100 years ago today in Spokane: Railroad strike grows to 1,000 amid call for higher pay

The number of strikers in Spokane’s railyards grew to 1,000 as locomotive shop men from two other railroads, the Northern Pacific and Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Co., joined the strike.

That number was expected to double to 2,000 soon, when the car men at the Great Northern yard in Hillyard were expected to join their locomotive shop brethren.

The walkouts were in support of the Federated Railway Shopmen Union’s nationwide call for higher wages.

From the Army beat: Several black soldiers from Spokane said they planned on returning to France as soon as possible.

Sgt. Charles Ramsey said France was “one fine country” and that there were plenty of good jobs and “they treated us boys fine.” He said there was nothing to keep him from going back.

Another soldier said it was a shock to come back to prohibition after the glories of the grape in France. He said he would wake up in the morning to “cognac on one side of me and ‘big rouge’ on the other.” Back in the States he was waking up to “ice water.”

The paper rendered their speech in exaggerated dialect, modified in the above quotes.

From the murder beat: Police were searching the Spokane River for the gun used in the shooting of Mr. and Mrs. Mangus K. Gove.

The gun would provide crucial evidence in the case, because Thomas Tomalski, the confessed killer, maintained that the gun belonged to Gove and it went off while he was struggling with Gove. But if the gun proved to be Tomalski’s it would refute his claim that he arrived unarmed.

Tomalski confessed to tossing the gun in the river after the shooting.