Distinctly Montana Magazine

www.DistinctlyMontana.com 29 by NICK MITCHELL I n the America of 1894, economic uncertainty and political division ruled the day. The Great Panic of 1893 had spilled over into the proceeding year. Wheat prices had fallen through the floor and into the cel- lar. Likewise, the price of silver, artificially buoyed by the Sher- man Silver Purchase Act for years, was now tanking following the act's repeal. The silver mining burg of Granite became a ghost town overnight. Many of the railroads, judged too big to fail, were in receivership. In New York, some 200,000 were with- out work. In Chicago, 100,000. And even in the sparsely populat- ed backwater of Montana, the number reached as high as 20,000 souls without employment. Across the nation, thousands were unemployed and unhappy. The Populists, a left-wing party mainly comprised of poor South- ern sharecroppers and disenfranchised wheat farmers from out West, managed to carry several states in the general election. One ambitious party member named Jacob S. Coxey had a radical notion. He thought that the federal government should create jobs for the mass of recently unemployed workers. The nation's infrastructure, he argued, was rapidly deteriorating. All of those laborers might be profitably put to use paving roads and building other public works. But he didn't want to spend years trying to win grassroots elections; he had something rather more direct in mind. He raised an army. At first, it was around 500 men, but some estimates place the number of participants across the United States as high as some 60,000 men and women. If they marched on Washington, D.C., Coxey reasoned, the federal government would have to meet the workers' demands, and probably with more expediency than through traditional political action. So in March of 1894, Coxey's Army set out for Washington. The spirit of Coxeyism, meanwhile, went West. All over the country, groups of the out-of-work devised novel ways to head for the capital. The writers Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, sympathetic to the cause, joined local groups of Coxey's Army. Bierce, for his part, derided that the status quo had become a "pickpocket civilization," with the rich picking the pockets of the laborers. But not everyone was quite as taken with Coxey's radical politics. It's easy to imagine how concerning this was to those who felt that an army of vagrants bullying the country into capitulation was less than democratic. The Tacoma News, for one, lamented that "Coxeyism teaches a bad lesson, the most dangerous les- son indeed that can be taught to the American people—the les- son of dependence on the federal government." And as author Philip Dray points out, it must have been especially galling to those who agreed with the Tacoma News that the movement had caught on in "the West, the part of the country long identified with the creed of individual reward won through determination and hard work." Even so, Coxey found many willing followers in Montana. One of them was a teamster named William Hogan. Hogan con- sidered himself a general in the service of Coxey's Army, and a good one too. For one, he was responsible for recruiting some 500 "soldiers." Hogan had a plan that made Coxey's march on D.C. look like a daisy chain. He figured his army had more ground to cover, and he knew that a march from Montana would end with most of them freezing to death somewhere in North Dakota. Walking was for suckers; General Hogan would steal a train. Although given the apparent indifference of the local author- ities, he might not have considered it theft. As a matter of fact, Hogan was a smart man and well-connected. He knew that if he effected his quest through violence, he would lose the support Jacob Coxey's ideas attracted followers throughout the country and received attention from newspapers such as Harper's Weekly

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