The primary cause of the Coeur d’Alene miners’ strike was technological change. Silver and lead mine operators in the Coeur d’Alene district of northern Idaho began installing steam-powered drilling machines in their mines. The new machines increased the number of low-skilled jobs such as shovelers while eliminating the jobs of highly skilled hand-drill miners. In contrast with other American labor unions that insisted on a wage differential based upon skill, the strong labor movement in the area reacted to technological displacement by winning a standard wage, the rate paid skilled miners, for all underground employees.
The uniform wage removed the cost efficiencies the operators hoped to gain by replacing their skilled men, and in an industry suffering from falling prices, labor costs were an important issue. Not surprisingly, the operators decided to destroy the union and its uniform wage scale. In 1891 they organized the Mine Owners Protective Association to ensure a united front against labor. The Protective Association hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the union.
As the Pinkertons gathered inside information, the operators ceased all mining in the region in January 1892. Although it was a ploy to force lower railroad rates, the shutdown had the additional effect of depriving the mine workers of an income, thus weakening their ability to resist employer aggression. On March 18 the mine owners announced that since the railroads had granted them rate relief, they would reopen the mines on the first of April. But they also announced a new wage scale that would be based upon skill. The union rejected the new wage scale and management responded by stating that the mines would remain closed until June.
But within a few days of this announcement, the operators began importing strikebreakers. Confrontation between union members and the strikebreakers and their heavily armed guards escalated on July 11 with a five-hour firefight at the Frisco mine that ended with the strikers dynamiting the processing mill. In another gunfight at a nearby mine five men were killed. Later that day a small army of armed strikers gained control of a third mine and threatened to destroy it if the strikebreakers were not fired.
The violence prompted Governor Norman Willey to order the National Guard into the region and to request and receive additional help from the federal government. Martial law was declared in the region, and the military force pursued a decidedly promanagement course. It removed local officials who were sympathetic to the strikers, arrested more than 300 union men and placed them in unsanitary “bull pens,” closed down the union commissary, and protected the imported strikebreakers. The governor finally lifted martial law on November 19 when the strike was broken.
The strike’s failure, however, inspired the union movement among the hard-rock miners. In May 1893 representatives from the broken union attended a meeting with delegates from other unions in the Rocky Mountain region to form the Western Federation of Miners, which would recruit more than 200,000 members by the turn of the century.
Further reading: Robert W. Smith, The Coeur d’Alene Mining War of 1892 (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 1963).
—Harold W. Aurand
Colleges See education, higher.
World History
