In the right place

1969; I was driving into Crested Butte for the first time. The road through sodden ranch country was deserted on a rainy Monday in late July, it wound the trees and mountains along with poverty level ranching operations. Rusting cars and lack of paint, I liked it. I was dog tired; I had been driving a 1949 Dodge pickup with my brother's motocycles and etceteras on the back from Chicago. The pickup was a beast to drive, worse than the Commer van I left behind in London; apply the brakes and it would leap to the right. My brother bought the truck for fifty dollars and gave me thirty to make the drive, from the land of Dailey to Colorado.

This was my second time in Colorado; several years before I had visited with a poet friend who was to be found later with a needle in his leg three days dead on the toilet. Poetry in Colorado is a full contact sport.

The entry to town looked like the entry to a junk yard. I liked it immediately. After years in England avoiding my country's call, Local Board Six, Vineyard Haven, Mass, informed me that the State of Massachusetts was no longer persecuting draft dodgers and the land of the free was a safe place to live.

This happened about the time I made some very unpopular films about Ireland. I was shot at by the Protestants, my people over there, and had beaten the living shit out of a couple of vengeful IRA types. The country I returned to was split. There were signs saying "no hippies here" and in Nebraska I was offered a fight a couple of times for being a hippy. I was hellishly tired and dirty and declined to fight, the fool didn't know I had a .45 revolver under the seat and was sick enough of conflict to waste a flag wearing patriot in a Belfast second. Armed love was my motto, words to live through the Nixon years by.

My first stop in Crested Butte was Tony's Conoco. The old man kindly asked me what that thing in my pickup was. "Haven't you seen a motorcycle before?"

The old man blinked and smiled and said "no, that wooden thing."

I explained that it was my brother's crew oar. And then explained what he did with it. Enlightenment came over me. Ulysses was home. This place would be my home town for better or worse. I'd grown up on Martha's Vineyard in the sea culture and been run off by lawyer sharks who prey on orphans. They didn't want me there and their minions made the Vineyard a nasty place for the young who were poor. Mom died owing the liquor store two grand and we were moved on for so-called debt.

I then went into Tony's Tavern. A surly young man served me 3.2 beer and told me my brother would be there in a minute. I liked it more. I sat there with my beer between sleep and awake. An old timer was sitting at the end of the bar. He was a Slav or Croate, I could tell by the accent. "Hey, buy the new guy a beer and strain it through an IWW sock". His hands were gnarled from arthritis, his voice was the yell of a miner. Pitzker Sporicich introduced himself. When I told him I was a Wobbly he laughed a big laugh. "Hell, half this town are Wobbles and the other half Klansmen."

Beer was fifteen cents and there was much buying back and forth and my brother rolled in. The night was just about dark when we went to his house.

The morning was something else; the town was glowing with the clear light I never saw in Europe or the East. Pure light, everything was hard edged and real. The house had an outhouse for winter; after a night of freezing I saw my money was going for sleeping bags and warm things. There was snow visible in July, I got the picture.

The rest of the next few days were spent exploring the valleys and the mountains and unpacking. I was going to stay here. Europe was a bad memory. Too much hatred without reason. At least in America we hate with some sort of reason. Random violence had yet to be invented; in our country we hate people for their race or hair cut, not their religion, except in Crested Butte.

Very soon I was dubbed a radical and more than likely a lapsed Catholic because all Wobbles in Crested Butte in the past were lapsed or bad Catholics in the eyes of the Klansmen. The Klan and Wobs fought quite a bit. The reports of killings were rare but with the coming of the long hairs and the hippies no one really liked, there had to be a quick distinction. There were field hippies like tree planters who worked for the forest service, wild hippies who lived in the woods, and store hippies, long hairs and hermits, all of whom shared this little piece of paradise.

Our little family did a lot of shooting close enough to town to be heard but far enough away to not present danger; we wanted be to known as armed and anti-social, that way any one wanting a fight would have to want a fight.

In the bars, which were the social gathering place, we learned the real history of the town.

Gold was found in Washington Gulch in the late eighteen fifties and there was a mini gold rush overshadowed by the Civil War. Soft coal, hard coal, gold and silver were all together in a very small area. Big players moved in fast and from the first, the Vails and the Guggenhimes and then the Rockafelers owned everything. Scots, Welsh and Irish were brought in to mine and soon there were huge mines and mills filling the valleys. With that came workers demanding a living wage and the Knights of Labor and the Mollies were active. Railroads brought in, with a Chinese buried under every tie, more skilled and organized people to the mountains.

