Founding
After hard rock miners made sporadic and often unsuccessful efforts to organize during previous decades, the Western Federation of Miners was created in 1893. The federation was formed with the merger of several miners' unions representing copper miners from Butte, Montana, silver and lead miners from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, gold miners from Colorado and hard rock miners from South Dakota, and Utah.
Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin have written,
The Western Federation of Miners was frontier unionism, the organization of workers who had become "wage slaves" of mining corporations rather recently acquired by back-east absentee ownership. They built their union when they were not yet "broken in" to the discipline of business management. had the militancy of the undisciplined recruits ... From the founding of the Western Federation in 1893, its story for twelve years is that of a continuous search for solidarity ...
The miners who formed the union had already experienced a number of hard-fought battles with mine owners and governmental authorities: in the Coeur d'Alene strike in February of 1892, after company guards shot five strikers to death, the miners disarmed the guards and marched more than a hundred strikebreakers out of town. In response Governor N.B. Willey asked for federal troops to restore order; President Harrison sent General John Schofield, who declared martial law, arrested 600 strikers and then held them in a stockade prison without the right to trial, bail or notice of the charges against them. Schofield then ordered local mine owners to discharge any union members they had rehired.
During the confrontation, the Coeur d'Alene miners received considerable assistance from the Butte Miners' Union in Butte, Montana, who mortgaged their buildings to send aid.
There was a growing concern that local unions were vulnerable to the power of Mine Owners' Associations like the one in Coeur d'Alene. In May, 1893, about forty delegates from northern hard rock mining camps met in Butte, and established the Western Federation of Miners, which sought to organize miners throughout the West.
Read more about this topic: Western Federation Of Miners
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