How Kootenay Emerged from its Wild State. 245 



nearer than those two points, save the shelters occupied by the 

 railway hands. After a month's solitude in the dense forest, or in 

 the yet more dismal lake-side swamps in this part of northern Idaho, 

 the average human nature to be found out West will invariably 

 " blow in " the hard-won dollars as speedily as poisonous whiskey 

 will do it. Hence it was quite an understood thing that pay-day 

 was followed by a night or two of the rowdiest debauch. I had 

 been a witness at different times of dozens of such pay-day 

 pandemoniums in railway camps, and I knew Sandpoint known 

 also as Hangtown could hold its own for depravity. But a few 

 months before, during construction days, a pay-day " bust " had 

 ended in two men being lynched who, it was afterwards found 

 had nothing whatever to do with the crime of which they had been 

 accused, i.e., sand-bagging a contractor's paymaster. The only 



excuse, that the whole camp was " hanging drunk on X 's 



poison," did not mend matters so far as the two victims were 

 concerned, and, of course, no steps whatever were taken to 

 punish the drunken crowd. 



In other places, to break the thread of my story for a minute, 

 I knew to what lengths a crowd of Western labouring men, tuned 

 up to deeds of violence by bad whiskey, would go. Thus on 

 one occasion during the miners' strike in Butte City a few months 

 previously, three thousand of them went out on the question of a 

 proposed reduction of the daily wage from 4dols. to 3dols. 50 cents. 

 A friend of mine, Frank Medhurst, was manager of a well-known 

 mine in that town owned by Parisian capitalists. These 3000 

 drunken fellows late one night came crowding round the hoisting 

 shed to compel him by threats of instant death to have the 

 miners who were still at work in the yooft. and Sooft. levels to 

 stop work. The rowdies struck the wrong man, however, and 

 Medhurst, with two friends and some loyal employees, stood off the 

 3000 men at the point of their rifles. Had all the managers shown 

 the same bold front as did this Englishman the bloody riots that 

 made those Butte strikes so notorious would have had another 

 ending. These strikers, mad with whiskey, would have sentenced 



