The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 51
Rye took the pint glass and tipped it, the tart foam reminding him of the sweeter foam around the ice cream soda he’d had with Gurley.
Early took a long drink of his own. “I guess, if anything, maybe I was thinking it was strange seeing you up there because you seem to agree with me about this one big union business. I thought it was more your brother’s folly than yours.”
Rye took another drink.
Early leaned over. “This utopian one-for-all bullshit . . . if it wasn’t for your brother and that cyclone of a girl, I don’t think you’d be doing any of this. I guess that’s what I was thinking.”
Rye felt a tightness in his chest, loyalty to Gurley and to Gig, but something else, too, which had been growing since the riot.
“Come on. Tell the truth.” Early closed one eye. “You don’t actually believe the story Gurley is selling out there, do you? I mean, that it’s possible?”
“I don’t know, Early,” said Rye. “Does it have to be possible to believe in it?”
Early stared at him a moment, then gave a short staccato laugh. “Jesus, Rye. That might be the best defense I’ve ever heard from one of you utopian shitheads.” He gave a small, appreciative nod and pointed at Rye with his glass of beer. “And are you willing to go to jail again for something impossible?”
“Yes, I am,” Rye said, wondering if that was true.
“Okay, then. If you’re going back to jail anyway, wouldn’t you rather do something to deserve it, something big?”
Rye looked around the saloon. It was full of men like them. He imagined a street of saloons in a state of saloons in a world of saloons, a million men spending their last dollar on a glass of frosty forget. It was all too much, this way of thinking. Rye took another drink, the tartness not bothering him anymore.
“I got a question for you, Early,” he said. “What the hell is Taft?”
20
It wasn’t even a town but an overgrown work camp that had sprouted three years earlier when the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad decided to connect the last transcontinental line. They mapped a route eighteen miles shorter than any competitor, but that meant going over, and mostly through, the steep Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and Idaho. Thousands of men came to the woods to lay track, spike ties, clear trees, and build dizzying trestles two hundred feet over virgin forest and canyons. They dynamited and hand-dug thirteen tunnels, the longest of which ran 1.7 miles through a granite peak. On either side of that endless tunnel, the St. Paul Pass, grew a pair of squalid work camps, like the front door and back door to hell, Grand Forks, Idaho, and Taft, Montana.
At their peak, each bustling camp housed more than a thousand men and nearly as many barmen, gamblers, and prostitutes, spread out in fifty or so rough-hewn wooden buildings—saloons, brothels, hotels and casinos, a barracks, chow hall, sawmill, and a sprawl of crib tents where the sorriest played-out jangle girls sat open-legged on dirty cots waiting for men too drunk to climb the brothel steps. Neither place had what you’d call streets—just crude wood buildings thrown up alongside the train tracks, where every night dirty, bearded men seeped from the woods to spend a day’s wages. Behind this one square block were the men’s shacks, lean-tos, and tents, trailing up the wooded hillsides with no more planning than sprouted mushrooms. Taft himself had visited as secretary of war in ’07, before becoming president. He called the camps a “sewer of sin” and “a sore on an otherwise beautiful national forest.” In response, the Montana side gleefully voted to take his name.
If Spokane was half-lawed, at least there was half. Taft and Grand Forks were built illegally on National Forest land, so neither had police nor government, and vice grew wild and untended there. An hour after frustrated forest rangers closed a saloon, three others opened. Taft did have what locals called a hospital—a dank cabin where a sawbones separated men from their smashed feet and gangrenous arms and where it was rare to leave better off than you arrived.
With no police, order was kept by the bosses of Baltic work gangs—Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, and Slav—who drove off the Chinese, Negro, and Indian workers and took over the camps. These bosses made deals with the job agents and foremen to control hiring, and they took a dime from every man’s paycheck. The gangs also policed each other, settling disputes quietly, with fists and knives and hammers. No one would ever know how many killings took place in the mountains in those three years, but the previous spring, forest rangers had counted eighteen corpses in the melting snowbanks outside Taft.
“I’d like to register my official objection,” Early said that morning as they boarded the Northern Pacific train from Wallace.
But Gurley had already been convinced by Bolin that with log and rail work down for the winter, Taft was the best place to recruit floaters to join the Spokane protests.
Early leaned over to Rye. “Nothing to recruit there but the drips.”
The train slowed as it slid through Grand Forks, and they looked out at a cluster of half-burned log buildings along muddy paths. A prostitute had recently set fire to the camp to cover up the murder of a sadistic barman. “And that’s the nicer of the two camps,” Early said as they left Grand Forks and entered the endless black tunnel, bound for Taft. It was dead quiet