Miners take a violent stand

We’ll use any excuse to tell the story of one of the most violent and startling events in Inland Northwest history: the 1899 Bunker Hill Mine riot and bombing Our excuse is the art exhibit “Big Trouble: Scott Fife’s Idaho Project,” on display now through May 7 at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane. Fife uses the 1997 book “Big Trouble,” by J. Anthony Lukas, as an inspiration for a series of sculptural portraits of the book’s historical characters. Both exhibit and book are focused on the 1905 assassination of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg in Caldwell, Idaho.

Yet the story’s violent beginning takes place right here in the Inland Northwest, with one of the most earthshaking (literally) events in the region’s history.

To put it succinctly: About 1,000 enraged miners hijacked a train, rode it into Kellogg, placed 60 boxes of dynamite under the Bunker Hill Mine building and blew it to kingdom come.

How big was the building?

Only one of the biggest “concentrators,” as it was called, in the world. The result was a mountain of smoking lumber and rubble. The mine office and the company boardinghouse were also blown sky-high.

This was the culmination of a nasty, long-running labor dispute. The 1899 trouble began when the Bunker Hill Mine fired 17 employees suspected of being members of the Western Federation of Miners.

Miners up and down the Silver Valley, many of whom were fervent union supporters, decided they had had enough. The next morning, April 29, 1899, about 250 miners from Burke, a mining camp farther up the valley, jumped on the Northern Pacific train and ordered the conductor to take them to Wallace. Since many of the miners were masked and carrying rifles, the conductor complied.

The train stopped a few times for the miners to pick up caches of weapons. Then it stopped at the Helena-Frisco mine’s powder house, where the miners grabbed 80 crates of dynamite – a total of 4,000 pounds. The train chugged down to Wallace and then on to Kellogg, picking up more miners at every stop.

By the time the train arrived in Kellogg, it was jammed with nearly 1,000 miners. They piled off the train and proceeded to do two things: hit the saloons and pile all of the dynamite in a pyramid in the middle of the street.

The Shoshone County sheriff, who was at least somewhat sympathetic to the miners (he had ridden down in the train), climbed on top of the dynamite and commanded everyone to disperse.

They didn’t. The sheriff told a reporter, “What can I do?”

The miners were swigging from bottles and singing songs like, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Some of them formed up ranks and began to march toward the Bunker Hill concentrator.

As they approached the building, some miners fired shots and took some company employees as “prisoners,” one of whom later died from a gunshot wound. Most of the employees had fled the building hours before.

Some of the miners then took 60 boxes of the dynamite and placed it in strategic locations underneath the building. At 2:35 p.m., they lit the fuses. It was all over in a few seconds.

The miners, perhaps startled by the enormity of what they had just done, immediately hopped back on the train and retreated back to Wallace. They were now calling the train “The Dynamite Express.” According to one account, ranchers and working people lined the tracks and “cheered the men lustily.”

Not everyone was cheering. Gov. Steunenberg immediately requested that federal troops be ordered into Kellogg and the Silver Valley. Soldiers and police rounded up 128 miners in Kellogg and Wardner.

Then the soldiers made what a Spokesman-Review reporter called “one of the most remarkable arrests ever made in any country.” The soldiers took an armed train to Burke and arrested virtually the entire male population of that mining camp.

Soldiers swept through the canyon and arrested miners, waiters, bartenders, a doctor and “even the postmaster and school superintendent,” wrote Lukas in “Big Trouble.” In all, 243 men were loaded into boxcars and taken to the “bullpen,” a hastily erected barbed-wire camp.

Before long, another 1,000 miners were rounded up and put in the bullpen. Three died there.

Tensions would have run high in any case, but were exacerbated by the fact that the troops were from the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of only two all-black regiments in the country. These troops were used partly from a fear that white troops might identify too closely with their prisoners. However, this simply injected the volatile issue of race into an already poisonous atmosphere.

Only 13 detainees were ultimately charged, and those on minor charges. Everyone else was released. Steunenberg was vilified for years by miners and by union supporters for his role in the bullpen.

Predictably, the real ringleaders of the bombing had never been in the bullpen. They had fled immediately to Montana and Washington.

One of those was Harry Orchard, a miner from Burke, who later confessed to having lit some of those fuses.

And how does all of this connect with the assassination of Gov. Steunenberg six years later?

Harry Orchard confessed to that crime as well.