by Lou Cameron
Stringer shrugged and said, “I could try. I’m no automotive engineer, but it does seem to me a machine this light and frisky ought to be able to go most anywhere a steam locomotive can get to, with or without a cogged track. It’s just a matter of keeping the engine turning over as the air thins out up yonder, see?”
T.S. didn’t, really, but he chuckled and said, “I want you down in Cripple Creek, then. I’ll get you through the guard and them fool machine guns. You’ll even be free to write about the labor situation for your yellow journal, for my side has nothing to hide. The only string I insist on is that you’ll be at my beck and call when, not if, I can get a little wager down on this Panard’s ability to climb Pikes Peak. Agreed?”
Stringer nodded and said, “Sure. Why not? But how are we to work it, you being on those red rubber wheels and me being on this pony and all? Do you reckon we could tether the critter to your trunk rack and lead him down the slope in mighty low gear?”
T.S. Murdstone grimaced disdainfully and said, “I have neither the time nor the patience to spare. I’ll just write you out a military pass and you can follow me down to Cripple Creek at your own equestrian pace, MacKail.”
As he reached under his duster for an officious-looking pad and a gold plated fountain pen, Stringer felt obliged to ask, “How come you get to issue military passes, you being a civilian and all, as far as I can see. Might you be some sort of reserve officer, T.S.?”
Murdstone looked disgusted and began to write direct orders to the National Guard as he replied, downright smugly, “I’m more important than any fool officer or, hell, Governor Peabody, for that matter. He takes his orders from me and, naturally, his soldiers take their orders from him. Don’t strain your brain over it, Stringer. Nobody will mess with you as long as you got me backing you. I hope you savvy that applies vice versa, newspaper boy.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cripple Creek, more or less centered on the original Poverty Gulch Lode, was the most substantial but hardly the only settlement in the gold fields spattered over the southwest shirttails of Pikes Peak. For gold was where one found it and gold, along with silver, had spawned the satellite settlements of Altaian, Independence, Victor and, of course, Goldfield.
Long before you got near any of ’em, the heavy hand of humankind and the hooves of overgrazing livestock had turned the normally timbered slopes to stony desert, and muddy gullies ran along the rocky beds of long-dead trout streams. But while the original trees were long gone, a line of creosoted utility poles ran between the wagon trace and the railroad that joined it north of Cripple Creek, where outcrops of bedrock formed a natural bottleneck. So they’d posted proclamations of martial law, printed on heavy stock, every third or fourth pole, all bearing the same message. Neither Governor Peabody, nor General Bell, wanted anybody visiting the goldfield without a mighty good reason they approved of personally. Such sissy notions as Trial By Jury and Habeas Corpus were suspended during the current state of “Anarchist Agitation”, as the State of Colorado saw anything that slowed down production in a part of the west that prided itself on outproducing any other place on earth in, hell, sheepshit if you wanted to make a contest outten it.
Stringer thought it more prudent to unbuckle his gun rig and stow it, with his Army Issue S&W in a saddlebag under his slicker before he rode any closer to any part-time soldiers packing more serious Army Issue. He was glad he had when, riding around a barn-sized boulder, he came face to face with General Bell’s ferocious notion of a road block.
They had a hard rubber tired motor truck parked to either side of the Gold Camp Road, each with headlamps facing south and rear bumpers aimed upslope at him. Neither was as impressive as the boiler plate gun turret mounted on each truck’s bed. Just in case the .30-30 machine guns peeking out of the turrets failed to stop any bearded anarchist loping down the wagon trace with an infernal device, they’d strung concertina loops of barbed wire across the right-of-way between the armored trucks. But the pudgy young guardsman wearing glasses and a slung Krag rifle looked less worried as Stringer dismounted up the trail a piece and approached on foot, leading the bay with one hand and holding out old T.S. Murdstone’s pass with the other. This was going to be one hell of a time to discover the puffed-up Murdstone was on General Bell’s shitlist.
Apparently he wasn’t. The summer soldier barely glanced at the familiar printed form before he hauled enough wire out of the way for Stringer to lead the pony through. When a ghostly voice called out from the nearest tin turret, the kid called back, “He’s with the M.O.A., Sarge. The CO. said it was only the union guns we had to worry about, remember?”
