by Bill Albert
The Independence Depot is about half a mile from Victor, fairly high up on the south slope of Bull Hill. On the morning of June sixth the station was crowded with two dozen non-union men from the Findley Mine waiting for the 2:15. Other miners from the Shurtloff, who had been late going off shift, were running up the hill towards the station. As the train rounded the curve the engineer pulled on the whistle. At that moment there was a massive explosion which cut the platform into splinters, blew the end off the station house, and threw dirt, planks of wood, and dismembered scab miners hundreds of feet through the air. Within seconds the platform had been replaced by a deep, gaping hole about forty feet across. Eleven men were killed outright. Two more died later and six had to have arms or legs amputated. By the afternoon of the next day rescuers sifting through the rubble with their tin pails were still picking up bits of flesh and bone.
That’s right. That’s what I heard Haywood say. He was well pleased with the job Orchard and Adams had done. Yes, I think that’s correct, three hundred dollars.
One more of those thirteen black steps nailed firmly onto Bill’s scaffold. I’m feeling better now, sort of light-headed with it, wanting to give McParland more. Fill his cup until he chokes on the richness of the contents. Maybe he’s right, maybe confession is good for the soul. But this isn’t a real confession. No. This is nothing but a tall tale, a yarn, a hollow fabrication, a fiction, a string of lies, a line from which to hang a life. But that’s what I need right now—the Story. And that’s real and true enough for me. It’s the only true story there is to tell.
Like I’ve said before, the Cripple Creek district was the strongest union mining camp anywhere in America. After June 1904, all that was to change, rapidly and brutally. Whoever set off that giant powder at the Independence Depot blew the Western Federation of Miners clear out of Cripple Creek and clear out of Colorado.
And I was there to see the final scene played out, to see the real American West win the final battle of the Colorado mining war.
25
The day of the explosion Victor was running hot with rumors and accusations against the Federation who were, not surprisingly, blamed for what had happened. Wasn’t it strikebreakers who had been so horribly killed and mutilated? Wasn’t the Federation’s strike being slowly choked to death by willing scabs? What better way to scare them off than the miners’ best friend—dynamite. Who else would want to do such a terrible thing? Only the Federation. Only the Federation. A low, angry-volcano rumble shaking the morning streets of Victor. Only the Federation. Only the Federation.
Mrs. Norton, the fat-armed old Negro lady who ran the boarding house, begged me not to go out.
“There’ll be more blood spilled, more murderin, more fatherless children before this day is out,” she intoned. “Y’all mark what I’m telling ya, child. I’ve seen it before. Come over here if y’all don’t believe me.”
I went over to the open door where she was standing. Her house was on a road cut into the side of the hill above Victor. It had a wide-open view of the white-topped Sangre de Cristos which ran through Colorado on their the way from New Mexico to Wyoming. Closer to was the back end of the Gold Coin Mine’s massive shaft house. It was built against the mountain slightly below us and to the left. Below that was Victor Avenue and the center of the town. Usually the grinding, clanking, and steam engine chugging from the shaft house was there twenty-four hours a day so you never really heard it.
“Listen to it. Hear that?”
I did. The shaft house was completely silent, as were the others farther over on the hill. Behind the silence, carried on the wind blowing up from the town, was a faint but menacing complaint of edgy, agitated voices.
“What y’all is listenin to, child, is what is gettin ready for a lynchin. Y’all think that’s somethin just happens to black folks? Don’t you believe it. I saw them string up Big Nose George in Rawlins, Wyoming back in ‘81. Hung him up from a telegraph pole and then tanned his murderin skin for a pair of shoes and a tobacco pouch.”
It wasn’t until early afternoon that I gathered up enough courage or maybe enough foolishness to venture out.
The bigger mines, which were all working with scab labor, had closed down and their men were let loose by the mine owners to come boiling into town, armed, angry, and looking for trouble. All the saloons had been locked tight. The men milled around on the street corners, their voices hard and threatening.
