osted in the Everett
shingle mills. The weavers promptly struck. Scabs, gunmen, injunctions,
and violence followed. The strike failed, the wage reduction was made,
but the men returned to work relying upon a "gentlemen's agreement" that
the employers would voluntarily raise the wages of the shingle weavers
when shingles again sold for what they were bringing before the
depression. Faith in agreements had gotten in its deadly work; the
shingle weavers believed that the employers meant to keep their word.

In the spring of 1916 shingles soared to a price higher than had
prevailed for years, but the promised raise failed to materialize. With
but a skeleton of an organization to back them, a handful of determined
delegates met in Seattle in April and decided to demand the restoration
of the 1915 scale thruout the entire jurisdiction of the Shingle
Weavers' Union, setting May 1st as the date when the raise should take
effect.

At the time set, or shortly thereafter, most of the mills in the
Northwest paid the scale. Everett, where the employers had given their
"word of honor," refused the strikers' demand. The fight was on! The
Seaside Shingle Company, which held no membership in the Commercial
Club, soon granted the raise. Many of the other companies, notably the
Jamison Mill, began the importation of scabs within the month. The cry
of "outside agitators" was forgotten long enough to go outside in search
of notorious gunmen and scab-herders. The slums, the hells of
Capitalism, were raked with a fine-toothed comb for degenerates with a
record for lawless deviltry. The strikers threw out their picket line
and the ever-present class war began to show itself in other than
peaceful ways.

During May, June and July the picket line had to be maintained in the
face of strong opposition by the local authorities who were the pliant
tools of the lumber trust. The ranks of the pickets were constantly
being thinned by false arrest and imprisonment on every charge and no
charge, until on August 19th there were but eighteen men on the picket
line.

On that particular morning the Everett police searched the little
handful of pickets in front of the Jamison Mill to make sure that they
were unarmed, and when that fact was determined, they started the men
across the narrow trestle bridge that extended over an arm of the bay.
When the pickets were well out on the bridge, the imported thugs, some
seventy in number, personally directed and