Chapter 6: Fighting Back

July 1917

I spent four days in Seattle waiting for the Governor or the State Detective to see me. I think I was closer to giving up then than ever before. From where I sat, in a cheap hotel or a working-man’s diner, it seemed that the United States was unravelling. The people in power are trying to raise the drawbridge to prevent anyone else getting ahead. The farmers want to pay starvation wages and even the industrialists can’t seem to see the benefit of a settled, well-paid work force.

It had seemed so obvious to me that the unions could help to make life better for the latest arrivals from Europe and Mexico. I had no interest in the political stance taken by so many union leaders: let the farmers keep their land so long as they give the farm hands a wage that lets them start a family in modest comfort. In Washington, the farmers had to establish their rights against the traditional rights of trappers who had, in their time, fought against the native people. But their own experiences seemed to have blinded them to the plight of others. So many of the people I meet treat America as a life-raft so overcrowded already that the only way to survive is by beating the latest arrivals into the sea.

By the time Sheriff Ed Spencer arrived from Yakima and cleared my path to the Governor, I was resolved to deliver my message and leave them all to sink or swim without me. I’m ready to return to the Napa Valley and grow grapes.

My journey from Bonners Ferry started well enough. I had to catch an east-bound freight because of the grade that slowed trains in that direction. I had to go as far as Butte, Montana before I could turn around and set off for the west coast. The talk amongst the tramps and hobos was all of the war in Europe; the government had moved swiftly since they declared war on Germany at the beginning of April. They were already drafting single men aged between twenty-one and thirty.

Many of the hobos felt an urge to join the army but as many more considered that they should do nothing for a nation that had treated them with disdain. Emotions were running very high and there were half a dozen fights in the jungle at Butte in the hour or so I waited for a west-bound freight train. By the time we pulled into the goods-yard at Seattle, I had made up my mind to join the army after I’d helped to thwart Lewis and his mates, holed up in the mill at Bonners Ferry. I’m not entirely clear why the War is being fought but America is now involved, and I should stand up for the nation that has treated me well.

I went straight from the depot to the office of the State Detective where I was stopped at the front desk by a uniformed police sergeant.

“When the State Detective wants to see tramps, he sends out a patrol and brings them in wearing manacles.”

“I’ve spoken to him before. I helped after the Everett massacre.”

He didn’t bother to reply but went back to reading his newspaper.

“Let me have paper and pencil and I’ll write him a note.”

“The good citizens of Seattle pay taxes to buy paper and pencils and they entrust me to take care of them. Buy your own paper!”

I almost asked if the citizens would approve of him reading a newspaper while at work on their behalf, but I turned on my heel and left the building without another word. I ate in a diner near the depot and the waitress recommended a hotel near by – she also gave me several sheets of paper and a sharp pencil. I sat and wrote three letters giving a lot of thought to the precise wording of each one.

I reminded the State Detective that I had helped to identify Leggett, the man I know as Lewis, who was with a gang of men like himself across the state line in Idaho. In my letter to the Governor, I mentioned the vulnerability of the grain crop as we neared harvest time. It was only to Ed that I opened my heart and detailed all my fears for the coming months. I posted his letter on my way to leave a note with the unhelpful sergeant in the State Detective’s office.

He wanted to know what I had written, and he lifted a paper knife from the desk he was leaning over.

“I don’t think the State Detective will be happy when he finds that you open his mail.”

He looked at me, and then he looked at the letter before he made up his mind and placed my note in a pigeonhole on the wall behind his head. I left him wrestling with his conscience and went to the Governor’s office. I asked for an appointment as I handed over my letter to a smartly dressed young man at the enquiry desk. His response was practiced: he opened a ledger, noted my name and the address of my hotel, and then closed the book with my letter inside. I could almost see the cogs turning in his head – poorly dressed and living in a doss house equates to a person of no importance.

I spent most of the next three days in the library reading newspapers. I called at the two offices where I had left letters twice a day without doing anything other than annoying the people I spoke to. There was a different sergeant on duty every day, but I could detect no difference in their attitude to me. The smooth young man at the governor’s office remained polite for two days before he forgot his training and told me to leave him alone.

Here I was, ready and willing to help these people and I was being ignored. They represented the population of a single State of the Union, and they couldn’t find time for me. How much worse would it be if I tried talking to the national government? I resolved that I would not volunteer for the forces being armed and trained for the War in Europe. If they found me, I’d join up but until then I’d remain a civilian with whatever freedom I could retain.