Mrs. Norton had read the wind correctly. As I walked over to the Miners’ Union Hall a mass of people were drawing together in a vacant lot across the street. They were too damn quiet for there being so many of them.
“Get out as quick as you can, laddie,” Calderwood said brusquely. “I know you’re dumb as a gatepost but you got two good eyes, don’t you? You can see what’s going on out there. Suffering Christ! Don’t bother me, boy. I got more important things to do.”
He stumped off, crashing his leg violently against the floorboards.
Inside the hall men were preparing for a siege, pushing desks up against the windows, carrying buckets of water, loading Winchester rifles.
“I sure wished right about now that I believed in the good Lord Jesus,” said a frightened union miner, looking out the window.
“Damnation!” replied another, calmly drawing a dirty rag through a revolver barrel. “Better to believe in Mr. Samuel Colt here and Mr. Winchester. They’re all that’s gonna be standin between you and them scab bastards outside.”
“Ain’t ya heard the Alliance and the Association showed the noose to Sheriff Robertson and to Marshall O’Connell? Resigned the both of ‘em.”
“I heard they swore in a couple of hundred deputies,” a third miner added. “All of ‘em scabs, too. Every damn mother’s son.”
By this time there must have been well over two thousand people across the street. The piece of land in which they were cramming themselves, on the corner of 4th and Victor, had been cut back deep into the hillside. Along one side was a high bluff where the cut had been made, along another was the back wall of a two-story building with a painted two-story advertisement.
Cremo 5 .
The other two sides were open to the street. Above this man-made amphitheater stood the imposing bulk of the Gold Coin shaft house and behind that Bull Hill.
I should have taken Calderwood’s advice. Instead, I went upstairs to get a better look at what was going on. There were a dozen miners who had the same idea. We crowded up to the open windows.
“Hey, look,” one pointed. “Ain’t that ol’ C. C. Hamlin?”
No one offered to tell me who he was. He had jumped up on a flatbed wagon and was speaking to the tight-packed crowd, waving his arms about. It was impossible to hear what he said, except at the end when he shouted at the top of his voice:
“The time has come for you to take this matter into your own hands and rid the district of these murdering scum!”
There was scuffling in the crowd. Suddenly a shot was fired. Just a dull pop it was, but enough to frighten the horses. They bolted through the crowd, throwing Hamlin backwards onto the ground and scattering people from out of their path. More shots followed. Screaming and yelling men and women ran in all directions, knocking each other down, pulling at each other, trampling each other in their panic to get away.
Within a couple of minutes the two thousand people had vanished, leaving behind them half a dozen bodies, some moaning, others lying quiet in the street.
“Oh Lord!” exclaimed someone. “We’re in for it now!”
Outside on Fourth Street a squad of soldiers had appeared, rifles aimed at the Union Hall. An officer called for us to come out with our hands up. I was ready for doing just that.
“You go to Hell!” shouted a miner from a downstairs window who apparently wasn’t ready.
Someone grabbed my leg and pulled me to the floor. A second later the room exploded into
shattered glass, wood, plaster, and brick as a wave of bullets hammered in at us.
In the Dimes people are always shooting at each other. It was one of those day-to-day things that happened in the West. In the Wild West it had been the same. The Indians shooting at the stagecoach, at the settlers, at Custer and his men, and them all shooting back as good as they got. Exciting and harmless.
None of that prepared me for the real thing—the overpowering stink of gunsmoke which slammed into the back of your nose, the awful thudding vibrations, the noise of someone actually trying to kill you. To kill me! Kill potentially gifted, ungrateful but extremely repentant Meyer Liebermann.
In the midst of all that hell I had retreated to a safe-remembered place.
Lying on the floor of Miners’ Union Hall Number 32 covered in plaster and glass, surrounded by shouting, cursing, shooting miners was not a safe place. I was so terrified I had a slight accident. I suppose I should have been thankful for the smell of the cordite. And I wept. For the fear of my own violent death, for the awful shame of befouling myself. Nobody heard my gaspy cry. I was hoping nobody smelled me.
