Dynamite Express
On April 29, 250 angry union members in their "digging clothes" seized a train in Burke from Levi "Al" Hutton, the engineer later claimed at gun point. At each stop through Burke-Canyon, more miners climbed aboard. In Mace, a hundred men climbed aboard. At Frisco, the train stopped to load eighty wooden boxes, each containing fifty pounds of dynamite. At Gem, 150 to 200 more miners climbed onto three freight cars which had been added to the train. In Wallace, 200 miners were waiting, having walked seven miles from Mullan. Nearly a thousand men rode the train to Wardner, the site of a $250,000 mill of the Bunker Hill mine. After carrying three thousand pounds of dynamite into the mill, they set their charges and scattered. Two men were killed, one of them a non-union miner, the other a union man accidentally shot by other miners. Their mission accomplished, the miners once again boarded the "Dynamite Express" and left the scene.
From Kellog to Wallace, ranchers and laboring people lined the tracks and, according to one eyewitness, "cheered the men lustily as they passed."
Read more about this topic: Coeur D'Alene, Idaho Labor Confrontation Of 1899
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