The Industrial Armies on the Move
Across the West, unemployed men organized as 'Coxeyites' or 'Industrial Armies' are clashing with law enforcement and rail companies as they travel toward Washington, D.C.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In Spokane, twenty-five industrials captured a Great Northern engine at Troy, Idaho, threw the throttle wide open and rode twenty-five miles to Atlanta. There the company had torn up the tracks, and the engine was ditched. Six industrials were hurt, one seriously. All were arrested and taken to Kalispell, Montana, for trial. Two hundred Puget Sound Commonwealers tried to capture a Northern Pacific freight train today, but forty deputies and a company of United States troops were aboard, and they were not allowed to ride. In Idaho, serious trouble is brewing in Shoshone County, where about 800 Coxeyites have reached a point near the Coeur d'Alene mines. United States Marshal Pinkham has reported a fearful condition of affairs, with hundreds of men between Hauser Junction and Hope attempting to take possession of trains, prompting requests for federal infantry assistance.
“The industrial army now numbered 150,000. He asserted that within sixty days he would have 300,000 in Washington City.”
This reporting documents the 1894 'Industrial Armies' movement, a massive, grassroots response to the Panic of 1893. These 'armies' of the unemployed highlighted the era's severe economic instability, mirroring contemporary anxieties about income inequality and housing insecurity that continue to define the civic conversation in the Pacific Northwest.
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