An hour maybe it was. I don’t know. Finally, someone in the hall showed the white flag. The shooting stopped. The soldiers rushed in and arrested us. Some of the miners were shot up pretty bad. As I came downstairs with a rifle prodding at my back I saw Calderwood on the floor. It looked as if he’d taken a bullet in the right leg. Lucky again.
They marched us down Victor Avenue to Armory Hall. All day long more union men were brought in by the soldiers and the deputies. No one wanted to talk much. It was a bad time. Worse for me and those who got too close, as I stank like a ripe-summer privy.
The next morning, cleaned up enough not to offend my fellow passengers, I was put on a train for Denver with about thirty others. Seven deputies, strikebreakers with badges, most of whom seemed to be from Missouri, traveled with us. When we reached Union Station they let us free. If we knew what was good for us, they said, we’d never stick our noses in Teller County again. I didn’t need that telling twice.
As it turned out we were fortunate. After we surrendered, Citizens’ Alliance and scab mobs attacked and wrecked every union hall and cooperative store in the district. What they didn’t steal, they burned. In the street outside the Union Hall in Victor they piled up all the books from the miners’ library and set them ablaze. What the hell business, they said, did miners have with all that reading anyway?
That was just the beginning. During the next week or so two hundred and fifty union men were put on trains and deported from the county, some were dumped over the border in Kansas or New Mexico. Anyone refusing to renounce the union was deported. Anyone refusing to endorse the Citizens Alliance was mob-rushed out of the district. The Portland Mine and a few others which employed Federation men were shut down by General Bell, who ordered them to dismiss their workers unless they signed the yellow-dog contract.
Those damn dogs of war finally caught up with George Kyner too. Eight masked men with rifles and sledgehammers broke into the offices of the Victor Record. They ordered the workers out and then smashed the linotype machines and presses.
With the help of the National Guard and the Citizens’ Alliance, the mine owners had completely taken over Cripple Creek. It was their great victory. The Federation tried to fight back, but there was nothing it could do but watch itself being torn to pieces, shut out of every mine and every mining camp in the state.
Was Cripple Creek in America? Was Colorado in America? You bet. One hundred percent. Only the Federation wasn’t in America. Anyone with even one good eye could have seen that.
Bill Haywood did. He saw something else as well. He saw that the only road that led away from that terrible defeat in Colorado ran through Brand’s Hall in Chicago. He told me that himself, that and all the other high-flown guff about the Mayflower and the Declaration of Independence.
26
After I got back from Cripple Creek and after Bill was released from jail, I moved out of the Haywood house. Vernie’s and Mrs. Haywood’s disapproval of my ungrateful and destructive apostasy had become too much to bear. I did, however, stay at my messenger job with the Federation. Then six months later, not more than a few weeks ago now, about the time when most people are winding down from Christmas and winding up for the New Year, two of my lives came smashing together in a regular two-locomotive-single-track cornfield meet.
A crowd of men three or four deep were pushed up against the long bar in the Saint James Hotel, whooping and hollering like they’d won a prize raffle.
“Somebody’s birthday?” Bill asked impatiently.
“Or somebody’s wake,” Charlie Moyer observed.
“Come on, let’s find us another water hole, boys,” said Bill turning for the door.
“Hold on, Bill,” called B. J. Brown, “Ain’t that old man Cody over there?”
“Where?”
“In the middle of all them roisterin wags, that’s where.”
“Set ‘em up, bartender! Drinks for the house!”
No mistaking that ringmaster’s voice even in all that din.
“Huh! So what?” Bill said coolly.
As we made for the door a big man wearing a frock coat strode in.
“Hey up, excuse me. Sir . . . Why, if it ain’t you! It is too! You, boy! Newborn Buffalo Calf! I’ll be damned! I’ll be double damned!”