On my journey from Bonners Ferry, I had resolved to fight back. I wasn’t quite sure of all the people I was going to fight but I intended to begin with Lewis and his cronies. Once I had destroyed their influence for harm, I could consider what I should do about the leaders of the AWO and the Fassbinders. By the time Sheriff Ed slid into the seat opposite me in the diner on my fourth day in Seattle I was considering getting myself arrested to win some attention.

I had, you see, come up with two ideas for undermining the miller and his squad of goons. It was dangerous to assume that they would try to disrupt the wheat harvest as they had in the past, but I could think of no other way for them to damage the lives of people in the State. My time in the library had reinforced my concerns since the national government was pressing farmers to produce more and more grain. Wheat crops in Europe had been badly hit by the War and the news coming through of a revolution in Russia would likely make the situation much worse.

It would have been more satisfying to have discovered the plans of Pedersen and his gang but there was so little time until the start of the harvest that the best thing I could do would be to disrupt their efforts. Lewis and the others travelled by train all over the northwest and I had the idea of putting detectives on trains to stop and question the thugs; they all looked enough like Lewis to pull them in using the impression the artist had drawn from my description. I was assuming that the State Detective would have the authority to board trains travelling through his State.

“You look wild, Ewan,” Ed said as he settled opposite me. “I’d jail you on sight if you came to Yakima looking like that!”

My waitress brought two coffees and I explained my frustration to Ed. He listened quietly, making no comment but nodding occasionally. Describing my plan in his quiet, calming presence went a long way to restoring my belief that something could actually be done to counter the miller and his gang of thugs.

“Let’s go,” Ed encouraged me. “I sent a wire to the Governor when I got your letter and we’re seeing him in twenty minutes. You don’t look like much but at least you don’t smell!”

Governor Lister saw us on time. I was shocked by the change in his appearance since the Everett massacre. His skin was yellow, and his face was puffy; what I could see of his body, sitting shrunken behind his desk, was bloated.

“We’re neither of us as smart as before, Mr Clooney,” he smiled, “But all you need is half an hour with a barber!”

Ed and I sat facing him, lit cigars and then he waved me to begin.

“I have no proof, but I’ve seen a lot of straws and their all blowing in the same direction. If the newspapers have got it right, the United States would lose a lot of prestige if we don’t have a substantial surplus of wheat that we can send to Europe. Unhappy workers can destroy a field or two here and there without doing much damage overall. But what if someone used explosives to destroy the silos where wheat is stored at depots or the trains that carry grain to the ports for shipment to France and Britain?”

I told him that some of the leaders of the IWW would like us to follow the example of Russia and overthrow the governing classes. They openly advocated destruction of factories to bring down the bosses before a utopian future when the working man would be in control of his own destiny.

“The ordinary working man will never be in charge; the owner and stockholder will simply give way to the union boss, and a new ruling class will be established.”

Then there are the many farmers of German stock that want to stop this country attacking their homeland. Some of them will be persuaded that destruction is the prelude to a reopening of the debate about the War in Congress and the Senate.

“We can only guess where the blow will fall but fall it must unless we take action.”

The Governor had been making notes all the time I’d been talking but now he looked up at me and I could see the question in his eyes – what could we do?

“I wondered if you could call out the militia and send them on training exercises around the State.”

My idea was that twenty or so armed militia could camp close to grain silos in rail depots in the wheat-growing areas. I had only got this far when the Governor lifted the telephone on his desk and made two calls, one to a colonel and the other to an honourable. When he put the receiver back in its cradle, he sat back and smiled at me.

“While we wait for them to show up, tell me of your idea for putting detectives onto trains.”

The ‘honourable’ turned out to be the Attorney General of the State of Washington who was invited to give his opinion on the legality of requiring rail travellers to prove their identity to an officer of the detective force. His view was that it would be perfectly legal although there might be complications in deciding the county in which an offence took place in the event of charges being brought. He proposed that all railroad tracks should be considered to be in Seattle. The Governor wrote a memo and sent Ed off with it to get the State Detective to begin the questioning of travellers before the day ended.

I went on to detail my ideas for the deployment of the State militia. The Governor and Attorney General exchanged meaningful glances during my recital but neither of them offered to comment when I concluded. The telephone bell broke the little silence that developed after I had finished speaking. The Governor asked for five minutes before his next visitor was shown up.

“I appreciate all you’ve done, Mr Clooney,” he began. “But now I must ask you to leave things to the proper authorities. Please inform my clerk of your address and do not leave the State until further notice.”

I could feel my face flush, but I fought down my initial impulse to tell him just how little faith I had in the proper authorities. It added insult to injury that it seemed that I was the only person to be placed under restraint! My second thought was to appear to accept my dismissal and quietly leave them to get on with things while I travelled to San Francisco and got on with building a future for myself. I couldn’t leave, however, without making a comment.

