but all I got back was a big stupid smile. If only Mr. Moses Coleman had come a few days earlier, I thought, I’d be sitting safe in Spokane instead of there on top of a load of dynamite bumping along on a rattler full of gun-toting miners.
Then we found out who the war was against.
As we started out of Gem one of the other men, a Cousin Jack I think, said, “Say, Corcoran, reckon we got enough powder to do the job really good and proper like?”
“Yeah,” added another, “That ol’ Bunker Hill and Sullivan mill is one sonofabitch big.”
“Bunker Hill and Sullivan?” Al said, the first real hint of alarm in his voice. “Now boys, ya knows how I don’t hold with them . . .”
“Just drive the train, Al.”
They told him to reverse back up the track to the Frisco Mill. Fifty more boxes of dynamite were taken on.
“That’ll blow her clear over to Coeur d’Alene,” laughed Harry.
Corcoran cut him dead with a look and no one else joined in. The coming war with the Bunker Hill and Sullivan was serious business.
I had heard talk in the Grand about the miners being all steamed up about something, but I didn’t give it much time as it seemed the miners were pretty much always steamed up about one thing or the other.
“Bellyachin is what they does best; that and drinkin,” is how Benny saw it.
As we chugged sedately out the end of the canyon, the clear sky widened out. The dark lifted and sun washed over us, making it feel like the Spring it really was everywhere but up Canyon Creek.
At Wallace it looked like the entire town had come out to greet us, all waving and yelling like fury. There was a whole load more miners with rifles, over six hundred of them from Mullan. Some were dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, others in their work gear. They scrambled up, sitting all along the decks of the cars until there wasn’t an inch of that train, including the tender, that didn’t have a miner on it.
“That’s it,” Al said firmly, pulling off his gloves. “Can’t take her no further than right here.”
“Train’s going down to Wardner, Al,” Corcoran insisted.
Alongside the track was an ocean of noisy confusion banging up against the engine. Men shouted orders, rushed back and forth, hordes of excited kids were running and whooping. I thought I saw Rebecca but couldn’t be sure in all the dusty swirl of people. Al seemed to be ignoring the commotion as well as the masked men with guns. He carefully pulled a big yellow handkerchief from the back of his overalls and wiped his face.
“Can’t do her and that’s flat. This here’s a Northern Pacific train and that there,” he said pointing at the single track headed off down the along the river, “that’s an O.R. & N. line.”
“So?” asked Corcoran.
“So, I can’t take this here train down that there line without I got permission. Ain’t sure what’s on the line. Don’t want us no cornfield meet do we? ‘Specially with all that giant powder you got loaded up.”
“Work train,” Bert mumbled with his hand half covering his mouth. “Might be a way freight too.”
Al extracted his watch from its pocket and opened the face.
“Know for a fact,” he said tapping the watch, “that the Spokane passenger’s headed into Wardner right soon. Be there afore we are.”
Bert nodded his head vigorously. A thin line of spit snaked out from under his mustache and hissed as it caught on the boiler plates.
“Besides for all that,” Al continued calmly, “this here engine weighs over one hundred and fifteen tons. Mountain engine it is, too heavy for the roadbed and them trestles they got down to Wardner.”
Corcoran, Harry, and the other men were only half listening. Every few seconds someone on the tracks would shout up and another instruction had to be shouted back. And all the time the wall of voices outside swayed and rumbled.
“You all through, Al? Right. Now I hear the boys already got them tracks switched, so get on with it. Take her down like I told you.”
“How’s about we telegraph through to ‘em?” Al said, his calm starting to slip a notch or two.
“Line’s been cut.”
Al’s shoulders sagged. Corcoran prodded him in the ribs with his rifle.
“Now’s the time,” he said, pulling the hammer back till it clicked.
Al had nowhere else to go but to Wardner.
As the whistle blew and Bert worked the bell a deep roar went up from the crowd at the depot. The men sitting up on top of the train hollered back. Some began to sing as we pulled out of the yard. It was damn hard to hear over the clack and clang of the train but it sounded like “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
16
I should have slipped off the train in Wallace, but I was too busy watching and listening to all the carry-on. Benny December wasn’t. He vanished like a ghost. I didn’t notice he’d gone until we were out of the yards. That was about the same time Al noticed me.
“Little Hy? Ya still on board? Dam! May’ll have my hide for certain sure! Gotta stop and put ya down right now.”
He made to push at the throttle. Corcoran raised the rifle barrel and stuck it so it nuzzled up to Al’s ear.
“No stops. Ain’t got the time. This is an express, Al. A no-stops-to-Wardner express.”
“Ya got yerself more to think on right now, Al,” Harry offered. “Like what might be comin at us from around that next bend.”
He stepped across and ruffled my hair. One of my Liebermann uncles used to do that. I hated it like poison.
“Boy’ll be just fine. I’ll keep an eye on him, Al.”
He squeezed my shoulder and his gray eyes crinkled above the lopsided bandanna. I supposed it was one of his fat smiles hiding under there.
It took us about an hour and a half to cover the eleven miles to Wardner. Corcoran wanted to highball it, but Al refused point-blank because of the roadbed and single track. He kept the whistle blowing and crept slow as death over the trestles. The first one, about a mile or so outside of Wallace, cut off the singing like it had been sliced through by Rupert Clutter’s cleaver. You could hear all those miners, and there must have been more than a thousand of them, holding their breaths listening to the flimsy latt
icework of timbers groaning and creaking under us.
“Like souls in torment,” Harry said darkly.
Except for him there weren’t any real talkers up there on Number 485. It seemed like everyone knew why they were going to war so there was no need to spell it out.
After it was over, then, of course, there were more stories than Chinamen to say why. You could find one to prove just about anything you wanted to. It was the fault of the stupid, drunken miners or the greedy local union leaders. The Pinkertons had been behind it, stirring things up so’s to crush the union. It was a plot by the Federation against the mine owners. It was a plot by the mine owners against the Federation. It was a plot by the Bunker Hill and Sullivan management against the Populists over some tax wrangle. I wasn’t too clear about what a Populist was. Benny told me he thought they were Catholics. Aunt May had finally to explain it, like she did the war.
“Union can’t have a holdout like the Bunker Hill and Sullivan. If they don’t recognize the union, they don’t pay a union rate, soon the smaller mines will tag along behind, just like they did in ‘92. Survival is what it’s about, pure and simple. Mind, I don’t hold with that damn blasting over there in Wardner, nor the killing. Look what it’s got them! Who comes out on top from it? Not the miners, no, sir. Not the unions either. But they were pushed too damn hard, weren’t they? Rubbing their noses in it by firing all those union men and then saying they had nothing to talk to them about. What the hell did they expect? Miners take a lot of hard treatment but there comes a point when they can’t take any more. Just can’t hold them back and that’s flat.”
They sure didn’t do any holding back that day at Wardner. When the train stopped, Corcoran and the other men got down from the cab and lined up miners like an army on parade. A bunch with Winchesters were sent to find out how many guards there were hiding themselves up at the concentrator.
You could see the concentrator clearly from the depot, no more than half a mile away. A set of three or four huge barns set piggyback fashion one in front of the other down the side of the mountain. Leading into the one at the top was the long run of a wooden flume for water and a couple of steep lines of narrow track. That’s how they brought the ore cars in off the aerial tramway which disappeared into the mountains behind. The mine was there, out of sight of the invading army.
Two miners with revolvers were left in the cab to make sure Al didn’t try to take off with the train. We were too far away to see the real action but got a pretty good view all the same. Most of the miners started marching up towards the concentrator two abreast. I saw Harry and a couple of others drop out and disappear into the depot cafe. They must have figured it was safer to eat than get shot at.
The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it came to be called, although it wasn’t anything near to a battle, began with a single shot high up somewhere near the concentrator. A couple of seconds later miners were running in all directions, yelling, throwing themselves flat, looking for any kind of cover, and then blasting away. You could see the dirt popping all over the hillside where a few men, who they soon found out were their own scouts, were waving their arms and shouting for them to stop shooting. They did, but only after one of the miners had been killed. His body was carried down and laid out in the baggage car.
When they found out that all the Bunker Hill and Sullivan guards had run for it, and who can blame them with that trainload of destruction headed their way, the miners carried the dynamite up to the concentrator. Must have been almost a hundred of them each carrying a box on his shoulder. They looked like a column of slow ants as they made their way, snaking up the hill and finally disappearing inside one of the buildings.
When he figured out the battle had only the one side to it Harry stopped his eating and joined in. He was sweaty with the excitement of having set off one of the charges and must have told us all about a dozen times.
“Put one under the ore bins, another under the tables and put the lifter down below the boiler. Jesus! Did ya see her blow? Je-sus!”
No way not to see it, hear it, and feel it too. Three explosions, one right on the heels of the last. The concentrator disappeared in a mammoth cloud of dust and smoke a couple of hundred feet high and a few seconds later the train shook like a giant had grabbed it by the tail. Then came loud clanking and thudding as bits of wood, metal, rock, and dirt rained down on the train and the roof of the depot. Al pushed me hard onto the floor.
“They’re in for it now,” he said, his face right up against mine. “Sure as death is cold they are.”
As the dust slowly thinned, figures began to appear, singly or in small groups, around the depot and farther up the hill. They were all looking up where the concentrator had been, hushed as if in church. What had them so religious was the very last object to break clear of that dust cloud. At first you could see only a few pieces of jagged wood, then a few more pieces emerged sticking up at busted angles, but as more of the dust cleared you could make out a smoking expanse of broken timbers, an expanse which grew bigger and bigger. A few seconds before, that vast pile of broken timbers had been the largest ore concentrator in the whole American West. And they had smashed it flat.
“Frisco in ‘92,” Bert said in a hushed voice.
“Yep, sure does look like her,” Al said. “Frisco and ‘92.”
The sight of what they had done, the sight of that splintered-up, destroyed concentrator seemed to make the miners completely stonewalled slobbering crazy. They fired their guns in the air and shouted, screamed, whistled and whooped. Some of them were dancing jigs on their hats. Pretty soon you could see smoke and flames coming out of mine buildings that were still standing. That got the men even wilder and crazier.
“Al Hutton, pull on that goddamned whistle!” Corcoran shouted angrily up from the track. “Pull her hard and pull her long!”
Al did just that. Four loud blasts. There were still men running for the train when Al was ordered to head out for Wallace. Some of the miners up on top decks began to take potshots at anything, at nothing. They didn’t want to wind it down.
“Stupid bastards!” Corcoran spat. “Like a bunch of damn crazy, stupid kids!”
When we got back to Wallace there was still a crowd at the station but it wasn’t the same crowd. This time it was a frightened huddle, mainly women and children, trying to get out of town, get anywhere to escape the free-shooting, dynamite drunk, and now increasingly whisky drunk, passengers of the Dynamite Express.
I’d never seen Aunt May so worried and agitated, but despite that and the fact that the miners had hijacked Al and Bert and me and Number 485, she was still hard at it defending them.
“It was their enemy they destroyed,” she said, “their tormentor, their eternal nemesis, that mighty damn monster thing they can never put a face to which eats their lives without a by-your-leave or a thank you, that throws them out of work when it’s not hungry, that keeps them underground working like half-blind animals in the damp, which kills them and leaves only widows and orphans. That’s what they blew up, Little Hy. Of course it made them crazy! Damn-it-to-hell crazy! Crazy before, crazy during, crazy after, crazy all the damn time. That’s miners!”
17
Of course, there were conflicting accounts about what happened on the 29th of April, 1899, but the story of those miners on the Dynamite Express was also transformed into whole trainloads of stories running off on a whole network of different tracks after Al and Bert finally brought Number 485 back to Wallace. It became the story of Paul Corcoran, it became the stories of Harry Orchard, Al Levi Hutton, May Arkwright Hutton, the Western Federation of Miners, Governor Frank Steunenberg, Bartlett Sinclair, Big Bill Haywood, Jack Simpkins, and hundreds of others, too. It also became my story.
Those explosions at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan brought bad times to the Coeur d’Alenes, brought hard times to a thousand miners and their families, brought the end of the Federation in Shosh
one County, and they also saved me from being rescued by the Jews of Spokane. I appreciate right enough that what the explosions did for me doesn’t begin to weigh in the balance against all those hard times that others had to bear up to, but I didn’t care to think about it too closely.
On the day of the battle Rebecca and her father, along with a parcel of other timid or respectable people, frightened that the miners were coming back to sack the town and put it to the torch, left Wallace in a sizable hurry. Needless to say, Mr. Moses Coleman did not arrive from Spokane. What did arrive three days later was a long passenger train full of federal soldiers. After that Aunt May was far too busy to worry about a proper home for me and instead of my story going where it was headed on the 28th of April, it was to take off, like so many others, in a completely different direction. You could say that direction brought me, just like it brought Harry Orchard, here to the cold embrace of the Idaho State Penitentiary.
Governor Frank Steunenberg. Along with Harry Orchard, he’s why I’m sitting here with old Cobra McParland and his Texas friend Charlie playing out my hand as slow as I can. Dead and buried the Governor is. What knocked at his gate sure as hell wasn’t Opportunity. No, sir. Steunenberg grabbed hold of his front gate and was blown sky-high just like the Bunker Hill and Sullivan concentrator. If McParland’s got it right he was blown up by the same man—Dynamite Harry. Knowing what he got up to in Wardner and later on in Cripple Creek, I can well believe it.
What I can’t believe is if Harry did plant that bomb in Caldwell, why he’d hang around waiting to get caught. I saw him there the day after the Governor was killed, saw him with not a care in the world, laughing and joking, having a drink at the bar of the Saratoga. That’s not the Harry I knew in ‘99. Then he had more sense. As soon as he got a whiff that the soldiers were coming he and some others lit out from Burke, crossing over the Bitterroots through the deep snow into Montana.
It was Steunenberg who sent in those soldiers. Actually he had to ask President McKinley to send them as the Idaho National Guard were busy in the Philippines doing their part for our country’s Manifest Destiny. Negro troops came first, just like in ‘92. Big Bill reckoned that was done deliberately to rile the miners, who were all white men. For most of them, who were in any case a mixed bunch of Swedes, Italians, Finns, Irish, Cousin Jacks, Germans, Poles, Americans, and God-knows-where-froms, it was the blue uniforms, not the black faces, which got them nettled.