Coeur D'Alene Miners' Dispute - Coeur D'Alene Confrontation of 1899

Coeur D'Alene Confrontation of 1899

The profitable Bunker Hill Mining Company at Wardner, Idaho had employed Pinkerton labor spies to identify union members. The company fired seventeen union members.

On April 29, 250 angry union members seized a train in Burke and rode it to Wardner, and dynamited a $250,000 mill of the Bunker Hill mine. A non-union miner and a union miner were killed.

At the Idaho governor's request, President William McKinley sent the U.S. army. One thousand men were herded into an old barn. Conditions remained primitive, and three prisoners died.

Emma Langdon, a union sympathizer, charged in a 1908 book that Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg received $35,000 from the mine operators. J. Anthony Lukas later recorded in the book Big Trouble,

In 1899, when the state needed money for the Coeur d'Alene prosecutions, the Mine Owners' Association had come up with $32,000—about a third of it from Bunker Hill and Sullivan—handing $25,000 over to Governor Steunenberg for use at his discretion in the prosecution. Some of this money went to pay .

Some of the miners, never having been charged with any crime, were eventually allowed to go free, while others were prosecuted. The mine owners developed a permit system aimed at excluding union miners from employment.