The Great Depression Read online

Blood on the coal

  No labour union wanted to touch the Souris fields. The United Mine Workers of America had tried in 1907. The owners refused to negotiate, fired all who joined the union, and formed a protective association to dismiss or blacklist all future union militants. When, in 1915, the UMWA tried again, the owners locked out the miners and had them fined and prosecuted under wartime regulations.

  In 1920 the Souris miners applied to the first of the “vertical” unions – the One Big Union, as it was called. Out came an organizer from Calgary, P.M. Christophers. He was immediately kidnapped by a seven-man vigilante committee that included a provincial police corporal, hustled out of town, and warned he’d be tarred and feathered if he returned. All seven vigilantes were acquitted of wrongdoing. The police were then brought in to protect mine properties, three dozen militants lost their jobs, and would-be union men were threatened with rent increases and loss of credit.

  Thus when the miners in the summer of 1931 asked for help from the Trades and Labour Congress and the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, they got no response. As a last resort they turned to the Workers’ Unity League and its new affiliate, the Mine Workers’ Union of Canada, which had broken away from its international parent, the UMWA. (The story was a familiar one: the American-run union had not cared enough about its Alberta branch to give it any help.)

  On August 25, the new union’s president, James Sloan, a short, grey-eyed Scot, arrived in Estevan and held an organizational meeting. Six hundred miners joined the union, allowing Sloan to boast that he had a “100 per cent sign up of mine employees of the coal fields.”

  The fact that any union, and a communist-led union at that, could so quickly have signed up a majority of the miners suggests that the limits of despair had been truly reached. The problem of organization was a daunting one. The prospective members were living on company property under the eyes of company security guards. Many couldn’t write or speak English. Boatloads of Slavs and Swedes had been imported in the late 1920s to do most of the menial work for the lowest possible wages, making it easy for the companies to cut the miners’ pay after 1928. It was in their interests to play up ethnic divisions: the British-born got the best jobs; the bosses were English, Irish, or Scots. As Howard Babcock, a company cook, was later to testify, they “tried to compete with each other, trying to get the most work out of the foreign miner.” They did their best, he said, “to keep the animosity between the two groups at fever pitch all the time.…”

  Most of the men who rushed to join the union in spite of these divide-and-conquer tactics didn’t care about political affiliation. They simply wanted a better deal. The mine owners, however, seized on a heaven-sent issue and used it as an excuse to refuse to negotiate with the “Red Union.” The Big Six sent a message to Sloan: “We will not meet with you or any representative of an organization such as yours which, by your own statement, boasts a direct connection with the ‘entire Workers’ Unity League and the Red Internationale of Soviet Russia.’ ” In response, the union voted to cease work at midnight September 7 unless the mine owners met with their representatives.

  In the light of the tragedy that followed, it’s important to note that the community remained calm as the deadline approached. Sergeant William Mulhall, the resident Mounted Policeman in the district, reported on September 5 that there was “no immediate cause for alarm.” The rugged Mulhall was not a man to panic. He was close to retirement, with twenty-three years’ service in the Police; he had fought in the Boer War with the Royal Scots Fusiliers and had joined the South African Constabulary under the legendary Sam Steele before coming to Canada. He had considerable sympathy for the miners and advised his superiors that “our investigation must be carried out with care and patience.…”

  It was the mine owners, not the union, who were predicting violence and urging that more police be rushed to Estevan. Mulhall believed they wanted a strike. The ringleader was Charles Morfit, consulting engineer for Western Dominion Collieries at Taylorton. Morfit, an American, had given the company some bad advice that had caused serious losses. As Mulhall pointed out, “if the plant is forced to close down through strike conditions, it will form a loophole of escape … without exciting severe criticism from the investors.…”

  Mulhall reported that most of the miners weren’t in favour of communism but thought they’d had unjust treatment and needed a leader to air their grievances. “If these had been adjusted,” he wrote, “the present situation would have been avoided.” Meanwhile there was no reason to expect any violence or destruction of property.

