Mrs. ‘Jumbo’ Cantwell Comes Home: Swollen Feet, a Stolen $100, and the Remains of Coxey’s Army

TACOMA, Aug. 2.—[Special.]—The most pleasing feature of Mrs. “Jumbo” Cantwell’s trip East with the Commonwealers is the fact that her feet swelled to three times their normal size while she was in Chicago. Mrs. Cantwell’s return was announced two days ago in the POST-INTELLIGENCER, but she kept out of sight until yesterday, when she appeared on the street, looking thirty pounds less than when she went away with the Commonwealers months ago. While on Puget Sound her feet are pretty and small. At Chicago they were horrible examples of the truth of the paragrapher’s joke on the enormous size of the Chicago woman’s feet. For four days Mrs. Cantwell could not wear shoes at all. She slept, but her feet kept right on growing larger. She called in a doctor. His news brought great joy to the woman reft of Coxey’s army. The expansion of her feet had nothing to do with her position geographically. Dropsy did it, the doctor said, and he hastened to add: “If you have lived ten years on Puget Sound, my advice is to return there at once. The further south and east you go the affliction marked will be your present ailment.” She returned, and while she is urged by Coxey himself to raise another army, she does not now grow enthusiastic over the prospect of leading men to Chicago or Washington City.

She had a long conference with Gen. Coxey. “He is a very nice man. He says our work has already brought fruit in the shape of promises of senators and congressmen to pass laws for the benefit of the poorer masses. He says these laws will soon be enacted. He claims that the only way to bring about the enactment of these laws is to impress upon Congress the necessity for their enactment. This he said, but he wants more armies to march on to Washington City to further impress Congress. He was very anxious to have me march with the men to Washington City, but the doctor scared me, so I declined.”

At home Mrs. Cantwell’s little daughter had her stocking robbed of $100 by the secretary of the Seattle wing of her army. As Mrs. Cantwell tells it: “They said we would come back strapped, but we got here, dog and all, with $1.15 left. Every man in the camp—and there were 1,200 of us when we got to Tacoma in Dakota—treated the child and myself with the greatest respect. At Great Falls this man Farley, from Portland, secretary of the Seattle branch, learned that $100 of my personal money, which Mr. Cantwell had given me to pay expenses, was in the child’s stocking, and he took it and fled.”

Of the American Railway Union Mrs. Cantwell says: “They did everything for me. They gave us letters at Chicago, Fargo, Minneapolis and other points, and we were furnished transportation back. I spoke in the American Railway Union halls and took up collections, from $18 to $100, and clothed and fed the men. After we reached the Great Northern at Great Falls we had no trouble at all in getting East, and every man in the army owes Jim Hill a debt of gratitude that will never be paid or forgotten.”

By degrees she became excited: “Some of our men swam like rats when the marshals drove them off the bridges. For two miles on a stretch in Montana they waded in ice-cold water up to their waists. They were like the rats that went to devour a bad monarch. They sprang up everywhere, and they will reach the monarch at Washington City all right. You can’t put them down.”

Mrs. Cantwell says her husband will remain East until he can accomplish some definite good for the cause. Her first move now is to get a carload of provisions on the way to Washington City from the Coxey guard camps along the Northern Pacific and Great Northern roads. The Tacoma home guards have disbanded, and their leader says he wants no more to do with the movement.