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HighFiveCasino. And we're back with our American stories. For many of us, some of our best memories come from listening to the stories told by family members who have lived life much longer than us. For Linda Canole, one of those such stories centered down a rabbit hole to discover a riveting and quite overlooked piece of American history. Here's Linda sharing the little known story of the Amazon army of Southeast Kansas. Growing up in Southeast Kansas, a good deal of my early history education came from the stories that my grandmothers would tell about their journey from the old world to the new. They were often full of adventure.
They would interweave the difficult and the tragic a lot of times with the humorous and the delightful. And like the quilt pieces that they would piece together, they connected their personal stories with what was going on nationally and locally around them during the coal mining days. And as a young girl, I look forward to hearing about these stories in the Kansas history books. And so in my eighth grade history book in the mid sixties, I looked for the stories that I grew up hearing and I didn't find anything to my surprise.
There was nothing mentioned on coal mining. Gene DeGrissen was also enthralled with the stories that he heard as the son of a coal miner. Gene was a renowned special collections curator at Pittsburgh State University, and he wrote a book called Goats House. And in it had poems and stories of the Cherokee and Crawford County coal camps in the coal fields. And Gene gave me his book and kind of highlighted a poem that he had written for his mother, Clemens.
It was called Alien Women. So I happened to have this poem with me when I was visiting and having lunch with my 88-year-old grandmother, Maggie Beliza Onilio. And so I read her the poem and it was about this woman's march. And she turned around and matter of fact, really said, well, she was stirring up a sauce for the rigatoni. She said, well, Linda, I was in that march. And I said, well, Nona, you never told me.
And she laughed and she said, well, you never asked. And so from that point on, she kind of gave me her recollections of this really amazing event. And what I found was a treasure trove of stuff buried just beneath the surface of things, basically having to find the history out ourselves, going right to its sources or its roots. And so what I found was a fascinating story of how we started the coal mining business here. The first coal shaft mine was actually discovered in 1866 in Cherokee County. But the real national supplier of coal when it became big was in 1876 when Franklin Plater was approached in Joplin by two lead and zinc developers. And they wanted him to build a railroad, his railroad from their lead and zinc fields through the coal fields of southeast Kansas.
And Franklin thought that was a pretty good idea. But, you know, in order to do that, they needed laborers, you know, to dig out this coal. So it was Franklin Plater's idea to begin a concerted effort to bring cheap labor really from Europe. And soon he developed these beautiful broadsides that would say paradise on earth, come to southeast Kansas and mine coal. Those broadsides or posters were taken through all the steamship companies. They took them on little villages.
They tacked them on the square village walls. And soon huge waves of immigrants came to Kansas from 1860 to 1916. We had an immense amount of people come to Kansas, to the prairie really, to mine coal.
Included with that group was my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, John Paulin. He was from Austria. He was 17 years old and he came over here by ship through Amsterdam across the Atlantic, or which they called the big pond. Now, when the immigrants traveled at that time, the late 1800s and the early 1900s, a lot of times the steamships would be half sail ships and half steam.
And so therefore it could take weeks to get across the ocean. The immigrants who came over on steerage basically were crowded into as small a space as only two feet between you and your next patron on the ship. It was a rather rough and tumble kind of way to be transported across the ocean. My grandfather came to Ellis Island like so many other immigrants did. They also came into Pennsylvania and some even into New Orleans. But he came through Ellis Island. He at that time was given what appeared to be like dog tags, but they were a little necklace which showed exactly where he was supposed to go, which coal companies he had been assigned to, and those were in Southeast Kansas. While he was at Ellis Island, in order to make his name a little bit more understandable, he dropped a V in his last name. So he became Paulin that way. And a lot of immigrants would do that.
They would change their names. In fact, my grandmother, Maggie, when I was interviewing her, she was one of the marchers later. And I said, Well, Grandma, I said, Now, is your real name Marguerite or Margaret? And she said, Well, neither.
She said, Linda, it's Dominica. And I said, Well, Grandma, you've never told me that. And she said, Oh, when we went to school the first day, my brother Dominic and I came home crying to my papa. And I said, Papa, we don't want to go back to school because a teacher cannot spell or pronounce our names. So he said, Don't worry.