  Two days later, on September 7, a second Mounted Policeman, Detective Constable G.A. Sincennes, arrived from Regina and confirmed Mulhall’s appreciation of the situation. He attended a union meeting, “orderly in every manner,” in which Sloan counselled against violence in order to retain the sympathy of the community. Sincennes believed the miners would abide by that advice.

  At midnight, the miners struck. For a week, the situation remained calm. The mine operators still refused to meet with the union. The RCMP sent reinforcements to Estevan. An attempt by three of the operators to bring in strikebreakers was thwarted when the boarding-house cook refused to feed them. These were farmers, not miners, and Mulhall reported that the real object was “to provoke strikers to some act of overt violence thus creating a situation demanding police interference and promoting a crisis.” Again, Mulhall put the blame on Morfit of Western Dominion. “Mr. Morfit is an American with extreme views who has had experience in the Pennsylvania USA strikes, when riots occurred and the miners were literally ‘mowed down.’ His attitude is that the present situation be handled by the police in a similar manner.”

  The companies now moved to get rid of Sergeant Mulhall. J.W. Spalding, the RCMP’s assistant commissioner in Regina, was told that the Mounted Policeman lacked tact and common sense. “His apparent inability to be able to grasp the present situation here, as well as his very indifferent attitude of action, is being attributed, as a cause of the greater part of the trouble.” Mulhall, of course, had grasped the situation very well, and Spalding in a blunt reply backed up his man. That assessment was reinforced by Inspector F.W. Schutz, who reported that if Mulhall hadn’t handled the affair of the strikebreakers with tact there would have been bloodshed. He too believed that “the operators wish the Police to start something.” Some of the Americans had been heard to say that “if this was in the States it would soon be settled that the strikers would be mowed down with machine guns if they carried on the way they do up here.”

  On September 27, two diametrically opposed reports reached Regina. The RCMP was told by Schutz that “you would not think a strike was in progress at all.… There is no Bolshevik or red talk going on as far as I can learn.” At the same time the attorney general of Saskatchewan received a wire from the Big Six demanding more reinforcements and charging that “mob law has ruled.” Bloodshed, they insisted, was imminent.

  Nine smaller mines, meanwhile, had signed with the union while one large company continued to operate. This was the Truax-Traer mine, two miles east of Estevan, whose strip operation had caused such dismay among the deep-seam companies. This mine employed no pick-and-shovel men because all the work was done by machinery; none of its employees were unionized. But on September 24, the union decided to move in. Two hundred strikers massed in front of the company office and tried to get the steam-shovel men to quit work. A dozen Mounted Policemen were rushed to the scene and a truce arranged until the two sides could negotiate.

  The strike, by this time, had split the community of Estevan. The ordinary townspeople sympathized with the miners; the establishment – leading merchants, town council, newspaper – tended to favour the owners. The Estevan Mercury was strongly opposed to the strike, raising the old cry, blaming “outside interests” for paralysing “the province’s most essential industry.” It continued to harp on the “introduction of foreign influences and strange leaders” and wrote glibly about “the disrupt
ion of good relations that have existed since the opening of the coal fields forty years ago.” In one fanciful passage it decried “the state of unpleasantness in that vale of peaceful industry.”

  There was nothing in the paper to suggest that the conditions in that Elysian vale were vile; but then, there never had been. Reading the Mercury, one could only conclude that bosses and workers were all part of a happy family whose cool, sequestered way of life had been brutally disrupted by interlopers.

  The explosion came because the town council panicked and then tried to cover up its panic. The union decided to hold a parade on September 29, from Bienfait through Taylorton and into Estevan. Its purpose was to dramatize the plight of the miners and publicize a meeting scheduled for the evening. The star speaker, who had come from Winnipeg, would be the redoubtable Annie Buller, a short, husky woman and a fiery speaker who was the darling of the communist movement. The town council, which had shown where it stood by denying relief to the strikers, met hurriedly that morning and voted to ban the parade and deny the use of the hall to the union.

