Lest we forget!
Uncle Sam and President Roosevelt look at a variety of graves: Frank Steunenberg, Arthur L. Collins, and others. In the background is a skeleton that says, “murder,” “ruin”; and explosions at Vindicator Mine, Independence Depot, and Bunker Hill Mill. There is a handwritten note under “Lest we forget!”: “…[t]hat I was with you as newspaper correspondent in Victor when you were mobbed there by this same outfit. Harold Baxter E.M. Consulting Engineer for Davis [,] Goldfield.” Caption: Uncle Sam–“Must we have murder and destruction before we need troops?”
Comments and Context
The long, sensational trial of “Big Bill” Haywood and other radical labor organizers in Idaho, for acts ranging from wildcat strikes to deadly violence to the assassination of the state’s governor, ended in late 1907. But agitation and violence in Western mines did not end.
There was labor violence at the Goldfield mines in Nevada, where agitators had turned their attention, and where official feared an escalation in the fashion of bloodshed in Colorado mines, or in the notorious cases in Idaho. These factors and factors inspired the cartoon plea in the local Goldfield Chronicle, a newspaper that, like many Western mining towns, lasted but a few years.
