On this day in 1897, several hundred striking anthracite miners set out on foot from Harwood toward the colliery at Lattimer, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. They were mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German immigrants, and they were unarmed. A sheriff's posse met them on the road outside the village and opened fire. At least nineteen men were killed. Scores more were wounded.
The sheriff and his deputies were tried and acquitted the following year. The miners who survived went on organising, and the anthracite fields became United Mine Workers country in the years that followed.
The front page below is the Evening Star of Washington, printed the next day, September 11, 1897: "RIOT AND BLOODSHED," then "NINETEEN KILLED OUTRIGHT," then "Forty-One Wounded, Some of Whom Will Die," with a small map of Luzerne County and Hazleton so readers far away could find the place. In the neighbouring columns, the same page carries silver and the Bank of England, a new adjutant general, a death list from a wreck in Colorado. That is how the news arrived that Saturday morning, alongside everything else.
Most of the dead were buried in Hazleton. Their names are on a marker near the road they were walking.
The burials that week went through the Polish, Slovak and Lithuanian parishes of the coal towns, each congregation taking its own dead — several funerals in a few days, in three languages, within a few miles of one another.
Marguerite, thank you for this. The names of the dead were written down in several spellings that day, the immigrant surnames caught in a hurry by clerks and reporters; later researchers went back to church and family records to get them right, which seems to me a plain form of care.