Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,784
By This is the grave of George Pettibone.
Born in 1862, Pettibone was a miner. He came out of Kansas, but he eventually ended up in Idaho. He was just a working class guy. He became an activist in the Western Federation of Miners. This started up in Idaho at the Coeur d’Alene mines after the 1892 strike. Pettibone was a leader of the miners in that strike. He became a leader of the strike. It did not take the miners long to believe that the use of dynamite was a good strategy. They were good at it since it was so central to mining operations anyway. Pettibone evidently masterminded this. He and other men climbed above a mine shaft where the Pinkertons were hiding and blew it up. No one was hurt but a shootout started between the men and the Pinkertons. It was a pretty big deal at the time.
After this, Pettibone left mining entirely. He was blacklisted, though there were ways to avoid the blacklist if you really wanted, such as moving to a different mine district and using a different name. It’s not as if there were Social Security cards in 1892. He ran a store in Denver. He was just a guy. He kept a membership in the WFM on principle, but was not actively involved in the industry. He was known to be a funny guy and a nice guy, though one that you did not want to mess with on union matters.
On December 30, 1905, former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg walked home after a snowstorm in Caldwell, Idaho. When he arrived he pulled open his outside gate, triggering a bomb that blew him ten feet into the air and killing him. Steunenberg had arrived in Idaho from Iowa in 1887, quickly getting involved in local politics. In 1890, he was elected to the state legislature and in 1896 won the governorship at the head of a Democratic/Populist fusion ticket. Like a lot of Populists (William Jennings Bryan to his credit was an exception), Steunenberg was elected with labor support but became a tool of corporate power once he achieved office. The mines of northern Idaho were a hotbed of radicalism in the 1890s. The WFM were organizing workers around their terrible wages and working conditions, as well as violent suppression of unionization through the use of Pinkerton spies to fire anyone who signed a union card.
The miners had two reasons to elect Steunenberg. First, he claimed to represent working-class interests. Second, many of these miners were working in silver and silver coinage was a key part of the Populist platform. But when the workers went on strike in 1899, Steunenberg betrayed them, taking bribes from the miners to crush the strike.
Steunenberg declared martial law and convinced William McKinley to send in federal troops to crush the strike. Hundreds of activists were rounded up and kept in stockades for months without trial. Steunenberg stated, “We have taken the monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it. No halfway measures will be adopted. It is a plain case of the state or the union winning, and we do not propose that the state shall be defeated.” The strike was crushed.
Years later, in 1905, a guy named Harry Orchard put a bomb in Steunenberg’s mailbox. It blew up and killed him. Orchard was a former WFM activist with a taste for violence. He claimed that Big Bill Haywood (now involved in the new IWW), Charles Moyer, and Pettibone ordered him to do that. It was nonsense. Why? In 1905? Also, why in the hell was Pettibone included in this? Did Orchard hold some grudge against him going back a decade. No one knows. We also don’t know to this day why Orchard killed Steunenberg or why he then accused his former comrades in the WFM of the crime. Probably he was just unstable.
The case was huge. The state of Idaho charged all three with murder and capital punishment was expected. Haywood’s trial came first, as he was the biggest name. Clarence Darrow defended him and the case was so obviously transparent bullshit that the jury, to the shock of both Haywood and Darrow, actually looked at the evidence and found him not guilty. At that point the cases against Moyer and Pettibone fell apart. Pettibone was quickly found not guilty. Darrow later wrote in his memoir that he was utterly befuddled as to why Pettibone was included in all this.
Alas, Pettibone developed stomach cancer during all of this and died shortly after his trial. That was in 1908, at the age of 46. Doctors actually attempted surgery and it went as poorly as this usually went at that time. It was two days after the surgery that he died.
George Pettibone is buried in this excellent WFM funded grave in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.
If you would like this series to visit other members or major supporters of the Western Federation of Miners, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ed Boyce is in Portland, Oregon and Emma Langdon is in Denver. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.