The Letter That Turned a Railroad Strike Into a Frontier War
A Tacoma cavalryman's lurid account of fighting Indigenous people in the Olympics and riding through a strike reads like pulp fiction — and the paper knew it.
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.
The great railroad strike has produced its writer of fiction, and he appears to live in Tacoma. The few skirmishes which marked that struggle in this state fired the imagination of T. H. Adams, who appears to be a member of Troop B, cavalry, N.G.W., and caused him to picture to his parents at his old home in Birmingham, England, carnage which recalls the rebellion. Mr. Adams' letter, which was published in the Birmingham Weekly Post of July 2, does credit to his education at King Edward's School at Birmingham and must gratify the soul of King Edward VI, its founder. The letter is as follows:
"After my two last letters you must have been a little bit nervous, but, thank God, so far I have got through with only a scratch or two. ... Everitt Griggs is captain of Troop B, First Cavalry, of the N.G.W., something between militia and regulars. He was ordered out, with his company, to drive the Indians back to their reservations, they having come out on the warpath as soon as they thought that the pale face was harassed by those awful floods. ... So I collected three other Britishers, and we went. We found traces of their hellish work between Orting and South Prairie that made our blood run cold. ... We trailed them into the Olympic mountains ... The Indians are descendants of the Crows and Blackfeet. Men who were out scouting discovered them encamped in the bottom of a gulch, about 500 to 600 in number. ... We went back and reported, then we closed up and lay on three sides of the gulch ... and waited for it to get dusk enough to hide our scarcity of numbers. ... Then came the word to fire. Three times did we load and fire our carbines, and deadly was the effect at that short distance into those groups of men. Then we turned our revolvers loose into the disorganized crowd that was rushing for their ponies, then, loading our revolvers and leading our horses as we ran, we formed and mounted at a run at the top of the glade, and charged. When we had emptied our revolvers we drew our sabres and completed the rout. We were too few in numbers, and our blood was boiling at the things we had seen, so we took no prisoners. ... Then for thirty-six hours we followed them, but never saw them again ... They brought news of this strike of the railroads, and orders for twenty picked men to report back at Tacoma at once. We were then put in charge of a train, and had to bring it here to the limits of the state. ... The strikers swore we should never get through alive, but we cut the wires ourselves ... At Ellensburg, the station before, some fiend managed to get under the train and cut the pipes of the air-brake ... Ten of us take the west-bound train back to Tacoma tonight ... The strikers say there has not been a west-bound train through yet, and swear there shall not; and this time, unfortunately, we cannot conceal the time of starting. ... Two of the Englishmen are still left, and with me, but the other poor boy will never answer to his roll-call again on earth. A stray bullet found a home on the way up. I will write immediately on arrival."
“The strikers swore we should never get through alive, but we cut the wires ourselves.”
The letter shows how the 1904 railroad strike was bound up with military force and with the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people in Washington. The paper's own skeptical framing — calling Adams a 'writer of fiction' — is a reminder that even contemporary readers knew such frontier melodrama was partly performance.
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