Ed Boyce - Coeur D'Alene Strike

Coeur D'Alene Strike

In 1892, the 30-year-old Boyce became an active leader in a strike near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. In January 1892, railroad companies serving the area increased the shipping rate of ore. The mine owners decided to close the mines for four months until a compromise with the railroads could be reached. This action threw 1,600 miners out of work.

The mines reopened two months early, but wages had been slashed by 15 percent. The miners struck. The owners offered to restore wages to their previous levels but refused to recognize the union, an offer Boyce and the other union leaders rejected. When three scab workers were forced to join the union by a mob of miners (a fourth fled the county), the Coeur d'Alene Mine Owners' Association obtained an injunction from the United States district court at Boise, Idaho, preventing anyone from interfering with the working of the mines. The mine owners began importing scabs at the rate of 16 workers a day from outside the region. Company militia provided protection. (Idaho's state constitution contained a prohibition against the creation or use of private militia, but the law was not enforced.)

Random incidents of violence heightened the tension: A guard exchanged words with a miner and was whipped. Two drunk guards picked a fight with a group of miners in a local bar. Three guards armed with rifles threatened a miners' camp. Late in the evening of Sunday, July 10, the miners discovered that their union secretary, Charles Siringo, was a mine owner spy hired from the Pinkerton Agency. During that evening and into the early morning hours of July 11, armed miners surrounded the shuttered Frisco mill of the Gem mine. A firefight broke out. During the gun battle, miners dropped a barrel of gunpowder down the flume of the mill; the powderkeg exploded, destroying the mill and killing a non-union miner.

The mine owners demanded that Governor N. B. Willey, a former mine manager, proclaim martial law. Although violence in the region had ended, Willey called out the National Guard. President Benjamin Harrison ordered federal troops to back up the Idaho state troops. Martial law lasted four months.

Nearly 600 miners were arrested and confined in a large outdoor prison, or bullpen. But since most of the local inhabitants were miners or sympathized with them, the state had little chance of obtaining convictions.

Several union leaders, however, were arrested for violating the district court's injunction—Ed Boyce among them. Boyce and the other union officials were confined in the Ada County Jail.