  That decision, more than any other factor, led to bloodshed that afternoon. Some of the local merchants, it was said, feared the parade would get out of hand and their stores would be looted and damaged. No doubt the mine owners’ statements about “mob rule” had made them nervous. Yet there had been parades held in and around Bienfait for days without violence. The miners were planning to bring women and children; were they really prepared for a bloody confrontation?

  The council later tried to claim they had warned the strikers that the police would confront them. That was a cover-up designed to free the council from blame for what happened later. The copy of the telegram that Dan Moar of the union executive received didn’t mention any police action – just that permission to hold a parade and a meeting had been denied. The minutes of the council proceedings for that morning were either destroyed or never recorded. A confirming letter, which did mention the police, wasn’t mailed until after the fact and was not received until the following day; it appears to have been an attempt to whitewash the council’s actions and was written some hours after the trouble began. Moar was later to testify that “had there been any such knowledge of such an order to the police, the miners would never have attempted to hold either a parade or motor-car procession in Estevan.”

  A convoy of trucks and cars, the miners reasoned (splitting hairs), wasn’t actually a parade. It certainly looked like a parade – thirty or forty vehicles, many draped with Union Jacks and banners reading “DOWN WITH COMPANY STORES,” “WE WANT HOUSES, NOT PIANO BOXES,” “WE WILL NOT WORK FOR STARVATION WAGES.” The miners intended to drive into Estevan, confront the mayor, and ask him to rescind the ban on the evening meeting.

  The police were apparently not expecting them or they would surely have met the cavalcade on the outskirts of town. Half of the forty-seven members of the RCMP were two miles away at the Truax-Traer strip mine, where the earlier events had suggested the real trouble lay. So much for the pretence that the strikers had been warned that the police would stop them.

  Now, as the long line of vehicles came within half a block of the city hall it encountered twenty-two policemen hastily strung out across the road, determined to prevent the cavalcade from proceeding farther. Eyewitness accounts of what happened next are confused, but one thing is clear: Chief Alex McCutcheon of the Estevan police got involved in a struggle with Martin Day, the Scottish-born digger from Crescent Collieries, who struck him a blow that put him out of action. “Come on, boys,” Day was shouting. “Come on, give it to them!” The Mounted Police sent at once to the Truax-Traer mine for reinforcements.

  Almost immediately the fire truck was called in to disperse the strikers with a jet of water. But while the firemen tried to connect the hoses, they were set upon by the miners. A twenty-five-year-old Taylorton man, Nick Nargan, climbed to the top of the truck and attacked the engine with a crowbar. A shot rang out, and to the horror of the onlookers, Nargan fell dead.

  Across the street, a wide-eyed thirteen-year-old, Glenn Petersen, was attracted by the noise. He left the basement washroom of the Hillsdale School, climbed onto an incinerator outside the building, and peered out, watching the mêlée until his father, a garage owner, dashed up and pulled him away. “You wanta get yourself killed?” the elder Petersen asked his son. It wasn’t an idle question.

  The scene would stay with Petersen all his life. A full-fledged riot was now in progress. The strikers were picking up rocks and other missiles and flinging them at the police; the police were backing slowly away, firing their revolvers into the ground or in the air. By the time RCMP reinforcements from Truax-Traer joined the fray, the situation was out of control. Three strikers were dead or dying, eleven more were injured, four bystanders were wounded, and five policemen were sent to hospital. Although the police tried to suggest that the strikers were armed, no policeman suffered a gunshot wound, but all of the injured strikers were struck with .45-calibre police bullets. A city constable, W.D. MacKay, later estimated that six hundred shots had been fired.

  The police also tried to insist that they did not open fire until the strikers forced them back to the wall. In fact, the shooting began when Nick Nargan was killed on top of the fire engine. Many of the police were young and inexperienced. Of the forty-three RCMP constables on duty that day, thirty-four had less than a year’s service with the force and twenty-six were under the age of twenty-five.