“I’ve broken no laws in this State. At some personal risk and expense, I’ve brought you information not, apparently, available from the proper authorities. I will trouble you no further.”

As I closed the door behind me, the two men were looking at each other with their eyebrows raised. I had no doubt that they could cook up some charge that would let the police hold me for a few days, so I headed straight from the Governor’s office to the docks since I didn’t think they’d allow me to hop on a freight train. I was prepared to spend some of my dwindling bankroll on a passenger ticket, but I spotted a hand-written sign for a deckhand on a barge. After my experience on the voyage to Charleston, I should have known better!

Jeb, the owner and skipper, had cut every corner he could find. The vessel had been written off by the insurers after she ran onto rocks and Jeb had salvaged her. He beached the boat and covered the hole in the planking with metal plates that he welded on with the help of his brother-in-law. The hull was watertight, but the balance was compromised – stopping her broaching in even a moderate quartering sea was like trying to balance a pencil on its point.

We sailed north along the Canadian coast to Prince Rupert where we took seven log rafts in tow. The mass of wood behind us cured the handling problem but we only made progress towards the sawmills for twelve hours out of the twenty-four while the tide was running in our favour. The rafts were simply tree trunks loosely chained together with a hawser fore and aft. There was one raft directly towed by the barge and it hauled three more rafts that each pulled one. Regulations required one man to be stationed on each raft to deal with emergencies, so Jeb told me – things were hazardous enough on the barge!

It turned out that there were quite a few regulations Jeb was flouting. The maximum number of rafts, for instance, was four so we had to pull into a bay at the back of Vancouver Island where another barge was waiting to tow three of our satellites into the dock at the lumber yard after handing Jeb a bundle of cash. We were supposed to carry two officers with mates’ certificates and a qualified engineer: we had Jeb, who had plenty of sailing experience but nary a certificate, his brother-in-law, who was good with a welding torch and reckoned he could strip and rebuild any engine, and there was me, ex-seaman on a down-at-heel coaster.

The voyage was an outstanding success! Jeb didn’t have enough money left to put coal in the boiler until we rendezvoused with the other barge, but the lumber yard paid him handsomely for our delivery. I sat with him and his sister’s husband while they discussed the future, and I decided not to remain with them after they determined to risk another perilous voyage before they refitted the old barge. Jeb paid me a hundred bucks for the seven days I had crewed for him.

They landed me back in Seattle where I went first to my hotel intending to sleep the clock round. I was in no hurry to eat; that was the other good thing about Jeb - he had spent the last of his money on food for the voyage. I had removed my boots and was giving thought to taking off my trousers when there was a knock on my door that could only have been made by a policeman on official duty. I was taken to the office of the State Detective and housed in a cell although I wasn’t made to wear handcuffs. I took my boots off again and collapsed on the wooden slats that constituted the bed. I was asleep before the duty sergeant had time to wish me ‘pleasant dreams’.

Sheriff Ed brought me breakfast in my cell next morning.

“You’re in a tricky position, young Ewan. Half the police officers in the State are mad at you for telling their chief how to do his job and half the men in the National Guard are mad at you for bringing in the militia. I’m mad at you because you left me facing all the other people that were mad at you.

“And what’s made everybody else mad is that we’ve caught Leggett, the guy that organised the Everett massacre. He’s been identified and confessed. He doesn’t look anything like that drawing you invented!”

Ed wanted me to see the State Detective right away, but I convinced him that I should first visit a barber and buy myself some respectable clothes. My farming outfit had been in pretty bad shape to begin with but a week on the barge left me dressed in scraps of clothing that could not be used as rags.

The Detective made a valiant effort to hide his chagrin that my description and my suggestion of searching the trains had gained him an important prisoner. The words of praise were fulsome enough, but his tone of voice was markedly frosty. He tried to get his own back by crushing the bones of my hand when we shook at parting but that had been tried on me before by platelayers on the railway and tree-fellers in the forest, so the State Detective got the worst of things.

It took me some time to understand what Ed had meant about militia and National Guard and it needed a cordial meeting with the State Attorney General before I fully appreciated why he and the Governor had rushed me out of the office. State militias were first introduced before the War of Independence – in fact it was militiamen that first attacked the British. In 1908 the federal government brought in a bill organising the militia into a National Guard.

Recruited and trained in the States, the National Guard would be available to the President of the United States in the face of an enemy attack. There was a legal challenge about whether the men could be made to fight outside their home State, so a second bill was passed the previous year that allowed the President to make the National Guard part of the regular army when they were needed. Now that the country was at war with Germany, the National Guard recruited in Washington State is part of the United States Army and is being trained to fight in France.

