Sunday, October 08, 2006
Outlaws, Dynamite, and Really Nice People
Sometimes people do really, really nice things! Take my friend Taki Telonidis at the Western Folklife Center for example. When I asked him for advice about how to clean up a 1970s cassette recording of my great grandfather explaining how he and his brother moved a herd of horses from Montana to Washington in 1903, Taki said, “Oh, just send me the file. I’d be more than happy to do it for you.” He made it sound like it was just a lil’ ol’ thing, but after receiving his new and improved version in the mail a few days ago, I’m pretty sure he spent a fair amount of time on it. I was so excited (and grateful) that I converted it to streaming Quicktime over the weekend so I could share it here with you. There are still a few parts where it is difficult to understand (particularly right at the beginning), but there are some things technology still can’t fix.
Great Grandpa Jack was just a teenager when most of this story takes place, and it is not short on thrills and excitement. There is even some gunplay as they try to cross the Flathead Reservation without paying the required toll. They had very little money at the time and simply couldn’t afford it (at one point they even have to trade horses for food). One of the things that interested me most about his tale, though, is the political and sociological picture he paints of life in the Northwest around the time of the trip.
His brief mention of the dynamite-induced destruction at the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho was something I’d never heard about before, and I immediately had to find out more. What I learned is there were large and violent labor strikes in 1892 and 1899 at the mine because Bunker Hill had managed to remain non-unionized. When Governor Frank Steunenberg--who entered office as both a Democrat and a Populist--asked the federal government to send troops to quell the unrest in 1899, the miners felt betrayed. The troops rounded up and held hundreds of men in “bullpens” without hearings or formal charges, and a few even died. Steunenberg was later killed by a bomb at his home in 1905. Big Bill Haywood, a prominent figure in the labor movement at the time (and a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World), was one of three people charged but later acquitted due to lack of evidence. I recently picked up the very thick and detail-packed Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America by J. Anthony Lukas, which is about these events. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but I feel comfortable recommending it if this sort of stuff interests you.
Additionally, Grandpa talks about the outlaw Harry Tracy, who escaped from an Oregon prison in 1902 and (according to Grandpa) shot up Cle Elum, Washington, as well as some other places before finally being tracked and killed by a posse. Hollywood made a movie about it in the 1980s starring Bruce Dern and, it turns out, Gordon Lightfoot (Sundown, you better take care...)? Anyway, Grandpa claimed to have owned one of Tracy’s guns.