Stringer felt no call to correct anyone as he remounted and rode on down the wagon trace. The scenery got more chewed up before he started passing outlying log cabins nobody could even think about building amid such stark surroundings these days. The kitchen match reek of ore refineries hung in the air now. His pony didn’t seem to like that, much. Stringer steadied his mount and told it in a soothing tone, “Just be grateful they don’t refine copper in these parts, you delicate critter. Roasting telluride may not smell of lavender, but it’s perfume, next to copper sulfide ore. Those fumes will take the hair off a man’s chest without unbuttoning his shirt!”
They began to pass more impressive architecture, none moreso than the roofed-over mine machinery running up the slopes to either side. For human beings could always throw another blanket on the bunk or shove some more coal in their cabin stove during the winter months up here. But conveyors, crushers and such needed real protection from the elements if they were to keep producing, and around the clock production was the way anyone but a lawyer made money on a gold mine.
There were, Stringer already knew, more than five thousand shafts producing everything from High Grade to Hot Air in the Cripple Creek field. In the banner year of 1901, those various mines had produced between them, a little over twenty-five million dollars worth of bullion, which sounded like a lot until one divvied the pot between a good sized gang of owners and the forty thousand lesser lights who dug the gold or, with much less effort, from the ones who did the hard work underground at circa three dollars per diem.
The original business center of Cripple Creek had burned to the ground in ’96 when a coal oil lamp had taken an unfortunate punch during a punch-out between a barkeep and a whore in the Central Dance Hall. Ten buildings had been left standing after the fire had spread to the dynamite and flammable whiskey in Harder’s General Store, although some blamed part of the horrendous explosion on the boilers of the all-frame and all-steam-heat Palace Hotel betwixt the dance hall and dynamite. So the downtown Stringer rode into that afternoon had been rebuilt of brick and brownstone, albeit in a less flamboyant style than the incinerated Victorian Gingerbread old-timers still recalled so wistfully.
After such a long ride, the first chore Stringer faced, of course, was seeing to the creature comforts of his tired mount. Once he had the bay rubbed down, watered and fed at the livery across from the new brick Palace, he thoughtfully removed his gun rig from the saddle that seemed safe enough in the tack room, for now, and strapped it on before striding up the street to the offices of the Cripple Creek Crusher, one of the two reliable newspapers Sam Barca had known of in town. Stringer had no call to suspect the rival Cripple Creek Prospector of skullduggery, but as he told the old-timer who came out from the back to study him morosely, Sam Barca had said to look up his old pal, Jeff Keller, at the Crusher.
Stringer could see how his crusty boss and this old fart might have gotten to be pals in their cub reporting days. Good Old Jeff just growled, „„You sure picked a swell time to pester me. You ever stick type?” to which Stringer replied with a shrug, “Some. I just told you I was a newspaperman.” So the older example of the species snorted something about Stringer looking more like a saddle tramp and led him back to the press room.
There, amid the clatter of a fancy new electric press and the smirks of the two printer’s devils feeding it blank ne
wsprint and stacking the results, Jeff nodded curtly at a much more traditional sloping typecase and told Stringer, “If you know the game enough for me to bother with you can stick some pesky personals and tell me what you want at the same time, right?”
Stringer said that sounded reasonable and peeled of€ his hat and jacket to pick up a typesetter’s stick and scan the topmost scrap of notepaper impaled on a spike with others near the upper right-hand corner of the ink-stained wooden case. The older man watched just long enough to see Stringer knew the rudiments of sticking type, then he grumped around to the far side, where a similar typecase sloped the other way with a sort of roof ridge between them below eye level. At first, Stringer didn’t ask many questions. Sticking type was a lot like roping calves or riding a bike. It came back to you if you’d ever done it before, but you had to get into the swing of it by paying attention to what you were doing for the first few minutes.
