Violence broke out during the Coeur d'Alene labor strike of 1892 after miners belonging to the union realized a Pinkerton agent had been planted among them, feeding information to the mine owners on a regular basis. What followed proved calamitous for the miners' local union, and the fallout became the chief reason behind the establishment of the Western Federation of Miners the next year. This episode stood as the first bloody clash between the mine workers and those who owned the mines. Tensions among laborers did not end there, however, and the discord resurfaced in another confrontation in 1899.
Background
During the 1880s, laborers digging in the mines around Shoshone County, Idaho banded together into a handful of local unions, prompting the operators to counter by establishing their own Mine Owners' Association. By 1891 the ore hauled out of the Coeur d'Alene district carried a value of $4.9 million in lead, silver, and gold, a sum equivalent to roughly $154 million today.
Tensions escalated when the mine operators clashed with railroad companies over freight charges that had climbed for moving ore. Around the same period, owners began installing hole-boring machines underground, technology that pushed aside the traditional single-jack and double-jack miners and shoved them into lesser paying positions as trammers or muckers.
Rather than absorb rising costs another way, the operators simply cut pay. Once the drilling machines were in place, workers could expect wages ranging from $3.00 to $3.50 daily, the exact figure depending on the nature of their labor. On top of this, the standard workday stretched from nine hours to ten, yet compensation stayed flat. Laborers now faced a full seven day week, catching a Sunday off only now and then, and only if they were not assigned to pumping. Beyond wages and hours, the miners chafed under steep charges for company housing and meals, along with fees imposed for cashing checks at saloons the companies themselves owned.
Strike
The trouble began in 1892, when miners walked off the job to protest falling wages paired with longer hours. Their central demand held that every man laboring underground, whether unskilled or trained, deserved a "living wage" of $3.50 daily. This stance broke sharply with the pattern common among AFL craft unions of that period, where skilled tradesmen usually looked out mainly for themselves. Here, roughly three thousand better-paid miners chose instead to back five hundred common laborers earning less. This commitment to industrial unionism, rather than narrow craft loyalty, would shape the outlook of Western hardrock miners for decades afterward.
Once the union men abandoned the mines, company recruiters set about luring replacements to Coeur d'Alene. Advertisements ran in Michigan promising mining work, sometimes framed as Montana jobs, with no mention made of the ongoing dispute. Guards accompanied trains carrying these job seekers, and some of the men later described feeling as though they traveled under the watch of captors rather than escorts.
Before long, every train arriving in the district carried fresh replacement workers. Bands of armed strikers regularly confronted these newcomers, warning them off from taking jobs during the walkout.
Mine owners countered by bringing in Pinkerton operatives along with agents from the Thiel Detective Agency, tasked with infiltrating union ranks and monitoring strike activity. These agents flooded into the district in considerable numbers, and soon a substantial protective force stood ready to shield incoming laborers. For a stretch, the conflict played out mainly through dueling accusations in local newspapers, as owners and workers traded blame. Scattered fistfights broke out, and arrests followed for men caught carrying weapons. Two mining operations settled with the union and reopened under union labor, earning their operators exclusion from the ranks of fellow owners who resisted organized labor. Meanwhile the Gem and Frisco mines in Burke-Canyon continued running at full capacity.
Tensions escalated sharply in July when mine guards killed a union miner, marking the conflict's first deadly clash between labor and ownership.
Working undercover for the Pinkertons, Charlie Siringo, a man destined for later fame as a lawman, took a job shoveling at the Gem Mine under the false name Charles Leon Allison. He worked his way into the Gem Miners' Union and won election as recording secretary, a post that gave him full access to the organization's papers and ledgers. He later described the union leadership in the district as, on the whole, a callous and vicious band of anarchists. By his own account, he initially resisted taking the assignment since his sympathies leaned toward the workers, and the agency told him he could quit once he understood the situation on the ground. Even so, he saw the fourteen-month assignment through to its end. Though he later expressed regret over spying on coal miners in Colorado, he never voiced any remorse for his informant work here.
