The Miners' Strike of 1884

By George Self

The Wage That Built the Camp

Tombstone mining district showing hoisting works and mine structures, circa 1880s.
Tombstone's mining district at its peak. The deep shafts of the Grand Central and Contention mines required costly pumping operations that made the four-dollar daily wage increasingly difficult to sustain as silver prices fell. Public Domain.

Throughout Tombstone's silver boom, miners in the district earned four dollars a day, a rate that held even when other Arizona mining camps paid considerably less. By the early 1880s the price of silver had been falling steadily, squeezed by the consequences of the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and the broader political battle over bimetallism. The largest Tombstone mines were Eastern-owned operations with investors and boards far from southern Arizona, but the mines' daily operating costs were local and unavoidable: labor, fuel for the steam hoisting works, and the immense expense of pumping water from shafts that reached four hundred feet and deeper.

By spring 1884 the companies had decided the four-dollar standard was unsustainable. They announced a reduction to three dollars a day, citing losses from operations and the sustained low price of silver. The Miners' Union countered that the wage cut originated with local management rather than the home offices, and held out for the original rate. The companies offered a compromise of three dollars and fifty cents. The union refused it. On May 1, 1884, the mines closed and roughly four hundred men were thrown out of work.

Armed and Waiting

George Parsons, a Tombstone businessman, was serving on the Grand Jury when the strike began. He was simultaneously an active member of the merchants' protection committee, an informal group of citizens organized to guard mine property from sabotage. His journal provides the most detailed day-by-day record of the crisis.

Parsons watched the situation develop in the weeks before the walkout, and was not initially alarmed. On April 26 he wrote that he believed the camp would recover once the wage adjustment was complete. He was wrong, but he didn't know it yet.

Dull times ahead, but I believe camp will be better than ever next year. Is to be a $3 camp.

George Parsons, Journal, April 26, 1884

Within ten days he was standing guard with a rifle. On May 5 the union met with the mine superintendents, including E.B. Gage of the Grand Central Mine, and the meeting produced no agreement. On May 6 Parsons received word to have his weapons ready. On the night of May 7, a false alarm sent him and several others racing by carriage to the Grand Central to defend the hoist against a reported attack that never materialized. Watchwords were established. Steam was kept up at the hoisting works around the clock.

At our mutual protection meeting this evening, word came that Grand Central Hoist was to be attacked. W. Farish called for volunteers and I responded — first man — and went for a carriage at Colonel Clark's suggestion. The Colonel, Farish, Judge Robinson and I rode up in a hurry. False alarm. Guards posted, watchword given and we returned. Guns and ammunition gotten tonight. Up late discussing situation and advising, etc. Lively times ahead, probably. Signs agreed upon and steam to be kept up continually. Organized tonight.

George Parsons, Journal, May 7, 1884

Two nights later, on May 9, Parsons pulled a midnight-to-3:00 A.M. guard shift at the Grand Central while simultaneously serving on the Grand Jury during the day. The Contention Mine, which had not cut wages and was not party to the dispute, was forced by threatening union members to close anyway. Guards were posted at every major shaft.

May 10: The Bank Fails

On the morning of May 10 the crisis took a second blow. The Safford Hudson Bank, one of Tombstone's principal financial institutions, suspended payments. Many of the striking miners had their savings on deposit there. Milton Clapp, the banker, left for Tucson the same morning, and within hours a crowd gathered in the street convinced he had absconded with the money. Parsons was at the Grand Jury when word arrived that the mob was preparing to break into the bank.

People thought Clapp had skipped with a lot of money and wished a warrant sworn out immediately and officers sent for him before the train could be reached. I headed this off by having Jimmy Eccleston sent for, knowing Milton had done nothing of the sort, and he testified that everything was intact. Mrs. Clapp standing the thing bravely. Good thing for Milton, his leaving. Somebody would have been killed otherwise.

George Parsons, Journal, May 10, 1884

Twenty deputies were sworn in. The Grand Jury adjourned, and Parsons and others marched to the crowd and read resolutions, partially restoring order. That evening a rope was found around the bank building. No damage was done, but the air, as Parsons wrote, was "thick yet."

For the next two days Parsons helped spread word that Clapp was solvent and had not fled. On May 12 he advised Mrs. Clapp to leave for San Francisco immediately, given that her house was being threatened and "one couldn't tell what a day might bring forth." She went. On May 14 Parsons summarized the situation in his journal with characteristic dryness: "Nothing but an earthquake left for us now."

Miners' unions in Bodie, California and Virginia City, Nevada sent funds to support the strikers. The broader labor community recognized the Tombstone strike as a test case for Western mining wages.

Soldiers and the Strike's End

The arrival of soldiers from Fort Huachuca, combined with the sheriff's decision to swear in approximately one hundred deputies, cooled the immediate threat of violence. With armed force clearly on the side of the mine owners and the town's merchant class, and with the bank failure having wiped out many miners' savings, the union's position became untenable. The organization dissolved. The miners did not win a single concession. The mines reopened at three dollars a day for the men who returned, but many did not return. The camp's population had already begun to contract.

Even after the main crisis subsided, the union continued to exert pressure on individual workers. On May 29 Parsons noted that "chloriders" — independent miners working small surface deposits — had been stopped by union members and compelled to quit. The strike was effectively over, but the bitterness it left was not.

The Long Aftermath

Most of the larger mines did not reopen in any meaningful way after the strike. The Contention Mine's plant was later destroyed by fire caused by a watchman's carelessness; with silver prices at their depressed levels, rebuilding was not justified, and the shafts began to flood. The combination of the labor dispute, the bank failure, the sustained fall in silver prices, and the ongoing water problem in the deep shafts had broken the economic momentum that had sustained the town since 1878.

Parsons, who had been optimistic in April 1884 that Tombstone would "boom" again by winter, recorded a quieter judgment eighteen months later.

Contention shut down. Bad thing. Camp will now be idle till spring. Wonder what will be left of it then.

George Parsons, Journal, December 24, 1885

Alice Emily Love, whose 1933 master's thesis remains the most comprehensive scholarly history of Tombstone through 1887, treats the 1884 strike, the bank failure, and the water problem as the three interlocking causes of the town's decline, rather than assigning the blame to any single factor. By 1886 the big mines had either ceased operations or were running at a fraction of their former output. The silver boom that had made Tombstone famous was over.

Sources

  • Love, Alice Emily. "History of Tombstone to 1887." Master's thesis, University of Arizona, 1933. Chapter IX.
  • Parsons, George Whitwell. The Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons, Volume II. Arizona Historical Society. Entries April–May 1884 and December 24, 1885.
  • Monahan, Sherry. Tombstone's Treasure: Silver Mines and Golden Saloons. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. 1884 chapter.