  A good many of the bullets went wide. Clyde Butterworth, an Estevan music teacher walking a block north of the town hall, was shot in the leg. A fifteen-year-old, Tony Martin, who was strolling down the main street, got a bullet in his wrist. His companion, Bernie Hitchcock, had a miraculous escape when a bullet took out one of his front teeth.

  The worst case was that of a Mrs. King, a weaver, who had come from England to visit her brother in a neighbouring community. She had chosen that day of all days to visit a doctor in Estevan. Seven bullets from Mounted Police guns pierced the walls of the room in which she was waiting. She was hospitalized for forty days and continued to get treatment as an outpatient until December 17. Neither the federal nor the provincial government would accept responsibility for her injuries.

  The police bullets drove the unarmed strikers from town. Most piled into the nearest car or truck and fled back to Bienfait, chased by police who were still firing their weapons.

  Two strikers picked up Julian Gryshko, one of their number who had been shot in the abdomen, and drove him to the private hospital run by Dr. James Creighton, who acted as company doctor for all the collieries. Creighton had phoned in to remind the nurses in charge that no one was to be treated unless he had paid a week’s fee in advance or was a policeman in uniform “because the Government pays the men in uniform.” Gryshko was denied aid and was driven to Weyburn, fifty miles away. He died before his friends could get him to the hospital.

  Meanwhile, Pete Gembey and three others brought Peter Markunas, a twenty-seven-year-old miner from Bienfait, into Creighton’s hospital on a stretcher only to be turned away by the matron. Gembey remembered her order: “Take him away, we don’t treat no Red guys around here.” Markunas was also driven to Weyburn. He died there in hospital two days later.

  The funeral that followed was the largest the district had ever known. Fifteen hundred people tried to crowd into the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Estevan, which the strikers had used as a headquarters. After the service, most filed in a mile-long cortège to the graveyard.

  The strike was still in effect, but the heart had gone out of the strikers. The union leadership was either in jail or in hiding. Thirteen had been arrested immediately after the riot, and more were captured later. The trials that followed were marked by allegations of official bias, stacked evidence, and at least one case of jury tampering. The counsel for the mine owners bought drinks for some of the jurors and confided, “We will have to get the whole bunch of red sons of bitches.” The attorney general had alread
y made his position clear when he referred to several of the accused as “radicals,” “reds,” “Communists,” and “agitators.”

  Of the twenty men and one woman arrested, eleven went to jail for as little as three months and as much as two years. Some served time only because they were too poor to pay the fines. The charges were dropped or dismissed for seven, including James Sloan, the union leader, who hadn’t been present at the riot. Oddly, another of these was Martin Day, whose attack on the police chief was generally credited with starting the fracas. But another man got a year in jail for starting the riot and assaulting a police officer.

  That curious twist served to point up one of the serious problems faced by the police – the difficulty of identifying the rioters, whom few of them knew by sight. In fact, many of the identifications were open to question, as a local policeman, Constable W.D. MacKay, was to testify. MacKay, who personally knew many of the rioters, could identify only a few, and yet “we had a policeman there who had never seen them before, could identify everybody that came up.” MacKay was astonished that the Mounties from out of town were able to identify people they’d never seen before. “I always thought,” he said, in a piece of diplomatic understatement, “they were stretching a little bit.”

  One woman who proved difficult to identify was the indomitable Annie Buller, who had been slated to speak at the banned meeting that night. She should have been an easy person to spot at the riot, for she was unmistakable – a small, stout woman with bright red hair and strong features. In fact, the evidence that she was present at the scene was remarkably flimsy. Several witnesses swore she was in Bienfait at the time of the riot, and this included her boarding-house keeper, who was anything but a communist. At one point the wrong woman, a Miss Carroll, was arrested because the police were confused by the similarity of her clothing. In spite of this, Annie Buller was eventually sentenced to nine months’ hard labour in the Battleford jail.