To anyone but a printer, a printer’s stick looked a lot more like a shallow tin box. When sticking type, you held it in your left hand if you were right-handed, and reached for the metal type with your free hand. If you were unfortunate enough to be born left-handed you still stuck type right-handed, if you wanted to work for ninety-nine out of a hundred printing outfits. Each shallow compartment of the sloping case in front of you contained a heap of the same letters, if the printer’s devil who refilled the cases from broken up and resorted type knew what was good for him. Each metal letter was, of course, the reverse of the impression it left in ink on contact with the newspaper print. Ergo, as Stringer read the hand scrawled copy to be stuck, he had to insert the type in his stick upside down and backwards. Printers were supposed to be able to read that way as well and while it was an old print shop saw, Watch your Ps and Qs! didn’t really apply to anyone with a lick of sense. While it was true that a metal type-face reading lower case p would print as q on paper, there were grooves on the slivers of type that warned one at a glance or quick feel when type had been stuck wrong. So it was simply a matter of taking his time and paying attention to the personal notice he was sticking at the moment. The older hand facing him wasn’t able to hold out as long. He grudgingly asked how Old Sam Barca was these days and added that Stringer’s trip all the way from Frisco proved the dumb Dago still didn’t know a mouse in the dark from an all-out assault by Jack The Ripper. When Stringer removed the print order slip he’d just stuck from the spike and proceeded to set a second, mildly asking what they might be jawing about, the local newspaperman said, “All this bull about another big shoot-out up here in the gold fields, of course. I covered the one we had back in the not-really-all-that-gay nineties. Those of us as had families to feed called it a mighty mean business depression. The panic pushed the price of gold down. It was a mighty dumb time to strike for higher wages, but the so-calt Knights of Labor called one. So miners walked out of the shafts all over Colorado, the poor saps.”
Stringer double-checked the spelling of the name of the lady who’s husband would no longer be responsible for her debts before he told the older newspaperman, “I think I was on my way to Cuba with Teddy and his Rough Riders about that time. The Colorado Guard got to shoot at least as many strikers as Teddy did Spaniards, right?”
Jeff growled, “Don’t talk like a damned Democrat. It was in ’96, two years afore the war with Spain, the Knights Of Labor declared war on Colorado Capitalism. They failed at Aspen and Leadville. Men with wives and kids to feed don’t cotton much to risking their jobs to prove old Karl Marx right. You can’t have much of a strike when only a handful of single and no-doubt lazy malcontents refuse to work.”
Stringer stuck the last of a line, placed a slug in for some space and began a new one, working faster, now, as he insisted, “Come on, Jeff. I said I never covered the big Cripple Creek strike of the nineties. I never said I heard it was a snowball fight. Sam Barca tells me considerable blood was spilt on both sides, and that you boys here at the Crasher were as sympathetic to the strikers as any paper in Colorado.”
Jeff Keller grimaced and replied, “What can I tell you? I was still laboring under the impression that this world might be run on the level. Some of the mine owners did try to take advantage of the financial panic by cutting wages. A vainglorious sheriff who looked and talked like Wild Bill, but doubtless sat down to pee, thundered war talk that only encouraged hot heads on the other side to study war. Meanwhile old Winfield Scott Stratton, about as decent a mine owner as ever drew breath at this altitude, signed a contract with John Calderwood, founder of the more reasonable Western Federation Of Miners, for two bits more a shift with the same pay for shorter night shifts.”
Stringer frowned and said, “Hold on, Jeff. We’ve been told the W.F.M. is a radical red flag outfit, run by Big Bill Hey wood and some like-minded anarchists.”
Jeff Keller locked the stick he’d been filling, picked up another, and growled, “History could be repeating herself, although things ain’t half as bad now as they were then. Calderwood enlisted about eight hundred miners in his then-new union, struck some of the mines owned by more stubborn gents, and then sort of foolishly went down to the flatlands on other union beeswax. He had his fool self two younger and less cool-headed lieutenants, Junius Johnson and Jack Smith, who liked to be called General Smith. Calderwood had no sooner left town than brawling broke out betwixt strikers, and scabs brung in against the very advice of this newspaper and the Colorado Guard. So Johnson and Smith built a half-ass fort atop Bull Hill and both sides commenced lobbing lead and dynamite until it’s a pure wonder only a handful were killed outright in the end.”