There was provision in the 1916 bill for the States to form armed militia for their own internal security. At the time when I suggested placing militia close to potential targets for sabotage, there was a debate raging in Seattle about the value of such a force. The Governor was the main opponent, and the Attorney General was the chief advocate. My suggestion made the Governor think again and they were actively recruiting men to learn discipline and the use of arms.

The ‘colonel’ the Governor had spoken to when I went with Ed to his office, turned out to be a full colonel in the permanent army of the United States. He had recently arrived in Washington to take command of the National Guard and he was waiting for orders from the President. While they waited, the colonel was very happy to deploy his men around strategic places throughout the State. Every depot through which grain was shipped now had a platoon bivouacked close to the jungle. They were even providing some night patrols around the fields where the wheat was ripening to discourage sabotage.

I didn’t get to meet the Governor. He is the commanding general of the new militia, and he was camping with the latest recruits in Tacoma, his hometown.

“Come back to Yakima,” Ed pleaded when we caught up with each other in the diner. “You can take it for granted that they’re all pleased with what you’ve done but they’d rather not see your face around Seattle to remind them!”

I was in an odd mood, partly because I’d never had so much cash in my possession at one time – Jeb had paid me almost three times as much as my biggest previous pay packet. I was dressed in an expensive suit, and I had money in my pocket, so I was tempted to hang around and make the people that had ignored me for four days feel uncomfortable. It was also tempting to go back to Yakima and show off my wealth to Willi and Helga.

In the end I did neither. Being a well-dressed civilian was beginning to make me conspicuous on the streets of Seattle. The National Guard was part of the army of the United States, but it was still based around Seattle. The new militia were also beginning to appear on the streets although many of them only had armbands to distinguish them from civilians.

The United States had been at war for just three months and the government in the District of Columbia had moved with commendable despatch. They had already drafted young men into the army to join the thousands that had volunteered. The eastern newspapers that I read in the library were full of criticism over the things the President had left undone. It’s much easier to get men at short notice than to find places to house them, uniforms to cover them and food to feed them.

At the beginning of this year the standing army numbered about a hundred thousand, except ... For years there had been rumours in the jungles where the hobos lived that men had been taking the bonus for signing on and deserting; I met one man who claimed to belong to four crack regiments without once setting foot in an army camp. Desertion was not a crime but a simple misdemeanour. Now reporters were investigating the matter and establishing the truth of the urban myths: there were not more than eighty thousand trained soldiers in the army of the United States when it declared war on over a million seasoned German troops!

Even if the army had been as big as the generals claimed, they had now to deal with ten or more recruits for every regular soldier. There were stories of thousands of young men shipped to the northeast from the dry, hot deserts of the southwest and being housed in draughty, unheated barracks without greatcoats or blankets. It was already becoming clear that a million soldiers would need a hundred doctors, a thousand nurses and two or three hospitals.

The government acted with commendable haste but too late to prevent unnecessary deaths from disease amongst the first men recruited to the newly expanded army. Support for the war, never very high, dwindled as news filtered through of the deaths of volunteers. They joined up to face an enemy threatening their way of life quite prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, but their kith and kin were angry and bewildered that the government couldn’t prevent them dying of pneumonia in poorly equipped, make-shift hospitals.

The decision seemed to have been made to leave the National Guard in their home states until they were trained for the War in Europe. The added advantage was that their presence would discourage civil unrest over the mishandling of the first draft. This, at any rate, was the view of the leader-writers in the main eastern newspapers.

Whether these experts were right or wrong, I was feeling uncomfortable roaming the streets of Seattle in civilian clothing. I was tempted to confront Willi Fassbinder about the vineyard I had prepared on the slopes above his farm, but his daughter Helga was like a chasm between him and me. It was approaching the anniversary of our first meeting when she shot me in the shoulder with a small calibre rifle.

It would have been easy if the only thing between us was that shot, but Helga and I had somehow managed to become involved on a deeper level. You couldn’t quite describe our feelings as romantic but there was certainly a spark between us that might yet become an uncontrollable wildfire. Thinking of Helga brought me to Ellen my receptionist in Minneapolis. Ellen had proved loyal, and she had made no secret of her interest in exploring the kind of romantic attachment that leads to marriage and a family.

While I’d been working to prevent disruption to the harvest and grain supplies, it had been easy to dismiss both Helga and Ellen from my mind. Now that I had passed the baton to others, I had to make up my mind whether I’d woo either or neither. That in turn, made me think of Annie the milkmaid that already had a romantic attachment but who enthusiastically shared her body with me – and others.