Tomorrow you go to school. You're Maggie and you're Tom. And she said that's how they were for the rest of their lives. My grandfather then would be picked up and taken to a coal field. He would mine for 40 years and he would be a Franklin resident his entire life.
And he would never see another member of his family again, although he did send letters and he would send money to them. Syrian, Bohemian, Scandinavian and English could be heard around Market Square at Fort Scott as early as 1885. This settlement of such diverse people from so many nationalities would really give credence to the fact that this was the Americanization process in action. And the melting pot was alive and well dismissed by some, but it was operating here in Southeast Kansas. More than 50 nationalities would immigrate here from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Yugoslavia, and the British Isles. Greece, Canada, I could name many, many more that came here to mine coal. And as a rule, the immigrants who came to these camps didn't stay in their own little segregated little pods.
They mixed in. So you would have these mixed of nationalities in all these different camps. There were hundreds of camps, by the way, names like Yale, Chicken Ridge, Red Onion, Dunkirk, Radley, Capaldo, West Mineral, Chickapea, Weir, and in scores of other camps. So at one time, the inhabitants of Southeast Kansas would mine a third of the nation's coal. And from that coal would be smelted, lead, and zinc ore in such quantities that Kansas became an industrial giant, second only to the nation of Belgium in the production of smelter.
The immigrants who came over here did not find the Eaton described on the broadsides however. The job was brutal. You went to work before the sun came up, 10 to 12 hours on your hands and needs or lying on your side.
The Cherokee Crawford coal scene was only two to three feet thick. So the men had to do that. They had to work on their sides or lie on their knees. First of all, they had to dynamite the rock to get to the coal. And then they had to pick it by hand with their picks and take that resource then and either push it with carts or it would be pulled by donkeys to the hole.
And the risks were real. It was well known that the mules that lived underground and would pull the carts of coal up the hole were treated as more valuable to the company than the men. Well, the saying was, you could always get another miner, but well-trained mules, well, they were expensive and hard to come by. Countless mining families would lose their husbands, sons, brothers, sweethearts. Sometimes the first day they reported to work. Mining accidents and injuries just happened recurrently. This was the nature of the job.
People would say goodbye to their loved ones in the morning, sincerely, not knowing if they'd see them again. And you've been listening to Linda Knoll, and she's been sharing the story, the little known story of the coal mining region of Southeast Kansas. 50 nationalities had come to this part of Kansas to do this while backbreaking, grinding work wherever mining occurs.
It's backbreaking and it's grinding. When we come back, more of the story of the coal mining country in Southeast Kansas, the story of the Amazon army here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and to Linda Knoll, sharing the history of coal mining in America and in Southeast Kansas, and the story of a stirring mass march led by the wives of these miners.
Let's pick up where we last left off. By 1914, over 100 mines and over 10,000 men would deliver eight and a half million tons of coal, a third the nation's total. Considering the working conditions, it was not surprising that Southeast Kansas became unionized early and decided to fight the coal companies, not just in matters of wages and working conditions, but also in such things as patronage at the company store. You had to buy everything at the company store, your tools, your dynamite, your clothes, your food, and they charge it twice what a can of beans would cost you anywhere else. Now, the mine barons who invested in here were many. At one time, Crawford County had more multimillionaires per capita than any county in the nations, but Pittsburgh, Kansas and the surrounding countdowns were booming. Pittsburgh had five major railheads and an electric passenger streetcar line that came out to all directions in all these small towns every 20 minutes.
Some of these campdowns, including Franklin, had their own post offices, hotels sometimes, picture shows. Life was really booming, but the miners were not feeling the wealth of that. Not only was it dangerous, but it also became unattainable or untenable, if you will, just to exist in this situation. And the women would listen always for those four long whistles that would pierce the air saying that, you know, there might have been a disaster in the mines. You know, these women, their physical labor, the amount of labor they had to do was more like our colonial sisters than it was like the flappers of the 20s. When they watched this filthy black clothing, they would, almost on a weekly basis, putting new padding into the knees of their men's trousers because of the wear and tear that they had to spend so much time on the ground. In fact, when men got together and socialized, if they had worked in the mines a long time, they tended to just sit down on their haunches and talk, just like if they were down in the mine, they had spent so much time in that position. They, you know, they fixed the men's dinner buckets. They had to carry the water.
