for valuable assistance in
preparing the subject matter, to Harry Feinberg in consultation, to
Marie B. Smith in revising manuscript, and to J. J. Kneisle for
photographs.

EVERETT, NOVEMBER FIFTH

By Charles Ashleigh

["* * * and then the Fellow Worker died, singing 'Hold the Fort' * *
*"--From the report of a witness.]

Song on his lips, he came;
Song on his lips, he went;--
This be the token we bear of him,--
Soldier of Discontent!

Out of the dark they came; out of the night
Of poverty and injury and woe,--
With flaming hope, their vision thrilled to light,--
Song on their lips, and every heart aglow;

They came, that none should trample Labor's right
To speak, and voice her centuries of pain.
Bare hands against the master's armored might!--
A dream to match the tools of sordid gain!

And then the decks went red; and the grey sea
Was written crimsonly with ebbing life.
The barricade spewed shots and mockery
And curses, and the drunken lust of strife.

Yet, the mad chorus from that devil's host,--
Yea, all the tumult of that butcher throng,--
Compound of bullets, booze and coward boast,--
Could not out-shriek one dying worker's song!

Song on his lips, he came;
Song on his lips, he went;--
This be the token we bear of him,--
Soldier of Discontent!

[Illustration: Released Free Speech prisoners who visited the graves of
their murdered Fellow Workers at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, May 12, 1917.]

The Everett Massacre

CHAPTER I.

THE LUMBER KINGDOM

Perhaps the real history of the rise of the lumber industry in the
Pacific Northwest will never be written. It will not be set down in
these pages. A fragment--vividly illustrative of the whole, yet only a
fragment--is all that is reproduced herein. But if that true history be
written, it will tell no tales of "self-made men" who toiled in the
woods and mills amid poverty and privation and finally rose to fame and
affluence by their own unaided effort. No Abraham Lincoln will be there
to brighten its tarnished pages. The story is a more sordid one and it
has to do with the theft of public lands; with the bribery and
corruption of public officials; with the destruction and "sabotage," if
the term may be so misused, of the property of competitors; with base