Page:Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).djvu/106

Rh and the strike was eventually lost, although the struggle in the south went on for a year.

Much of the fighting took place around Cripple Creek. The miners were evicted from their company-owned houses. They went out on the bleak mountain sides, lived in tents through a terrible winter with the temperature below zero, with eighteen inches of snow on the ground. They tied their feet in gunny sacks and lived lean and lank and hungry as timber wolves. They received sixty-three cents a week strike benefit while John Mitchell went traveling through Europe, staying at fashionable hotels, studying the labor movement. When he returned the miners had been lashed back into the mines by hunger but John Mitchell was given a banquet in the Park Avenue Hotel and presented with a watch with diamonds.

From the day I opposed John Mitchell's authority, the guns were turned on me. Slander and persecution followed me like black shadows. But the fight went on.

One night when I came in from the field where I had been holding meetings, I was just dropping to sleep when a knock—a loud knock—came on my door. I always slept in my clothes for I never knew what might happen. I went to the door, opened it, and faced a military chap.

"The Colonel wants you up at headquarters."