The Great Depression (17 page)

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 disruption 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 already 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.

The strike collapsed within ten days of the riot. Several union sympathizers – “agitators from Winnipeg,” Inspector W.J. Moorehead called them – turned up to urge the rank and file to vote against returning to work. Moorehead dispatched a sergeant and eight men to arrest them on the catch-all charge of vagrancy. Two days later the strike ended.

The official RCMP attitude can be seen in Moorehead’s report of October 15: “The rioters consisted largely of Foreigners as very few English speaking people took an aggressive part.… I would strongly recommend discriminate deportation of the radical foreign element. In my opinion and until this method is put into effect, there is sure to be continued trouble.…”