They were lucky if they had a well close to them. They had to carry their coal. You had to buy your own coal. It was called house coal. They were really appropriately called shacks because the companies owned them and they were rickety things.
They were very drafty. You know, they could take a house if they wanted to move to another shaft or down the road, they just would move these houses for these for these immigrants. The rent was like between eight and ten dollars a month. So they were small affairs that were being charged quite a bit. Now, when you look at comparison of what a miner would make at that time, they were making about a dollar sixty for a ten hour shift. So that was the out of balance situation that these people were faced with.
And so they were quite ready to take a stand and try to say, you know, can this be a little bit more fair? There are few places on earth where the struggle between labor and capital were more intense than in southeast Kansas during the 20th century. The miners were in a constant battle at this time to achieve workers rights.
And it was pretty much always against insurmountable odds. Labor strikes were numerous. And so in nineteen nineteen, one of the worst probably strikes that happened were even college boys from like KU were called down and the National Guard in order to take the places of these striking miners. And at that time, the Kansas legislature made national news by saying that they were going to pass, which they did, the Court of Industrial Relations Act, which outlawed strikes.
You couldn't strike. The climax, though, occurred in nineteen twenty one when the colorful and pretty much controversial president of the miners here in District 14, Alexander Howitt, called a work stoppage over three hundred men because they were not paying this young worker. How it went out anyway with his miners and he was immediately jailed and they disbanded District 14 officers and how it was ready to take a stand. He said, not one ton of coal shall be mined by the miners of Kansas until this industrial court act is scratched from the statue book. And that's where it lay, how it in jail.
And then months would pass. And of course, people who were starving in the first place, they were getting no help from anybody, you know, all the miners who were out on strike. Money became tight. Most of the men wanted to be loyal to Howitt, but they had to get back to work, you know, because of their starving families. So by December of that year, tensions were high. Teachers would report that there was a lot of fighting between striking miners and those families and the boys that, you know, were their fathers were going back to work.
A harsh winter set the stage for what was to come. Sunday, December the 11th, 1921, 500 women appeared at the Franklin Union Hall and decided to state their case that they were the wives of the loyal union men of Kansas. And they were against the Industrial Court Act. And they wanted to stand by their men in this endeavor that they were working for a good cause. They decided what they would do is that they would get pit buckets, they would sing and drum on pit buckets and go to every single mine shaft and stop the scab workers from working. So they decided to meet the next day. Marcher Mary Scubitz was a woman who was from Slovenia.
She spoke five languages, and Mary wrote a journal. In her entry, December the 13th, 1921, she talked about making her way to the front of the crowd because she saw the sheriff there in law enforcement and to tell them, hey, you know, we want you to stay here in case there is any violence. But all we want to do is just to talk to these men and convince them that they're doing the wrong thing. We want them to be with us and be true good union men. But Mary said for the most part, they had large flags, these 15 foot long and six foot wide flags. For the most part, we would just lay those down in front of the entrance and men would walk by in their cars.
They would honor the fact that they weren't going to work. And so she was very proud that that first day she said no arrests remain. Despite the straightforward nature of this event, the newspapers across the nation seem to construct the narrative of this march in strikingly different ways. The New York Times, the Topeka State Journal, the Pittsburgh Daily Headlight, they really stressed that this was a very, not only unusual, but a very violent protest from the sides of the women. Newspaper headlines were all towards using military terminology. Amazon Army, New York Times dubbed them that and that particular nickname went all the way across to the LA Herald.
It made national news. There was a picture in the Topeka State Journal of a young woman sitting in a car with a flag and the headline would read, General Annie Stovitch, the Joan Ark of the Amazon Army. Well, even bayonets couldn't stop these highly temperamental foreign women.
Actually, that particular girl was a 14-year-old young girl just happened to be sitting on the car and she was with her mother. A Wichita newspaper described them as using teeth and claws like tigresses. They called them gorillas, terrorists. The Kansas City, Kansas said that they were actually using dynamite and igniting mines.
