CHAPTER XI: Those Mules Won’t Scab Today
Lattimer was an eye-sore to the miners. It seemed as if no one could break into it. Twenty-six organizers and union men had been killed in that coal camp in previous strikes. Some of them had been shot in the back. The blood of union men watered the highways. No one dared go in.
After the raid of the women in Coaldale in the Panther Creek, the general manager of Lattimer said that if I came in there I would go out a corpse. I made no reply but I set my plans and I did not consult an undertaker.
From three different camps in the Panther Creek I had a leader bring a group of strikers to a junction of the road that leads into Lattimer. There I met them with my army of women again.
As I was leaving the hotel the clerk said, “Mother, the reporters told me to ring their bell if I saw you go out.”
“Well, don’t see me go out.
We marched through the night, reaching Lattimer just before dawn. The strikers hid themselves in the mines. The women took up their position on the door steps of the miners’ shacks. When a miner stepped out of his house to go to work, the women started mopping the step, shouting, “No work today!”
Everybody came running out into the dirt streets. “God, it is the old mother and her army,” they were all saying.
The Lattimer miners and the mule drivers were afraid to quit work. They had been made cowards. They took the mules, lighted the lamps in their caps and started down the mines, not knowing that I had three thousand miners down below ground waiting for them and the mules.
“Those mules won’t scab today,” I said to the general manager who was cursing everybody. “They know it is going to be a holiday.”
“Take those mules down!” shouted the general manager.
Mules and drivers and miners disappeared down into the earth. I kept the women singing patriotic songs so as to drown the noise of the men down in the mines.
Directly the mules came up to the surface without a driver, and we women cheered for the mules who were the first to become good union citizens. They were followed by the miners who began running home. Those that[Pg 86] didn’t go up were sent up. Those that insisted on working and thus defeating their brothers were grabbed by the women and carried to their wives.
An old Irish woman had two sons who were scabs. The women threw one of them over the fence to his mother. He lay there still. His mother thought he was dead and she ran into the house for a bottle of holy water and shook it over Mike.
“Oh for God’s sake, come back to life,” she hollered. “Come back and join the union.”
He opened his eyes and saw our women standing around him.
The general manager called the sheriff who asked me to take the women away. I said, “Sheriff, no one is going to get hurt, no property is going to be destroyed but there are to be no more killings of innocent men here.”
I told him if he wanted peace he should put up a notice that the mines were closed until the strike was settled.
The day was filled with