The craft unions divided the workers against themselves and the Company, CF&I, played every card possible to keep wage slaves wage slaves. Company gallerys, bars and whores were all there to make the worker at home and home was owned by the company. The company put in the water supply to ensure the workers were ill; cholera was a major killer until the forties in the mining camps. Men were encouraged to gamble and drink.

Hotels and whorehouses were there and women were sold into sex slavery, or they volunteered because whores got better pay than miners and had some independence. Fathers lost their daughters regularly in card games.

When the Erps came up from Arizona with Doc Halliday, the Erps had to stay in Gunnison, Colorado because there were enough whore houses in Crested Butte and they were men of ill repute. Doc Halliday was welcome because he was a gambler and had a decent profession.

When the Irish wised up and learned to get better wages, the company brought workers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy. Serbs, Croates, Northern and Southern Italians were packed into about two square miles.

People with the names like Cozetto and Kochevar married, alliances were formed but the Company ruled with an iron fist. The Veltris came in and the Niccoili and they worked and weren't paid money, simply company script from the company gallery.

In 1905 the Western Federation of Miners changed the history of the West. Big Bill Haywood's dream of One Big Union caught on in the minds of the Serbs, Italians and other Central Europeans; Anarcho Syndicalism was not a bad idea in their book and it worked.

The Labor Wars hit new intensity when workers organized against the Ku Klux Klan, the railroads, the timber barons and the Company that brought racial strife to the mining towns. There were murders of Wobbles but the Wobs fought back. Regulators like Tom Horn were met with vigorous defenses. The same has happened in recent memory; that is another story.

Nightriders were met with gunfire and over the 1912-1914 Strike in Gunnison-Crested Butte, the Army was kept pinned down on Gibson's Ridge. Wobs with Winchesters and Craigs controlled the Town of Crested Butte.

Wobs from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were shipped back to lands they'd left as children when World War One broke; out here they were enemy aliens. Many with families slipped back into the country in the twenties. They were the parents of people telling me these stories.

One day I was shopping in Gunnison and I met with Tony Lujan and Tony from the Conoco in the parking lot of the Safeway. We talked about this and that. Lujan was a short very tough Latino Wob, he worked all over the West supporting his family. When someone got blacklisted by CF&I their family would have to move up to Butte, Montana and work there. Only if they had the Crested Butte experience could they generally switch from soft coal mining to hard coal digging. Not many miners were that versatile. Hard rock mining and soft coal mining are very different envoriments.

Tony had been a professional fighter in his youth, $100 to beat the Mexican and no one ever collected. When he found out I'd been a wrestler, he had me pinned down in no time, and gently whispered in my ear, "You call me Uncle Tony and I give you back your arm." He will always be my Uncle Tony. Once up in Ennis, Montana, a huge giant of an old Black man came up to my car and looked at the licence plate and said, "You're from Crested Butte.. know my Uncle Tony Lujan?" "Hell, that's my Uncle Tony." What a party. I heard how Tony and Gentle Ben Hall hand trammed 81 tons of coal on a shift.

Tony looked at me with a hard look and said, "Don't you trust Crested Butte. It will rob you of your youth." The two old men laughed; I couldn't, I wasn't old enough.

Each family treasured their Wobbly card, even if they hid it. Being a Wobbly in the wrong place could get one hanged. The reason why so few are found as personal possessions was that the Wobs were buried with them just in case... When I showed my card in the bar one night Pitkzer warned me about a Company man and Klegle, now an old man drinking down the bar. "He lies." He said in a stage whisper that could be heard a mile away.

Pitzker was right, the same man had built the new Company gallery after the Wobs burned down the old one in the strike of '36. The Company man told my cousin that he'd done proper drainage around the building, but when we dug a new entrance, we found no drainage at all. A good Company man.

Crested Butte had a bankrupt ski area which needed timber tigers to clean up the bankrupt timber cuts and I joined the army of hard workers in the mountains. I never got to work as a filmmaker again (craft unions saw to that) and the newspaper didn't need investigative reporters since the truth was known as something dear, handled like their only jewel, passed between working people.

Paradise, a place where poor men and women worked, fought, screwed and raised sassy children in clean air, lasted for a few more years, then a car load of New Yorkers bought the town and a man named Bo Calloway bought the bankrupt ski area and real estate-cocaine swine again found beauty, then moved the poor on to make way for the ever deserving people who own the world.

"Shadows of our forgotten ancestors."

©Cordley Coit