Review by Ed Quillen
History – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Corpse on Boomerang Road – Telluride’s War on Labor 1899-1908
by Maryjoy Martin
Published in 2004 by Western Reflections
ISBN 1-932738-02-9
THESE DAYS, when there’s a controversy about opening a mine in the West, the mining companies point out that they offer better salaries, benefits, and working conditions than other rural employers.
They’re right, but that wasn’t always the case. The change did not come about because mining companies are run by philanthropists. Instead, it was the result of half a century of industrial warfare in Colorado, now largely forgotten with the exception of Ludlow.
But one of the longest battles in that war was fought in and around Telluride. On one extreme were some mine owners and operators who wanted not just profitable mines and mills, but the total elimination of organized labor, no matter what the cost in blood and treasure. On the other were a few anarchists and socialists who wanted not just a fair wage and a safer workplace, but a totally new economic system.
Most people fell somewhere in the middle, but this was a war, and wars build a mentality of “If you’re not totally on our side, you must be on the other side.”
Author Maryjoy Martin takes us to Telluride a century ago, when it was neither a ghost town nor a world-class resort, but a relatively prosperous and promising mining town, recovering from the silver crash of 1893 with gold production.
One of its biggest mines was the Smuggler-Union, whose mill sat a little more than a mile above town, beneath the mountainside tunnels that supplied the ore. Most employees belonged to the local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners, a growing union with locals that stretched from Texas to British Columbia. Labor relations were so harmonious that the union held its meetings on company property, and the mine ran so well that it had paid a steady dividend even during the Silver Panic of 1893.
That serenity ended on April 28, 1899, when the New England Exploration Company bought a controlling interest in the Smuggler for $3 million. The company installed a new manager, Arthur Lancelot Collins, with orders to improve profits by cutting costs – which meant reducing labor expenses by switching from day wages to contract mining.
Also on the scene, for a few days, was corporate vice-president Bulkeley Wells, a dapper and elegant fellow who essentially believed that working men had no rights, and just in case they forgot that and got uppity, Wells and his well-connected cronies could summon the state militia.
The actions and attitudes of Wells and Collins inspired more men to join the Western Federation of Miners; Telluride Local No. 63 was led by Vincent St. John, a gifted organizer and respected union officer.
Thus was the stage set for nearly a decade of warfare – guns, dynamite, soldiers, boycotts, terror, spies, provocateurs, politics, propaganda.
One aspect of the propaganda war provides a constant thread through this complex story. The mine owners, working through their Pinkerton agents, wanted to portray the Federation as a band of terrorists who committed wanton murder. If that image (“the Western Federation of Dynamiters”) could be held before the public, then the union would enjoy little or no public support.
Politicians and newspapers would shrink from any connection with the tainted union, and the mine owners would hold complete sway. One way to accomplish that goal was to accuse union agents of murder: specifically, the murder of Will Barney, last seen on June 23, 1901 as bullets flew around the Smuggler.
Vincent St. John, among other union leaders, was accused of murdering Barney, especially after a skeleton was found alongside Boomerang Road, and much of the press carried the accusations as though they were truth – along with the offer of a reward from the Mine Owners Association.
But Barney hadn’t really been murdered. He wasn’t even dead. He’d been seen around town, and in 1902 he even appeared in court for a divorce. That didn’t stop the Mine Owners from saying that Barney had been murdered by the Federation in 1901, though, and Barney was not the only alleged murder victim who was actually alive.
As the struggle intensified, the Mine Owners, led by Wells, forgot about getting ore out of the ground and concentrated instead on destroying the Federation. That meant using the “dead” Barney to eliminate St. John, preferably in some apparently “legal” way, such as making it look like he’d been shot while attempting to escape from law enforcement officers.
This is a long and complicated story, extensively researched and richly told by Martin. Further, it offers good period photographs, informative maps, a thorough index, and an extensive bibliography. But it’s so rich that I had to read it more slowly than is my custom. To see for yourself, here’s the start of a chapter:
“In the spring of 1902, Vincent St. John was ignorant of the noose James McParland [a Pinkerton detective] was carefully knotting for him. He was unaware union member George Riddell was McParland’s worm in the Telluride Miners’ Union. He knew a spy was supposed to be ‘inside,’ yet a spy of any kind was irrelevant since the union had nothing to hide. He was unconscious of the vast importance McParland and the MOA [Mine Owners Association] attached to Will Barney’s ‘disappearance,’ allowing the matter to be dropped once he was satisfied Barney was alive. Being a logical man, St. John saw no threat in groundless assertions that a living man was ‘murdered’ by the union. He had more important business to manage. Yet his not pursuing the Barney matter until he had Barney physically before the public gave McParland and the MOA a malignant advantage. Although the disappearance of John Mahoney had been quickly dropped in the Telluride district once he was found alive – Mahoney had recently run off again, this
THIS BOOK HELPS FILL an important gap in our regional history. The struggle between the Western Federation of Miners and various Mine Owners Associations ought to be a tale as familiar to Coloradans as the saga of Horace and Baby Doe. But it’s one of those things that gets brushed aside. Of all the mining-town museums I’ve visited, Victor’s is the only one that gives more than a mere mention to the Federation.
That may be because the response to the Federation was a greater threat to American values than anything the Federation might have done, even at its most militant moments in Colorado or Idaho. The state militia, in the pay of the mine owners, committed wholesale violations of the Constitution, and men were rousted at gunpoint in their own homes, pushed aboard trains, and told they could never return.
It’s a sordid part of our history that we should remember, and The Corpse on Boomerang Road is a good start on bringing the labor wars into their rightful place in Colorado lore.
— Ed Quillen