Sheriff Ed was still waiting for me to respond to his suggestion that I should leave Seattle as soon as possible and return to Yakima.

“I think I’ll go back to Bonners Ferry, Ed. We’ve poked a stick into the hornet’s nest, and I should see what’s happened as a result. I can reappear as a dairyman without making the enemy suspicious.”

“I’ll let the State Detective know – in that suit you might be mistaken for one of the guys we’re stopping and questioning!”

I went back to my hotel, changed into my work clothes and I was on a freight train travelling east by lunchtime. Before he left, I gave Ed fifty dollars to pay into my bank account in Yakima. I had replaced the fifty dollars in gold hidden in my belt and all I wanted was about twenty bucks to feed me until I could find work. I hopped off the train at the upgrade and walked around the fields to the dairy I had left less than two weeks before.

On my first visit to Bonners Ferry, I’d walked along the tracks to the centre of town, but I had chosen a more discreet route for my departure. Now I was in no hurry to reach the farm as I planned to arrive when they were all together at milking time. It was a beautiful day, and I took meandering paths through the pine woods enjoying the heady smell of the sun-warmed resin.

I was smoking a pipe with my back against a grassy bank at the edge of the forest when there was a commotion on the dirt road below me. From my vantage point I could see about a half-mile stretch of the old trail meandering along a dried riverbed left behind when some cataclysmic storm moved the river east by a couple of hundred yards. It was like a stage setting between the boles of the trees.

First, there were noises off indicating the approach of galloping horses and shouting men. When they burst into my view, I saw one horse plunging forward with the rider leaning back in the saddle hauling on the reins. Another two horses were ranged alongside trying, it seemed to me, to squeeze the runaway between them. Suddenly, the horse in the middle stopped, throwing the rider forward over the pommel; the other two horses slowed when the obstacle between them was removed and continued for a few yards biting each other petulantly.

The horses were flecked with foam and their sides were heaving as they regained their breath. The three men slid off their mounts and the man on the middle animal continued to slide until he was sitting cross-legged in the dirt with his hands clenched on his stomach. It was Henrik Pedersen, the miller, and his companions were two of his thugs. They were yelling at Pedersen and each other while the horses had quietly moved to the side of the road where they were cropping the dusty grass.

Against the jingle of harness, I began to distinguish what was being said.

“We must keep going, Uncle. The sheriff won’t take long to deputise a posse. We need to get across the border before they catch up.”

The third man was attempting to help the miller to his feet, and I couldn’t see his face clearly under the brim of his hat. I’d already mistaken the miller’s young nephew for Lewis because all the thugs resembled each other but I had an instinct that the third man was my old adversary. I wanted a closer look, so I eased my way towards the edge of the wood keeping a large tree trunk between me and the three men on the road below.

When I cautiously peeped around the last tree, the tableau had changed. The nephew - Hans is his name, if I remember correctly – had collected the horses and was standing holding the bridles. Pedersen was on his feet shouting at the third man in a voice that still sounded a bit wheezy after his encounter with the pommel.

“It’s your fault we’re on the run, Lewis, you stupid bastard! Killing that fucking farmer won’t stop Clooney!”

Both men now had pistols in hand.

“That’d solve all our problems,” Hans yelled, gesturing to the guns as he brought the horses between the two armed men. “Shoot each other, why don’t you, and save the sheriff’s ammo. Get mounted!”

There was a moment when I thought the decision could have gone either way, but in the end, they holstered their guns and clawed their way back into the saddle. I wasn’t certain but I think Hans and Henrik swapped horses. In any event they lost no further time and had urged their mounts to a gallop before they rounded a bend in the track leaving me watching the dust settle on an empty road.

It wasn’t empty for long. I was still deciding whether to set off after them or go to the farm to find out who had died, when a group of about half a dozen men cantered into view from the direction of the town. They were all wearing badges that glinted in the sun and they were chatting to each other as they rode past. It’s not more than five miles to the border with Canada and I wanted to shout at them to gallop after the three fugitives.

After they were out of sight, I stepped out from behind the tree trunk and crossed the road towards the farm. I had decided to find out who was dead and then follow Lewis and the others into Canada until I could attract the attention of the Mounties to the undesirable immigrants. I was still in sight of the road when the posse returned with the deputies looking happier. I had a lot of sympathy with them: Pedersen and Lewis were all too ready to draw their weapons and I don’t suppose deputies are any more enthusiastic than the rest of us to face death. I was standing amongst scrubby trees as they rode past, but they didn’t so much as glance in my direction.