Siringo funneled union secrets steadily to his handlers, letting mine owners repeatedly outwit the strikers' plans. When strikers plotted an ambush against a train of arriving replacements, owners simply unloaded the men elsewhere, avoiding the trap. At one point Gem Union president Oliver Hughes instructed Siringo to tear a page from the union records detailing a scheme to flood the mines. Instead of destroying it, the spy mailed it straight to the Mine Owners' Association. George Pettibone later confided to him that the union intended a July uprising meant to drive out non-union laborers and mine owners entirely and seize the mines for union control.
Suspicion of a mole grew after the Mine Owners' Association paper, the Barbarian, printed details that could only have come from inside the union. Siringo narrowly avoided capture, which surely would have meant his death. His later testimony proved instrumental in convicting eighteen union leaders, Pettibone among them.
Sunday night, July 10, found armed union miners massing in the hills overlooking the Frisco mine, their numbers swelling as reinforcements arrived from nearby towns. At five in the morning on July 11, 1892, the strikers opened fire, and guards along with workers inside the mill fired back. Forewarned by Siringo, those defending the mine and mill buildings had readied themselves for an extended siege, and both sides fought with lethal intent. Three and a half hours passed without a single casualty, until strikers positioned above sent dynamite tumbling down a sluice into the mill. The blast leveled the structure and crushed one strikebreaker beneath it. The rem
Martial law
Once the disturbance had spread, Idaho's governor invoked Martial Law and called up six companies from the state's National Guard, instructing them to put down what he termed insurrection and violence. Soldiers from the federal government joined them, and together the troops herded six hundred miners into makeshift stockades, holding the men without trials or any formal accusations. Later, some of these prisoners found themselves shipped off for defying court injunctions, while others faced punishment for interfering with the mail carried by the United States.
Once the National Guard and federal soldiers had the region under control, Siringo emerged from his hiding place in the mountains to point out union officials and those responsible for assaulting the Gem and Frisco mines. He later described his role this way: since he recognized every agitator and union man, he spent the following week or so herding troublesome cattle into what he called the bull pen, a sizable enclosure with a frame structure at its center where the captives could eat and sleep. Afterward, Siringo made his way back to Denver.
The occupation under military authority stretched on for four months.
Among the union men swept up, George Pettibone faced conviction on charges of contempt of court and criminal conspiracy. Authorities transported him to Detroit, where he remained confined until the Supreme Court intervened and ordered his release. The justices determined that the detentions had been unlawful from the start, and as a result, union members still sitting in the jail at Boise, Idaho, walked free as well.
On May 15, 1893, miners gathered in Butte, Montana, and established the Western Federation of Miners, an organization born directly out of what they had endured at Coeur d'Alene. Almost immediately, the WFM pushed to ban the practice of hiring spies to infiltrate labor, though this demand went unheeded.
The WFM came to embrace a founding myth centered on the Boise jail itself. Decades afterward, the union's Secretary-Treasurer, Bill Haywood, addressed a gathering of the United Mine Workers of America and declared that the Western Federation of Miners felt no shame in having originated behind bars, since prison cells had given rise to many worthy and important things.
Siringo was hardly alone in working his way inside the miners' unions at Coeur d'Alene. According to J. Anthony Lukas in his book Big Trouble, a Thiel agency operative known as Operative 53 had also penetrated the ranks, serving as union secretary at Wardner. Fittingly, the founding Preamble of the WFM listed a ban on armed detectives among its demands.
The miners of Coeur d'Alene would clash with mine owners once more, in the labor confrontation that erupted there in 1899.
Written by Aubrey Research from 1892 Coeur d'Alene labor strike on Wikipedia, cited as a reference and not reproduced.
Where these engagements were fought
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Documented engagements
| Engagement | State | Year | Outcome | Forces or losses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coeur d'Alene Mining War (Gem/Frisco mine battle) | ID | 1892 | Union miners victory | One miner and one non-union man killed, perhaps six wounded… |
Engagements and locations are compiled from published sources: Chronicling America, Library of Congress (contemporary newspaper reporting, public domain; passages cited, not reproduced).