Jumbo and Mrs. General Cantwell

A soft-spoken man with a trim mustache and rimless glasses, Jacob S. Coxey looked more like a prosperous farmer than an economic messiah. He proved ineffective at publicizing his proposals until he teamed with Carl Browne, a hustler whose faults did not include a lack of flamboyance. Browne had been a housepainter, cartoonist, theosophist, snake-oil salesman, and private secretary to Dennis Kearney during that demagogue's anti-Chinese agitation.
A big fellow, notoriously reluctant to bathe, with long graying hair and a beard worthy of a prophet, Browne decked himself out in buckskin coat, fringed, of course, and with buttons made of Mexican half dollars. His ensemble was completed with high boots, sombrero, a fur coat of dubious derivation, and a necklace of amber beads. His vocal range was from foghorn to buzz saw. As an attracter of attention, Browne was a triple threat, combining visual, vocal, and odoriferous pollution. He was also imaginative.
Browne and Coxey decided to send Congress "a petition with boots on." The unemployed would march on Washington to demand passage of a Good Roads Bill and a Non-Interest-Bearing Bond Bill. Coxey took credit for the idea of the march, Browne for calling the marchers "The Commonweal Army of Christ."
Browne painted a remarkable banner for the army to march under. It bore a picture of Christ which critics felt looked suspiciously like a Browne self-portrait, and it was captioned "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, He Hath Risen, but Death to Interest on Bonds."
The first battalion of the Commonweal Army started for Washington from Massilon on Easter Sunday, 1894.
A color-bearer with Browne's banner led the way, followed by General Coxey in a piano box buggy drawn by his forty thousand dollar pacer Acolyte, and, in a separate carriage, the second Mrs. Coxey, who held in her arms their infant son whose baptismal certificate read, no mistake, Legal Tender Coxey. Marshall Browne rode a spirited stallion.
The others walked. Among those in the ranks were Cyclone Kirtland, an astrologer who claimed that according to the stars the army would be "invisible in war, invincible in peace"; Unknown Smith, who had earlier been known as ringmaster for a disbanded circus; David McCallum, author of an economic treatise which sold under the title Dogs and Fleas, by One of the Fleas; Christopher Columbus Jones, a five-foot apostle of reform who marched under a silk hat; and Jones's private secretary, who "sustained a plug hat with impressive dignity."
The Commonwealers numbered only two hundred by the most favorable count but they were accompanied down the glory road by forty-three reporters, four telegraph operators, and two linemen.
Carl Browne had done his public relations work well. Though the stories the reporters filed were heavy with ridicule, they were numerous. Coxey's tatterdemalion troops captured the national imagination as they traipsed south. Others followed.
Tacoma and Seattle organized separate contingents in April, Seattle first. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 8, some two hundred men gathered in a skid road hall furnished with only two chairs and a card table. Harry Shepard, a soft-spoken engineer, made a quiet speech that called on "the respectable unemployed" to unite for the amelioration of their condition. He urged order, discipline, and self reliance in gathering food and funds for a protest march across the continent.
The seventy-two who signed the muster roll the first day pledged themselves "to uphold the constitution, recognize only honest workmen, assist any officer in the lawful discharge of his duty, repudiate all connections with drunkards, thieves and convicts, and to protect life, liberty and property." They elected Shepard their general.
Tacoma organized a week later. The unemployed and their sympathizers gathered in the National Theater, a run-down hall at Twelfth and A streets. After considerable speechifying, the mantle of leadership settled not on a quiet engineer like Shepard but on one of Tacoma's loudest personalities, Frank P. "Jumbo" Cantwell, long-time bouncer for Harry Morgan, occasional prize fighter, and current husband of Morgan's common-law widow, Dora Charlotte-usually called Charlotte.
Not for Jumbo a tone of respectability or a demand that his followers eschew association with thieves and drunkards. Cantwell himself was not unknown in police court. Respectability he could do without. Notoriety was the spur.
Cantwell told the would-be marchers that they could hire a train at cutrates to carry them to Washington. How to pay for it?

"Every feller who follers us from Tacoma, we'll make him dig up ten cents; militia, police, I don't care who he is-we'll make him dig up. Then we'll use the money to pay our way. But when we come back to Tacoma, we won't hang out at the Old National. Oh, no. We'll go to the Tacoma Hotel and be the elite."

Or so said the Ledger in a report on his speech. The Ledger complained that Jumbo's followers were "the best dressed, best fed lot of unemployed to be found on the Coast," and disapproved of "emigrants going not west but east, with no purpose but to present a demand that the government shall help them, shall take them in its charge and provide for them. The Army is marching to the unknown in search of the impossible and the impractical." The paper suggested that the government simply draft the unemployed, ship them out of the country to Nicaragua, furnish them with pick and shovel, and set them to digging a canal.
The Commonwealers were not to be dissuaded by such suggestions. They organized into companies, or "cantons," of sixty men, drilled at marching by morning and in the afternoons rustled provender for the mess. "General" Cantwell helped out by boxing an exhibition and turning over his purse to the commissary. