by Bill Albert
Once again the yellow press raged against the Federation and the Federation shouted the odds against the mine owners. George Kyner’s dogs of war were unleashed in Cripple Creek good and proper by then as well as in Telluride where Governor Peabody sent five hundred soldiers to break the union. Needless to say. Bill and everyone else at headquarters were going damn near crazy.
Nonetheless, something else happened that week which to me seemed far more important than all the fuss about miners, unions, trains, explosions, civil wars, and Governor Peabody. In the jail at Cheyenne, Wyoming, on the same day that troops were sent to Telluride, Tom Horn was hung for the murder of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell.
Horn had been an Army scout in Apache country. He was a gunfighter, cowboy, bounty hunter, stock detective, fought in the Johnson County war, and, of course, with those Rough Riders in Cuba. At times it seems hard to find someone who wasn’t in Cuba in ‘98. Horn had also been a Pinkerton and a friend of Buffalo Bill and Charlie Siringo.
Every day of that week leading up to the hanging Horn was front-page news. Some papers, particularly the Post, made him out as the most evil man in the West, a spiritual and moral degenerate, a child killer. Others proclaimed he represented all the noblest virtues of frontier America. One reporter wrote that, “Like him or not, Tom Horn was the kind of rough-cut diamond who made the West what it is today.” He was being railroaded to the gallows, his supporters said, for sordid political reasons, reasons I never did understand.
Sitting here in the warden’s office and thinking about Bill Haywood, I remind myself how deadly a story can be. Tom Horn was convicted on the basis of a drunken boastful tale he told to Joe La Fors, a deputy US Marshall. At the same time I remind myself how Tom Horn was hung and of that same walk to the rose garden Siringo has promised me.
In Wyoming they use what’s known as the Julian system, in which the condemned man in effect hangs himself—not far from what McParland wants me to do with my confession. Under the center of the scaffold platform is a trigger mechanism which when tripped by the pressure of your weight draws a cork stopper from a cistern containing water and a floating arm. The water starts to splash out on the floor. The sound you hear is the last thirty seconds or so of your mortality dripping away. When the water reaches a certain level the arm is released and that springs the trap under your bound feet. If you’re lucky the drop snaps your neck. Horn was lucky.
His last request was for a farewell song. As he mounted the thirteen stairs, his two friends, Charles and Frank Irvin, sang:
Life is like a mountain railroad, with an engineer that’s brave;
We must make the run successful, from the cradle to the grave;
Watch the curves, the fills, the tunnels; never falter, never quail;
Keep your hand upon the throttle, and your eye upon the rail.
As you roll across the trestle, spanning Jordan’s swelling tide,
You behold the Union Depot, into which your train will glide;
There you’ll meet the Superintendent, God the Father, God the Son
With the hearty, joyous plaudit, ‘Weary pilgrim, welcome home.’
Put your trust alone in Jesus, never falter, never fail,
Keep your hand upon the throttle, and your eye upon the rail.
I was sure Al Hutton would have appreciated Tom Horn’s last request. I’m just as sure that Bill Haywood would not have appreciated it at all.
21
After that week in November the strikes throughout Colorado got meaner and meaner and that piled greater pressure onto the already embattled Federation and its leaders. More meetings, more lawyers, more members to defend, more money to pay out, more money to find, more letters to write and people to see. Big Bill worked himself harder, drank harder and spent even fewer evenings at home. Because of that, in the following months I got to know Market Street pretty well.
On my Grand Tour with Glove I had acquired a close working knowledge of the tenderloins in almost every mining camp in Colorado, but Market Street taught me how much I didn’t know and hadn’t seen. The scale and variety of its depravity was a true wonderment.
Some people in Denver claimed proudly that their Market Street could be compared with San Francisco’s Barbary Coast or Storyville in New Orleans. Others said Market Street was a cause for shame, not pride, a stain on the good reputation of the West’s Queen City. I couldn’t say one way or the other. For me it was a wide-open, rip-roaring attack on the senses.
The first thing that caught at you was the relentless clamor. Although the Row didn’t really begin until Eighteenth Street, the sound of it reached you by Seventeenth and continued to build. Shouting, laughing, occasionally howling-drunk men and women crowded the sidewalks. Loud dance music washed out of the saloons into the street.
The girls that worked the fancy parlor houses for the most part stayed sedately out of public view but, as on Myers Avenue or Cedar Street, the crib girls advertised themselves forcefully. Painted up and wearing cut-down, short dance-hall dresses to show off their busts and their meaty legs, they displayed themselves in lighted windows or hung out of them hissing and whistling at passers by.
You could get anything you wanted on the Row as well as things you never knew you wanted. Young girls, mature women, overly mature women, and boys, if that’s what took your fancy. All colors, all nationalities too. Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Swedes, French, and Jews. I was told, but don’t really credit it, that if you knew who to ask you could even pay to watch women doing unspeakable things with animals.
If you only had twenty-five cents you went to a back-alley crib off Twenty-third for a sloppy five minutes. If you were well-heeled you could spend thirty dollars on an all-nighter at a parlor house with fine food and wine.
At its Mattie-Silks-parlor-house best the Row smelled of champagne and French perfume, at its worst stale sweat, stale beer, and vomit. Somewhere in the middle was plain old sawdust and whisky.
It was on the sawdust and whisky section of Market Street, while on my way back from delivering a personal message for Big Bill, that I was confronted by what was possibly the most outlandishly improbable of the street’s infinite surprises. I met an old friend.
“Hyman? Oh, Hyman Budnitsky, it is you, it really is! What on earth are you doing here in Denver? I never thought . . . Well, this is something, isn’t it just? What ever happened to you? We were so worried. How could you go off like that without saying or writing or anything? If I wasn’t so pleased to see you, I would be angry with you, I really would!”
Rebecca Smith hadn’t changed all that much. A little taller and definitely fuller in certain places, but with the same breathless rush of talk. What was she doing on Market Street? It was no place for a respectable Jewish girl. At first I thought perhaps she had lost her way. But she didn’t appear to be lost. Then it came to me that maybe she wasn’t respectable any more. Had she fallen?
“Isn’t this simply awful?” she said looking around at the people pushing past us. “Everyone in such an almighty rush to get at their sinning. You’d think they were being chased!”
She laughed, a raucous hoot that startled me as well as a couple of men walking by. They glanced over at us, quickly looked away, and then hurried their pace.
“Come on, Hyman, let’s find some place where we can have a real good old-fashioned talk without all this unholy commotion.”
She led me into the restaurant at the Portland Hotel on the corner of Market and Sixteenth.
“I want to hear all about everything, Hyman. Absolutely everything.”
She took out a silver cigarette case from her handbag and handed me a box of matches. Her fingernails were painted red.
“You don’t mind, do you?”
I lit her cigarette.
“Thank you, Hyman. That’s better. It’s so terribly common for a woman to smoke on the street, d
on’t you think?
“And after all your adventures,” she said reading my brief and carefully selected account of life since Wallace, “you now work for that infamous Mr. Bill Haywood?
“Imagine that,” she said with a sly grin. “His name is in the newspapers almost every single day. Isn’t he just awful? No, I’m sorry, how silly of me. How exciting for you, Hyman! Oh, yes, Herbert. Herbert. I’ll get used to that, just give me time, that’s all.
“Poor dear father. He died soon after we arrived in Spokane. Blood poisoning they said. Always a danger for a tailor. And . . .”
Tough little Samuel Smith, the self-made American, my stalwart defender at the Grand. All those hard years and hard miles away from that yeshiva in Berdichev only to be murdered by a needle in Spokane. It scarcely seemed to have been worth all his effort to get there.
“ . . . my uncle, Moses Coleman, who’s not really my uncle, he was a cousin of my mother’s brother but I always called him ‘Uncle Moses’ which he liked me to do, he took me in. He said a family had to stick together and that I was to think of myself as one of his daughters. Just like that, one of his daughters. A family is so important, Hyman, ah, Herbert, so important. If you’d stayed in Wallace and then had been able to go with us to Spokane like we planned, you and I could have been brother and sister, couldn’t we?
“Denver? Oh, that’s a long story, and a secret one as well. You must promise not to tell anyone, Hyman. Not a soul. Promise? Well,” she said, leaning forward and dropping her voice to a hiss, “I’m here working for a group of very important Jewish people. That’s right, very, very important. Have you ever heard in your travels, Hyman, of what they call the White Slave Trade?”
It is impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a tragic story of how an unsuspecting fresh-faced country girl from Iowa or some naive immigrant was lured into a depraved life by evil men making promises of marriage, a job, a meal, a place to stay for the night. According to some people, the white slavers were everywhere, hanging around city street corners like so many vultures waiting to deprive innocent girls of their innocence. Once that is gone, there is no road that leads back from a life of disgrace.
I knew all that. What I didn’t know was how widespread the white slave trade was or that so much of it seemed to be run by Jews. Rebecca explained that thousands of Jewish girls were moved all around the world from one parlor house to another by a network of big money macks. From Poland and Russia to London to Johannesburg to Buenos Aires to New York to Denver to Butte, to just about anywhere there was a demand, which was just about everywhere.
“An enormous international trade in sin, Hyman,” she breathed at me with her big eyes. “Jewish sin! Can you imagine that? Isn’t it just . . . Oh, hello there, I hadn’t expected . . . so early . . . How are you?”
A beefy man with a pock-scarred face and dark pinprick eyes stood next to our table. He was expensively dressed and carried a silver-topped cane.
“Miss Smith, my very dear goyl. So nice.”
He spoke out of the side of his thin mouth, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know it was him that was speaking.
“This is my good friend Herbert Budnitsky, I mean Herbert Brown. Herbert, meet Mr. Argument from New York City.”
Here was someone who had clearly taken Sam Smith’s advice about changing his name.
“Hiya, kid. How youse doin?”
“Mr. Argument is from the New York Independent Benevolent Association, Herbert,” she said proudly.
Mr. Argument was clearly New York, but just as clearly anything but benevolent. He looked me over like a butcher surveying a side of freshly hung meat.
“Say, kid, listen, youse gotta brudder or somethin lives near ta Alien Street? Sure as how I know from some kinda Budnitsky lives near ta Alien or Forsyth, somethin like that there. No? Youse sure about dat? I coulda sworn.”
Hyman Budnitsky? Alive and, God forbid, maybe well? Why not? My destructive creator was undoubtedly a full-time criminal by then. So, what did that make Mr. Argument? A settlement worker?
“Did you know that . . .” Rebecca began and stopped in some alarm as he put a finger to his lips.
He then winced as if in sudden pain, took a quick survey of the room and then without being asked he sat down.
“Look here, can we talk, Miss Smith, here?” he asked. “I am meanin right now. At this very moment in time I am meanin.”
She was embarrassed.
“Herbert, will you excuse us please? I am awfully sorry, but Mr. Argument and I have some very confidential business matters we simply must discuss.”
We agreed to meet again. I asked for her address. She said not to worry, she knew where I worked and would get in touch as soon as possible.
Neither Rebecca nor Mr. Argument looked up as I left.
She never did get in touch. She also never got around to telling me exactly what she was doing on Market Street for those “very important Jewish people.” I figured the New York Independent Benevolent Association must be some kind of settlement house project, probably come to Denver to rescue fallen Jewish women. The only thing that didn’t figure in with that idea was Mr. Argument. He was more like someone you would need rescuing from.
Right then, however, I didn’t have much time to worry about the mystery of Rebecca Smith and Mr. Argument. Work at headquarters had become all-day-running frantic. Bill took on another two secretaries. More secretaries meant more messages and more errands.
22
“Either we go down fightin like men,” I heard Jack Simpkins shout hoarsely, banging on the table, “or we go down like goddamned pigs in a slaughterhouse! That’s how I sees it.”
The Federation was being pushed to the wall and right through to the other side. Bill knew it, but he and the Federation had nowhere to go but straight ahead into the mouths of Colorado’s capitalistical cannons.
Simpkins, another Coeur d’Alenes veteran and still living in Wallace, had come to the new headquarters in the Pioneer Building to discuss the situation with the other members of the executive committee. It had been a long, smoke-fogged meeting. I was going in and out of the room taking messages, delivering them, filling up the water jugs.
“Grand she is now,” Jack told me in the saloon after the meeting. “Al and May bought themselves a big house down on the flat, on Pine Street. Spend all their time dressin up and entertainin just like they was regular swells. Ya should see them new hats she’s bought herself. Ya know what I mean? Damn! Looks like she should be cookin ‘em, not wearin ‘em! That’s how it is with them two anyways, regular swells. Though I figure Al would like it better sittin quiet over a few hands of pinochle. But, ya know May! Blow me but bein quiet ain’t her game at all!”
I wondered how those genteel, soft-spoken society ladies of Wallace were holding up to May’s language, temper, and to her hats. I had no doubts that she would be holding up like a ship under full sail.
“Sounds like May Hutton hasn’t changed much,” Bill said. “Although I didn’t expect she ever would.”
That got them all talking about the Coeur d’Alenes and how Colorado was going the same way.
“Might be we’ve stepped out too far,” Moyer said glumly. “Don’t know . . . Might be calling out those boys in District Number One wasn’t . . .”
“Might be’s never loaded no ore carts,” Jack growled, wiping the beer foam from his heavy mustache.
“And what do you do if the Law itself becomes lawless?” Bill asked. “Where do we go? The courts? Even when we get the decision it doesn’t wash. The ballot box? We got that decision too, didn’t we? The President? The Congress? Wrote to them as well. They don’t care a hoot.”
“Give the stinkin bastards somethin they understands!” Simpkins blurted drunkenly, shaking his fist.
“Sure, Jack,” Moyer remarked contemptuously. “Did us just fine in the Coeur d’
Alenes.”
“Wasn’t no ‘us’ about it, Mr. President Moyer!”
Violently throwing off his coat and yanking out his shirt tails, he exposed one side of his chest. Along his ribs a long scar cut into the thick wall of white flesh. One way or the other, there seemed to be no escaping P. K. D. Swibble.
Moyer turned away.
“The streets and the people is all we’ve got left to us,” Bill said.
“What the hell you talking about, ‘streets and people’?” Moyer shot back.
“Take it to them. Show them exactly what’s going on. Make them mad with the injustice of it. Get the other unions behind us. Shut it all down! All of it!”
It was that night Bill went home and drew up his infamous flag poster that was to cause all the perturbation that followed.
He’d spread a big piece of butcher’s paper on the dining room table. The girls and I stood back and watched as he worked. He bent over the table, big shoulders tensed, a pencil stub in his small fist. And all the time he was talking, burning with the joy of what he was doing. I’d never seen him so happy.
“Short, direct, hard that’s what you want for something like this. Remember those soapboxers I worked out, Herbert? ‘Industrial Unionism is Socialism with its working clothes on,’ ‘The shorter workday makes a bigger payday.’ That’s the kind of thing I mean. A solid punch. Forget their heads, go for their hearts. The heads will catch up later on. An angry rumble in the guts. That’s what you want. Lots of those angry rumbles pulled together. Gee fizz, but this is going to be a real killer!”
Like the postermen in the Wild West, like those who painted the big advertisement signs for Cremo Cigars or Dr. Williams Pink Pills for Pale People, Bill had something he wanted to sell. Whether he went at the selling with posters or slogans. Big Bill was one damn good salesman in the very best flag-waving American tradition.
Under the bold question, “IS COLORADO IN AMERICA?” he drew the outline of a large American flag. In each of the thirteen stripes he wrote a scream of union rage.