You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Monday August 24, 1903
Cripple Creek District, Colorado - W.F.M. Establishes Stores for Strikers
The merchants of the Cripple Creek District may yet rue the day that they denied credit to the striking miners! They did so three days after the miners went on strike, hoping to starve them into surrender. The Western Federation of Miners, however, has met this challenge by establishing stores throughout the strike district without delay.
Tom Parfet and George Hooten of Cripple Creek along with John Harper of Victor have been appointed store managers by their local unions. They have been going about the city of Denver purchasing goods from the wholesale merchants, always looking for the best prices.
The stores are being placed in the buildings owned by the Western Federation of Miners. Each store has a meat market, a grocery and a green grocery. The stores provide strike relief as well as providing goods for the community at large, at better prices.
Big Bill Haywood was heard to say that the merchants are so worried that they are in a state of insomnia.
SOURCE
The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood
(1st pub 1929)
International Pub, 1983
Sunday August 24, 1913
Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan - John H. Walker Speaks in Support of Copper Miners
John H. Walker, Secretary of the Illinois Federation of Labor, was in the strike zone and gave a speech yesterday. Walker has been employed by the Western Federation of Miners to spread the word about the copper miners' strike among trade union members and supporters.
John Walker reports that the military presence is brutal, and that General Abbey's troops are acting as:
scab herders, strike-breakers, and black-leg protectors..[who] have shot people in the back, browbeaten men and women, insulted women and girls, and after filling up on beer and whisky sent them by the mine owners, swaggered up and down the streets with their big guns and sabers, a disgrace to the rottenest government on earth, let alone ours.
SOURCE
Rebels on the Range
-by Arthur W Thurner
MI, 1984
Hellraisers Journal on vacation!
Hellraisers will appear in abbreviated form until Sept 2nd for a vacation of sorts. A total vacation is not possible since the capitalist never took any time off in their suppression of the U.S.labor movement.
Solidarity,
JayRaye