I mean, it was sensationalism, but this just kind of took a life of its own. Mary, on December the 14th, 5 a.m., she said, oh my goodness, eight and 10 women now from different camps, war coming in. She said, no one's left and everybody has kind of joined in. These are American women. They're of all different nationalities and their ethnic differences don't seem to at all figure in here. They all seem to be united in this. The next day we're 6,000 strong, she says, and it's miles long now and we're getting ready to march.
Mary's last entry into her diary is, quiet for a day or two. Then the militia came. And you've been listening to Linda Knoll tell the story of the Southeast coal mines and the Amazon Army.
And now you know what that term means. 100 mines, 10,000 men, one third of the nation's total coal production. And of course, the usual problems that came with coal mining and 500 women appeared at the Franklin Union Hall, letting the bosses know and management know that the ladies weren't happy, but they were there to protect their families and their husbands. When we come back, more of the story of the Amazon Army of Kansas here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and to Linda Knoll sharing the story of the women who newspapers of the 1920s labeled the Amazon Army. When we last left off, the militia had been sent to get these women under control. Back to Linda with the rest of the story. When the women were told that the militia was coming, these women said they would just stand in front of the militia. They wanted their kids to have a little bit more food to eat and something warm to wear. And they would stand there and fight the militia.
Mary said, you know, cooler heads needed to prevail. And on December the 15th, three days after the disturbances began, three troops of Kansas National Guard cavalry came pounding down the county roads from Topeka. And they were stationed, you know, in certain places like Ringo, Franklin and Walberry. The city of Lawrence would send a machine gun detachment. They brought a couple of machine gunners down for that. The local county sheriff decided to deputize a thousand men in the area in case the Amazons were going to come to Pittsburgh.
It didn't seem like, you know, it disturbed the enthusiasm of the women. And at that point, the arrests started happening. There were all in total, forty nine women who the sheriff would arrest on unlawful assembly and assault.
Among those would be Mary Scubitz and her mother, Julia. And she'd be arrested a couple of times. Interestingly enough about the arrest reports, they were given charged seven hundred fifty dollars instead of the normal average rate of two hundred. The warrants would go out to the husbands. They never went to the to the women themselves. The warrants would go to the husbands.
The husbands have to take them in. And they usually would do it late in the afternoon so the women would have to spend the night in jail. But but my my favorite newspaper article was three women actually got a bond set at a thousand instead of that, even the high 750. And when the reporter asked the judge, well, why your honor, why such a high, high, you know, you know, bond?
And he's the judge as well. It's the alleged seriousness of their offense. So the reporter said, well, what is that, your honor? Well, for using profane language against the union boss at one of the local mine shafts. So you could see the out of bounds of power of how much their actions were so out of sync with what society expected of them.
They couldn't even cuss at somebody. And they were considered, you know, heathens. That was what those women were charged with. It was funny, almost some of the newspaper articles, one of them, I mean, here they are, you know, they're they're they're chastising these women and calling them names and they say, oh, and this I forgot the Italian woman's name, but oh, she's very well dressed and she seems like she's an important.
And they just talked about how nicely she was dressed. But then then they would go back to saying, you know, they were heathens and they were guerrilla fighters. They were I mean, they really weren't you know, they had no weapons.
The county attorneys were exasperated because there wasn't one man who came forward, not one. So they did. Who who would press any charges? They did this all on their own, you know, like, OK, unlawful assembly. But there wasn't one guy out there that said, oh, yeah, you know, they really treated me badly. Very quietly, the mine inspector, the state mine inspector issued a report, never really got too much press. But in it, it said that, you know, there were three thousand working miners prior to the Amazon's march.
And it really after it was launched, there were less than 700. So it looked like the march really did kind of make a difference. But that really wasn't known victory for how it and victory for them would happen in about a year when the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down the Industrial Court Act, primarily because the Compulsory Arbitration Act, you know, that was that was unconstitutional. You had the right to strike. But that wasn't the case really in that January 13th at that time, right then after this March, defeated both by the local opposition in the union, how it ordered everybody back to work. And, you know, OK, we failed.
But you got to go back to work. When the when the men came back, they were charged a ten dollar initiation fee. They had no voice or vote.
They'd never get a voice or vote in the union again. That was where they stood. The state attorney general issued an edit that if there was work available, you had to work.
