John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

And maybe Sam should have a rifle.

Hod rides the Utopia back to Seattle with the other beaten men. They are a sorry-looking collection, frostbit sourdoughs with empty eyes and greenhorns fleeced before they even got to the fields, a few who probably made a small pile and blew it in town and can’t face another winter freezing their lungs and hacking the ground. The fog, constant up on deck, is a relief. Men appear in it, flick a glance at the state of Hod’s face, then turn away without meeting his eye. There is no brotherhood on this ship, each defeated stampeder minding his own troubles.

Hod has been down before, but never this alone. He misses the Army.

It started in Butte with hungry men. First the Gold Trust had their way and repealed the Sherman Act, then Amalgamated tossed Hod and hundreds more like him out of their pits.

“There’s a man named Coxey,” went the word in Finntown and Dublin Gulch, “gonna make it right. He’s got a plan.”

FREE SILVER! said the banners at the Union Hall. GOLD AT A PREMIUM, LABOR PAUPERIZED!

“May Day in Washington,” said the laborers with gleaming eyes. “Every damn American needs a job gonna tromp on Grover Cleveland’s flower bed. That don’t wake this government up nothing will.”

The plan was that the Government, which was the railroads and the mining outfits and the Rothschild bankers who had lured them out West to build their fortunes then dumped them like a gaggle of Chinamen, that Government, would pay them, the Workers, a decent wage to build roads, to dig canals to water the dry Western states and territories, and everybody would come out the better for it. Hod was younger then, just barely off the farm, but even he knew it was a desperate dream. But it was big, big as the Depression that had one man out of four walking the streets and feeling like shit on a bootheel.

“Coxey plans to leave on Easter,” said Bill Hogan, little Bill Hogan who’d never led anything bigger than a mule team but was as straight as they came and when voted General of the Butte Contingent said “Thanks, fellas, I’ll try to live up to it.” There were a bunch of them there who’d been in the same stope with Hod at the Orphan Girl — Hack Tuttle, Orrin Wheatley, Curly Armstrong — all shouting out and stamping their feet when the resolution to march was passed.

Of course marching to Washington was easy for Coxey and his troops, back east in Massillon almost to the Pennsylvania border. The Butte men could walk Coxey’s route twice over and never leave the state. The Northern Pacific said they wouldn’t haul a mob of tramps on their road even if every one of them paid full fare. Which neither Hod nor any of the other jobless men in Local Number One possessed.

And so it was that one night in the middle of April a dozen or so of the troops who’d been railroad hands snuck into the yard and convinced the watchman it was only patriotic that they liberate an NP locomotive and six open coal cars, plus a boxcar for supplies, and that he not inform his masters until the sun came over the Hill. The train stopped a quarter mile out of the yard and Hod was one of three hundred Commonweal soldiers to scale the coal-car sides and drop down into the grimy interior. Their cheers echoed off the insides of the car while they gathered steam and began to highball east.

Wild train coming your way , said the telegraph message sent ahead. Stay clear of our tracks .

It was cold, without a roof and with the train barreling across the scrublands, but with fifty men crammed together and the thrill of defiance running in their veins the night sped by.

The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

Down with the bosses, up with the stars!

— they sang—

Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again

Shouting the battle cry of Silver!

It had been the banks and their tight money that drove his old man off the farm, town people putting an arm around his shoulders and cooing into his ear till he took the loan and then there they were out in the yard with Sheriff White behind them, saying how it was just business and you had to be prudent with your finances. His own father, Esam Brackenridge, working for wages at the granary till it killed him with shame.

My country tis of thee

— they sang—

Once land of liberty

Of thee I sing

Land of the Millionaire

Farmers with pockets bare

Gypped by that cursed snare

The Money Ring

He’d never quite understood how they worked it, no matter how many speeches he heard and meetings he sat through. That was part of the con, of course, making it impossible for a simple toiler to follow, wrapping it in a gauze of words and laws and proclamations and economic ciphers, but somehow he knew somebody was getting rich without lifting a finger, and here they were, honest hardworking American men, without a pot to piss in or a window to toss it from.

We are — joining — Coxey’s Army—

— they sang, miners and teamsters and railroad men, tillers of wheat and builders of bridges, Northerners and Southerners and men born, like Hod, in the far West—

We are — marching — on to glory

We will — camp in — Cleveland’s backyard

On the first of May!

There must be some good men there, they thought, that flag they sang about must stand for something and if only they could bring the truth to Washington, truth in the flesh of a hundred thousand working men from every corner of the land, it would put the greenback boys on the run and there would be work and bread and pride enough to go around. Hod wasn’t sure of their names, but there had to be good men in the East, wizards of finance, who could do something .

Wild train coming.

They made Bozeman by daybreak and in the rail yard of the cow town there were a hundred people waiting, cheering as the Commonwealers stood on each other’s shoulders and climbed stiff-legged over the sides of the coal cars and cheered back, throats raw from singing, and there they commandeered a fresh engine and loaded up with coal from the NP stockpile and coupled ten beautiful spacious boxcars behind it.

“There’s law coming,” the telegraph operator told them. “Marshal McDer-mott just left Butte with an engine and two cabooses. Got him some eighty deputies.”

There were jeers from the Commonweal soldiers and from the crowd and much speculation as to the character of anyone who would throw in with the Czars of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

“Must not be a pimp left in Venus Alley,” said Jim Harmon as he jumped behind the throttle. “Who wants to go to Washington?”

The boxcars were rolling palaces after the open coal-haulers, and the folks in Bozeman had thrown meat and bread and cheese and even a few pies in with them as the wild train resumed its journey.

“This is still hot,” said Curly Armstrong, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Some lady woke up before the sun and baked us a damn pie.”

They had barely settled in, filling themselves with the donated food and bragging about what they would do if the Marshal and his deputies should have the misfortune of catching up with them, when the train stopped in the middle of the Bozeman Tunnel.

The men piled out and walked in the dark along the other boxcars and the coughing, dripping engine to find half of Bozeman Hill slid down over the track ahead of them.

“The NP done this,” decided Hack Tuttle, though the station agent had said there’d been a hard rain the day before and to watch out. “They called their agents out ahead of us.”