HARTVILLE – History can be an interesting thing in how it weaves its way through time and place. In the case of a presentation given by Mark Russ at the January SHAPPS meeting in Hartville, he shared a bit of the iron track of history beginning with King George III, across the nation to Guernsey, Hartville, and Sunrise.
Part one of this article, published in last week’s edition of the Record-Times, covered the emergence of railroads in the U.S., how the train system came through to the local region, and a bit about early train systems in the Guernsey-Hartville-Sunrise area. In part two, Russ shares some history of unions and related characters which influenced aspects of life on railroads in Platte County.
“Railroad contracts never expire, so people today who are hauling trains to Wheatland still work under Colorado and Southern Contract, but BNSF owns the track. They still recognize the original contract. When they go to negotiate a contract, that is what they negotiate the pieces on,” Russ said.
Delving into the reason for this, he explained: Pre-union, in 1883, the cordwainers of Pennsylvania formed a guild (like a form of union) to protest their employers requiring them to teach their skills to slaves who were going to put the cordwainers out of a job so their employers could have cheaper labor. The Pennsylvania case went to the supreme court where it was ruled the cordwainers were participating in an illegal conspiracy to steal labor from their employers. This set the precedence for strikes and unions being illegal at the time, and why during many labor wars people were killed on both sides. Nevertheless, from the 1880s through World War I, there were many labor strikes in the U.S.
“There were some nasty strikes, so eventually Congress made a rule you can only strike for two reasons: if the contract is aggregated or taken away without negotiations. That’s a high bar to hit,” Russ said.
Russ showed the audience a photo of a logo of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers union (they would later add teamsters to the union). They were the first people to win the right of limiting their work to an eight-hour day. He said in a wry tone, part of why they won that particular strike was, for some reason when they would fall asleep on the trains from long shifts, crashes would happen.
The Western Federation of Miners was one of the first mining unions in the West, specializing in hard rock mining and eventually making its way to Sunrise. In 1936 the Wagner Act passed during the Roosevelt administration, making unions and negotiation strikes legal, but there was no set limit on the negotiation period.
“A strike could theoretically last forever, so they formed the National Mediation Board of 13 labor and 13 industry representatives. The result was 13-13 votes all the time, so the Public Law Board was formed instead,” Russ said.
The Public Law Board has one union representative, one company representative, and one neutral representative paid for by the government. This three-person board addressed terminations, lost pay, discipline, etc. “They’d get the information from each side, then the neutral representative would take the information and in two, three – even six months, a determination was sent to both sides at the same time. As soon as another signature arrived back, it was the end – no appeals. Not to the courts or the government – it was done,” Russ said, adding when he was in the union, part of his job was to take issues to this board, so he saw this in action.
The first union in Sunrise after the Wagner Act was a mine workers and smelters union. Russ, whose grandfather was a member of the union at that time, said since the union members were afraid of spies, they met at a farmer’s house outside Guernsey on Bedaloon Flats near where the present-day Tank Farm is located. CF&I, owners of the Sunrise mine, fought the union until 1942. “In the meantime, they negotiated a contract, but didn’t recognize it. That went to the remediation board, and [according to] a newspaper clipping, the local [union] lodge was awarded $140,000 to be distributed among the Mine Mill and Smelter’s Union members for back pay during the period the company was fighting it.”

With a photo of the suit-and-vested “Big Bill” Haywood with a classic fedora on his head, Russ told the audience of the labor leader who started the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, later changed to OBU, One Big Union) and was a leader in the Socialist Party of America. No surprise, the IWW was the most militant of all unions, being armed with weapons at marches, and Haywood was directly involved in labor shootouts in Idaho. The union came out on the wrong side of a lot of them, so he decided to switch over and just go to mining unions. He started the Mine, Mill and Smelters Union, organizing its first contract in Sunrise, lasting through the war until 1947 – 1948.
At that time two competing umbrella organizations over unions, the American Federation of Labor, and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), chose to merge with the thought they were better together than apart, Russ said. “Then they made a new regulation: no communists are allowed to be in leadership of the unions, [and] there were a lot of communists and socialists in unions.”