And if you didn't, if you did not comply with that law, then you would have 10 to 30 days of hard labor. So that's where the situation was right after this. There was a lot of angst in the air. When we look at this symbolically, you know, the women use the American flag because they were they thought they were American citizens. Most of them at this point were American citizens or they were naturalized or whatever. And they, you know, they banded together.
And, you know, it's a little sensitive issue because just right at 1920 was when the 19th Amendment was passed. You know, they just got that particular right to vote. They did go to their weapons for red pepper. And they by emptying dinner buckets, they wanted to send a message that we are now taking away the food and everything that we'd always given.
We we feel this is entirely unfair. These immigrants faced poverty, discrimination and even death. And they as a group, they fought for their rights. And so many of the social reforms that we enjoy today, like the eight hour workday, equal pay for equal work, minority rights and child labor were all fought for early on.
And, you know, in southeast Kansas. Mary Scubitz, Mary had one son, Joe, Joe Scubitz. Joe would become a U.S. congressman. I mean, he was well educated.
Mary believed, like so many of these people in education, we still have a tradition of honoring education. And Joe graduated from Pittsburgh State. He went on to Washburn Law School.
He graduated finally from Georgetown Law School. He became a U.S. congressman. Joe, as part of the 88th Congress, was responsible for the Black Lung Reform Act, which gave a lot of these miners then the health care that they needed.
They hadn't had prior. Joe also worked on the Mine and Health and Mine Safety Act, again, to try to make the conditions in the mines, you know, of course, a lot better. Reclamation Act. He supported the Kansas Reclamation Act because we had 42000 acres of our land disturbed on the top from all the, you know, our big machinery that was being used in after the mines dried up down below.
And you can see the results of those things. My grandmother, when she was about 90 years old and talked about some of these times that she had told me about years hence, she said, you know, without struggle, there is no progress. And she said, you just have to keep going forward. She had a very much a positive spirit, which most of those people did.
Positive, hard work spirit. But, you know, it was just such a risky life. I mean, you know, you had to you really just had to have a lot of hope, you know. And what the hope was, I think, was was for their children, how those women came together like they did. Think about with no they have telephones. Most of them didn't have cars to afford a newspaper, even.
I mean, you know, like share some newspaper. How did that happen? That you said, I think it was just I think it was that from camp to camp, it had to be, you know, I mean, pretty soon they were getting more and more, you know, months went by how it was in jail. And so that was kind of it. I think it was just that the anguish of it and the unfairness of it got to them. And they just started, I guess, communicating because how that happened, really, even today, I don't think you can get unless it's a football game, maybe, you know, to get a thousand or five hundred thousand people together.
I mean, wow. I like I said, there was nothing in the history books when I was growing up about our coal mining. When I came back from Chicago in 1980 to teach, teach seventh grade history now, Kansas history, I checked out the seventh grade history books and there was nothing about southeast Kansas history on coal mining.
Ten years later, nothing. 2005, I got a message, a short note from the Kansas Historical Society. They were coming out with a new book called Kansas Journeys. And in that was a whole section on southeast Kansas coal mining and a paragraph on the Amazon Army. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Katrina Hein and Madison Derricotte.
And a special thanks to Linda Canole, who gave us a beautiful rendition, a beautiful glimpse into the coal mining country of Kansas. And by the way, the women who organized on behalf of their husbands fought on behalf of their husbands for basic voting rights and free speech rights of workers. And this union history has a long one in America. There's some good things, some bad things.
You decide we don't get into that here on this show. But my goodness, these women were organizing and helping their husbands organize on behalf of their families and for better lives. And my goodness, the National Guard was called out on these women. Heck, in Lawrence, Kansas, we had machine guns ready for these tough ladies and they prevailed. And by the way, let's remember that law that was passed in Kansas that essentially said union members can't organize. Well, the Supreme Court whacked that and put it down. And that actually was a good thing.
And I don't think you're going to get many people to argue about that. A little bit of history here on our American stories, Kansas history, coal mining history, women's history and so much more here on our American stories. This is Uncanny USA. He says somebody's in the house and I screamed. Listen to Uncanny USA wherever you get your BBC podcasts. If you dare.
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