“The military crushed the uprising, right?” asked Stringer, only to be told, “So union handbills and the socialist newspapers printed back east would have it said, only I was here, and that ain’t the way it happened. General Tarsney, in command of the troops at the time, was an officer and a gentleman who knew what both words meant. He and his troops busted up fights and policed the goldfields with as even a hands as anyone but a mine owner or a striker might want. So naturally both sides accused the troopers of siding with the other.”
“How did it end, then?” asked Stringer, really curious now, as he’d always thought the accounts he’d read about the big Colorado mining strikes had been unbiased.
Jeff Keller told him, “The union brought in professional toughs. The mine owners did the same, and they had more money to spend that way. The strikers were headquartered over in Altman, around the first mines they’d struck. A hundred and twenty-five company guns caught the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad over yonder one bright morning. As they were rolling off the flat cars, loaded for bear, a mighty dynamite blast blew the shaft house of the Strong Mine a good five hundred feet in the air. More dynamite went off all about, showering pullies, cables and shattered timber down on the hired guns, who no-doubt reasonably retreated, chased all the way into this town, or Victor, with the union toughs in hot pursuit.”
Stringer frowned thoughtfully and demanded, “You say that’s how the strike was broken, Jeff?” to have the old timer explain, “Sure I do. Johnson and Smith led let’s say seven hundred hotheads into town to bust it up. Some of them got busted up in the process, but they mostly made folks mad at ’em. Up until they took to knocking down old men and lifting young gal’s skirts right here in town, a good many local folk had been rooting for them to win again the stuck-up mine owners. But once the damn-fool union toughs declared war on society in general, well, there were at least fifty thousand souls in this county alone, including a heap of other mining men, who had more use for law and order than any damn notions of Karl Marx or even William Jennings Bryan! This paper, for one, switched positions on the union’s demands. The National Guard had to round up the ring leaders, even though General Tarsney didn’t think much of the state government we had at the time. Old W.S. Stratton, who’d been as easy to get along with as the union could have hoped for, took the lead in cracking down with a neat divide-and-conquer ploy. He got all the mine owners to
go along with three dollars a shift for an eight hour shift, provided all so-called troublemakers on both sides, including their leader Calderwood, stood trial for all the trouble they’d caused.”
Stringer whistled softly and said, “I was wondering how Big Bill Heywood got to be the boss of the W.F.M.” But Keller told him, “Don’t leap to conclusions like an infernal cub. I told you both old Stratton and General Tarsney were smart as well as decent gents. Calderwood and most of the boys on both sides were let off with warnings. Only the rascals who’d actually set off dynamite really got to go to jail. But that was only providing they cease and desist from further shit in and about the Sacred Soil of Colorado. General Smith didn’t seem to savvy the terms. He was gunned over in Altman whilst trying to organize another strike. Some say his killer was a company man while others say it was personal. Nobody ever stood trial for the shooting. Old Johnson joined up for the war with Spain and never came back. Old Calderwood was making a more honest, or at least less hectic, living as an assayer, last we heard of him. We know how to handle such assholes, here in Cripple Creek.”
Stringer slugged another line before he demanded, “What am I here for, today, in that case? Heywood’s taken over the remnants of the W.F.M. to demand a rematch with your Stratton and …”
“Stratton’s dead.” Keller cut in, bleakly, but sounding a mite more cheerful as he continued, “W.S. died in, let’s see, 1902 if memory serves me rightly. Lord, what a funeral that was, down to Evergreen Cemetery, in The Springs. But the Mine Owner’s Association he ran so swell lives after him, stronger than ever and, thanks to Stratton’s clever leadership when leadership was needed, smarter than ever. As for Big Bad Bill, the Wild Desperado of the Colorado mine fields, he’s only the executive secretary of the W.F.M.; Charles Moyer, a more reasonable cuss, is the president elected by the rank and file. Moyer’s only interested in wages and working conditions, like most of the miners, if the truth would be known. Bill Heywood’s just a windbag who reads too much. Bert Carlton’s issued standing orders on Big Bill. He’s likely to experience the joys of tar and feathering if he opens his big mouth in Cripple Creek again!”