It was Arizona John Burke.
He latched onto my arm, dragged me over to the bar. Bill and the others stopped at the door watching.
“Hey, Colonel, look here who’s turned up.”
“Who’s that you’ve got there, John? Oh, I see! Sure thing! Come right over here young fella, don’t be shy. I’ll be more than happy to sign you an autograph, of course I will. Don’t suppose you have one of those handbills with you, John?”
With a grand sweep of his arm he addressed his drinking companions.
“The Public is always . . .”
“Will,” said Arizona John, “it’s Newborn Buffalo Calf. You remember him, don’t you? Back in ‘98 during the war it was. When Charlie Pinto Face was still with us, and that old chief, Sunset Buffalo Dreamer.”
“Sunset . . . Sure! Of course, I do, John! Of course. How could I forget that?”
All the people he’d met in the last seven years, that’s how. A lot older, a lot whiter haired, he bent down, trying to get me into focus.
“Newborn what did you say?”
“Buffalo Calf, Will, Newborn Buffalo Calf. You know, the boy who couldn’t speak. Called himself Carl something-or-other after a time.”
“I got him now. Sure I do! Right there in my sights.”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“How are you, boy? Wadda you got to say for yourself?”
I was so pleased and proud he’d remembered me that I could almost forgive him not remembering who I was.
“This brave young lad,” he announced loudly, hand still fixed to my shoulder, “is the single, sole survivor of that villainous Indian raid on Cotton Springs Station in Kansas. You all remember that, don’t you? Whole family was wiped out. Father, mother, dear, white-haired old grandmother, two sisters and two little brothers. Shot full of arrows and scalped right there in front of his innocent eyes. Imagine that, my friends. And this brave lad,” he said to me with a comforting pat on the head, “this brave lad took a Comanche arrow right through his neck. See here?”
He indicated Hyman Budnitsky’s dent. I was positive that Hyman would not have been pleased to know he was actually a Comanche and not a Jewish street Arab.
“Should have killed him. But, when we found him in that prairie slough to where he’d crawled he was still alive. Barely alive, mind you, but fighting the Grim Reaper with every breath. I took him to Fort Collins and got him nursed back to health by a Lakota medicine man I knew. Spotted Owl was his na
me. Now old Spotted Owl . . .”
On and on the story went. Despite himself Bill Haywood was drawn towards the bar and Buffalo Bill. He stood there with the rest of the audience as the Great Scout regaled them with the heroic account of my life. I found that story damned exciting.
“You don’t look so all-fired dangerous to me, young man,” Buffalo Bill said to Big Bill, when the two finally came face to face a few drinks later. “From what I’ve been reading in the newspapers I figured you’d be set up with horns and a long red tail!”
“Just goes to show you,” Bill replied, obviously nettled to be patronized. “Because I am dangerous, old man, dangerous with a capital ‘D.’ Born to it, sweated at the end of a widow-maker to learn it, hard tempered with it these last years in the bloody crucibles of Colorado. And I aim to get more dangerous yet, until we smash the chains of capitalism and set the workers free. Emancipation, old man! Emancipation is why I’m so dangerous for those stuff-shirt Denver plutocrats and those Eastern Trusts; maybe even for you too. I mean to harpoon them in their pocketbooks. That makes me about the most dangerous man you’re likely to run across! Hopefully the most dangerous man in the whole United States of America. With a great big capital ‘D’!”
“Ha! Damn me! Snorting fire like a feisty bull! Shouting like a regular tent barker! I sure do appreciate that in a man. Mind you, what you’re spouting there is so much foreigner, immigrant nonsense, but I suppose you know that. Kind of crazy, socialistic-revolutionist talk never made the West what it is, Mr. Haywood, never made America what it is, the Great Republic that it is!”
Those two didn’t seem to be carrying around much of what you might call casual talk. They were swapping speeches. Bill filled his glass from the whisky bottle.