The resulting changes made things unfriendly for people like Haywood, who moved back to his hometown in Idaho. Later accused of blowing up the home of the governor, Haywood was arrested, tried, and voted innocent.
“Then he went to Salt Lake City, Utah, was accused of killing somebody else, so he high tailed it to Russia. When he died, his ashes were put in the wall of the Kremlin,” Russ said.
“Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a “fearless fighter for workers’ rights” who was involved in a lot of stuff, with her influence reaching even to the local area, Russ said. “Even though Big Bill left, there were still a lot of communists in the steelworkers union.”
Russ shared a story about the local priest in Hartville who got in a fight with a few guys from the union who were meeting in a room in the church. “Father Charles said they have to get the communists out, and it was a knock-down, drag-out fight,” he said.
The union had to decertify 15 years after the original organization was chartered.
“That’s when the steelworkers union came to Colorado. They bought this lot and built this building (Hartville Town Hall),” Russ said.
Switching to another aspect of unions, Russ shared, “Everyone working for the railroad has to belong to a union. If anyone is a dues objector, they still pay for contract negotiations, just not other things.”
Russ and some of the members of the audience, who were also retired railroad workers, discussed the ins and outs of how the dues objectors pay around $5 less per month than people who don’t protest required union dues. Without the perks of being able to vote for their union representatives or other union benefits.
Taking a step back in time, and next on the screen for discussion was an old photo of Charlie Siringo mounted on a horse with a packhorse trailing him. Russ shared the story of how the cowboy-turned-Pinkerton-turned-whistleblower-turned-Hollywood-acting-consultant ended up spending quite a bit of time in Sunrise.
Having joined the Pinkertons after being a witness to the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. Russ explained, after multiple assignments in Colorado, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, he was told he needed to get into the unions to see the when’s, why’s, and how’s of their going on strike.
Sent from the Denver office to Sunrise, Russ said Siringo was told, “Go see if you can ingratiate yourself into the community. So, he goes and gets a job as a miner, joins the union and is voted in as the recording secretary. He would write two copies of the meetings: one for the union and one for the Pinkertons.”
“In his autobiography, [it says] as they (union members) finally finger him as the guy who’s ratting them out, and they are all over Coeur d’Lene, Idaho, he goes to where his gun is, crawls under the floorboards of the boardinghouse, crawls under the boardwalk, waits ‘til dark then gets away,” Russ said, adding he ended up writing an exposé book on the corruption of the Pinkertons, where he was eventually allowed to print the book with references to the Pinkertons changed to a different name.
“There’s a copy of the re-written book at the EWC library in Torrington,” Russ added.
Eventually Suringo went back to California and became a consultant as a silent cowboy movie resource in Hollywood. He has a street named after him in Santa Fe, New Mexico where ranched in his younger years.
With comments from the other railroad men in the audience, Russ talked a bit about the changes in safety rules on the railroads over the years. “I was a mechanic trained for the job in 1979 – which was rare at the time, but I still had to do a 432-day apprenticeship indenture, then later became a journeyman machinist…When I started the rules included ‘no hands in pocket,’ ‘no licking envelopes,’ (too many papercuts), ‘don’t use a finger to line up bolts,’ ‘expect movement in any direction at any time on any track in any direction on a railroad. They’ve since buried [that instruction] later in the safety manual and changed it to say, ‘be aware of your surroundings,” he said.
From a rule book that can fit in a back pocket to the current much larger and thicker safety book, there have been rules made for everything, Russ said.
Some things certainly have changed over years.
Railroads and unions have left their mark on history and have uniquely influenced people’s lives and progress in the local area, and they continue to weave a new trail of history and influence on nations and local governments with their long-entrenched policies. Just ask one of the Platte County commissioners or a Wyoming Department of Transportation engineer, for starters. The railroad’s different way of doing things can at times be difficult to navigate around, but that is a story for another time.