all of a sudden and without warning quit, and the cause was one that we shall never forget." According to the _Farmers' Advocate_ , there had been "a slight disagreement" between the farmers and miners. But it didn't matter why, only that "an armed uprising, and consequently bloodshed, was the immediate result of a temporary misunderstanding." It didn't stop there. The _Farmers' Advocate_ went on to add: "The great majority of our people are now in the camp of the strikers. These people, men and women, many of them our neighbors and friends, and some of them our own sons and daughters, all united with the strikers—this, too, we cannot forget." In the end, though, there had to be some explanation of what had caused the tragedy of a mining camp called Goldfield to turn into a killing field in less than a week. In fairness, that explanation was no mystery. The newspaper got it right when it said that "a very slight cause has become a great and most deplorable result." The cause was the simple notion that mining companies must be forced to give the miners a fair deal. The miners had demanded better wages, and the railroad barons refused. And so the great catastrophe unfolded. By early January, President Theodore Roosevelt had finally found a way to make an example of "Big Bill" Haywood and George Pettibone, two high-profile union organizers from Idaho who were well known across the country as leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, the union to which most Goldfield miners belonged. Roosevelt had a vendetta against them. Haywood had organized some miners during the last great strike at the Coeur d'Alene mining district in northern Idaho, in 1892. And then Pettibone had gone out to organize them. To Roosevelt, this was sacrilege. Roosevelt was a progressive man, who often went on about how he was concerned about the rights of the little guy—labor and mine workers included. The president hated labor leaders like Haywood and Pettibone, and he felt, for some reason, that the people of the Western Federation of Miners were particularly suspect. That made it easy for him to take action. In late July 1902, just months after he had moved into the White House, Roosevelt gave the miners a choice: they could either stop the union, or their mines would be shut down. The miners didn't want to stop the union. They couldn't be forced to do that, even if they didn't like it. But they did want a good wage. They wanted what other workers in the country enjoyed. And the Western Federation of Miners wouldn't give them that. The result of all this was the great strike of 1902. On the second of September of that year, miners' demands went unanswered. That's when things got ugly. They stayed that way until mid-December, when there were a few more negotiations, and finally a compromise. The miners' demands were met, and then some. By then, though, they had gotten far too little for the work they had already done, and the price was far too high for the dangerous work they would yet do. The mine owners knew this. On the night of December 17, 1902, with the talks with the miners over and the mines at Goldfield about to go on their longest run of strikes and protests since the great strike of 1890, "Big Bill" Haywood spoke to a crowd of some four thousand people at a meeting at Goldfield's Community Hall. "We are prepared to go into this struggle," Haywood said. "We have said this once and we are going to say it many times. We want more than we have got; we will fight for it; we will die for it if necessary." The crowd's applause was loud. A couple days later, a deputy sheriff with Goldfield's sheriff's office approached the headquarters of the Western Federation of Miners at the Silver Dollar Mining Company office. One of the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, Frank Boyer, was in charge. The lawman, who told the _Union Record_ he was named Conley, asked Boyer what Goldfield miners were going to do now that the mines were going back to work. Boyer answered: "If it is an honest deal with the men who have put up their claims and the people of Goldfield, as they claim, we are not going to interfere with them. But if it is a sham and a 'shanghai,' as the officials of the company assert, we will do all we can to prevent a repetition of the last 'strike.' " The lawman gave Boyer time to think it over, then asked again what the miners would do. Boyer again answered: "Nothing." The next day, the miners of Goldfield went back to work. * * * — A MAN IN HIS mid-thirties was running for a house seat in the New Mexico legislature from nearby Pilar. This place was called Tularosa, and it had a population of some three hundred people. It was a boomtown of sorts, and one politician was predicting that it would grow to have a population of five thousand by the end of the year. That politician had been a farmer, but now he made his living as a stock promoter for the Western Livestock Land and Improvement Company, which had been established by a man named William B. Greeley. By the winter of 1902, William B. Greeley was a rich man. He lived on a twenty-five-thousand-acre ranch, had a ranch house in Colorado where he entertained every spring, and he had made many thousands of dollars since taking over the company—which included landholdings and ranching businesses throughout the Southwest—in 1889. The first time he came to Tularosa, Greeley had been struck by the fact that some of the town's residents were prospecting for gold. Greeley went on the following year to establish a number of mining claims, and he soon hit gold. By January 1903, he was ready to develop his new mines and to sell stock in his company. He needed, though, a name for the new mining town he was planning to build there. So he looked around. At Pilar, he saw a man who was running for office—the man who would become the mayor of Tularosa. Greeley asked him what his name was. "I would like a name for this town," he said. "What do you call that little peak right over there?" asked the town's new mayor. Greeley thought about it. "Mount Pilar," he said, "is about right, is it not?" The mayor nodded. "Then we will call the new town Pilar," Greeley said. "And we will call our new mine the Pilar Mine." And then he went on to describe how this name would serve a number of purposes. Greeley, after all, had a few other projects in mind as well. One was to establish a railway line to connect the new town with the mining industry of northwestern New Mexico. The mayor and the stock promoter got down to business, and the mayor soon became chairman of the town council. The council then began to draw up laws and a constitution for the new town. The citizens of Tularosa were also invited to take part in the drawing up of these laws. That began a tradition. From time to time, over the next twenty years, the mayor and council would send out invitations for local citizens to help them revise the laws, and every now and then the Tularosa citizens would show up to make suggestions. It was a ritual—one that ended up changing Tularosa's landscape forever. The original location of the Pilar mine was right in the middle of town. But, as the stories later came out, Greeley, or at least members of the town's mining company, had discovered that they couldn't mine much gold there. Instead, they began to look around and they discovered a hill to the north, one with higher, rockier land to the south. They began to think about how they could get to it. One day they met a man named W. R. "Bob" Walker, who told them that the land they were looking at—which was then owned by a man named John Tisdale—was the property of the Bureau of Reclamation. But there was a problem. Tisdale was still a government official, and he wasn't making his property available for mining. So Greeley, Walker, and others decided to run him out. Their plan was to go to Tisdale and tell him to "sashay or get out." But that didn't happen. Tisdale was out of town when the message arrived. In fact, he had been called away from the West to serve as New Mexico's state senator. He returned only a couple weeks later. That's when Tisdale realized what Greeley and company were planning. Greeley then showed him some maps of Tularosa. One of them showed a plan for the mining town of Pilar, and another showed a route that the future mining town would be connected with the Santa Fe railway system. Tisdale asked his son to tell the mayor that he was not going to sell them his land. Greeley got angry and told his son that he "should watch his step." They were going to get that land, Tisdale told his son, and Greeley said he was willing