Spokane, 1909: Cauldron of unrest and inequality

Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins had a delightfully unexpected plot: it featured Richard Burton, the filming of Cleopatra in Italy in 1963, the 2010s in Hollywood and reality TV, a proposed screenplay about the Donner Party , and the Pacific Northwest in the here and now. It fittingly made many best-seller lists. It also demonstrated that Walter is very good at blending historical fact with his fiction.

In his latest novel, Cold Millions, Walter returns to the Pacific Northwest and to his hometown, Spokane, in the early 1900s.

There was no place like it then, Spokane — such hell and hair on that town. A full day’s ride from anywhere, isolated between mountain ranges on the stair-step deck of waterfalls… basalt cliffs jutting like teeth from pine-covered hills, train bridges latticing the valley, and in the center that big river, which carved a steep, tree-lined canyon that led from the silver mins and forested mountains of Idaho to rich Washington farmland.

[…]a boomtown that just kept booming,doubling in size every six years, going from a few hundred to a hundred-some thousand in just thirty years, until the only place bigger in the state was that ugly harbor blight Seattle.

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The Northern Pacific Railroad had been completed in 1881, and Europeans poured into the Northwest. Silver mines and logging camps proliferated, owned by well-padded robber barons who lived luxurious lifestyles, and worked by young men struggling to make a living. Two of these men are Gig and Rye Dolan, 23 and 16 respectively, coming from poverty in Montana.

sister Lace dead and sixteen bringing forth a cold body in a Butte hospital, brother Danny a pond monkey in an Oregon timber camp until he side-spiked a rain-slick log boom, lost his balance, and drowned in a river of trees. […]their father-who-aren’t-in-heaven, that cursed old mine muck Dan Senior […]. Their ma was the last to go, from TB.

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‘Job sharks’ at thirty ’employment agencies’ lined Seattle’s mail street.

[Men] paid a dollar for the pleasure of a twelve-hour workday, knowing full well the shark was likely to split their buck with the straw boss and pull the job after two weeks for another crew (at a dollar-a-man), churning them like water in a paddle wheel, so no man could get a foothold. […] Then, harvest over, they recast the migrants as worthless bums and had security men knock their heads and drive them from town.

and a portrait of inp24

Walter thoroughly subverts the myth of equal opportunity in the wild American frontier, showing how even in the early days such opportunity was manifestly unavailable to those without money and education (and how some things have changed so very little).

Into this cauldron of economic imbalance came the unions, the biggest pan-union being the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies’), who call for nonviolent action and publish newspapers. The city, of course, suppresses all such ‘instigation’, and in 1909, the Wobblies start a free speech fight to protest the city ordinance against soapboxing.

The American frontier is often portrayed as a largely male province with women quietly bearing the babies and tending the kitchens, but Walter provides a much more complete picture with two strong female characters: one factual — the firebrand labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn — and one fictional — Ursula the Great, a dance-hall performer.

At ten, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was railing against inequity at Harlem social clubs and calling for the women’s vote at her grammar school. She drew hundreds when she spoke on the street, and by the time of her first arrest, at fifteen, was locally famous … The establishment New York Times took a harder tack, calling her a ‘she-dog of anarchy’.

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When she comes to Spokane in 1909, the real-life Flynn is nineteen years old and pregnant, ‘already a grizzled veteran of dozens of union actions.’

Then there is

Ursula the Great, the Spokesman-Review referring to her as ‘a spectacle of indecency’. […]

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A ‘flame-haired beauty’ with a magnificent singing voice, Ursula dances around the cage of a cougar, slowly stripping until the finale when she enters the cage…

Rye and Gig get caught up in the union battles and are thrown into jail. But they are largely pawns in the games played by the men with power, men who use their money to hire infiltrators and buy intelligence, while the young Dolans have only the barest understanding of the forces at play.

There is a plentiful cast of characters, and many of the minor characters are wonderful.

Jules, a Salish Indian who has not spoken his own name or language for years, and who encourages his daughter to pass as Italian for her own safety and future. Jules tells the Dolans the heartbreaking (true) story of how the US Cavalry “rode along the Spokane River, destroying every village and food cache”, and then shot the Indians’ eight hundred horses, “the full measure of the tribes’ wealth”.

Rye had heard Jules answer questions this way, with winding stories that failed off before their conclusion. He wasn’t sure if it was the Salish way or the French way or Jules’ way.

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There is the immensely cynical Early Reston, an apparently unremarkable man who seems to play all sides, a man with many names who is described as a Pinkerton man (but is he really? or is that part of his myth-making?), and who has several murders in his past.

“Nonviolence?” Reston stopped and gave a winking half smile. […] “Good God,” he said, and tossed the club he’d been carrying. “I’ve fallen in with idealists.”

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John Sullivan, the police chief, a big tough Irish man, who never takes a bribe himself (but overlooks bribery within his police force). He says ‘no one wants to protect women more than me’, but refuses to hire a woman warder for the women’s jail, allowing his men to arrest prostitutes and then pimp them out when they cannot pay their fines. To the end, he cannot understand why he was criticized.

I tell the papers I did nothing but stand up straight while others were blowing in the wind, but when the weak look for someone to blame, it’ll be the man standing up.

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Lem Brand, one of the wealthy string-pullers. Del Dalveaux, an aging ex-Pinkerton also hired to ‘hinder’ the unionists. Labor lawyer Fred Moore (another real-life character).

Gig, and later Rye, have one novel: Tolstoy’s War and Peace. At various points Walter has the characters quote from the novel as part of their dawning (if imperfect and incomplete) understanding of the larger forces arrayed against the ascension of poor men, and how all these lives are linked.

All people except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

A vivid depiction of the tumultous, painful development of the American northwest.