100 years ago in Spokane: Two seemingly endless sagas in the city’s history may have been resurrected yet again

Two major controversies, seemingly just resolved, were not resolved at all.

The first was the disruptive railroad shopmen’s strike, which had supposedly reached a final settlement a few days prior. Now, however, the 900 striking shopmen at the Great Northern rail yards in Hillyard indicated they “may not accept the decision” of the national union leaders to call off the strike.

The Hillyard strikers were meeting to discuss the issues, and indications were that they doubted the Great Northern’s “good faith in agreeing to take back” the strikers. The national settlement included a number of complex conditions that must be met for re-employment. The issue of whether strikers would retain seniority was also in question.

The second controversy was the Maurice Codd perjury trial, which ended a few days earlier with five acquittals, but a hung jury on the eight other defendants.

Now came word that special prosecutor Walter Fulton was meeting with county prosecutor Charles Leavy regarding a retrial of the eight remaining defendants.

In addition, a number of these same defendants were set for trial on separate perjury and witness-tampering charges. Trials for at least five of these defendants were scheduled for later in the month. (The earlier trial was on different charges – namely, conspiracy to commit subornation of perjury.)

Prosecutors also had to decide whether the trials on those separate charges would take place, since the outcome of the conspiracy trial seemed to weaken the chance of getting any convictions.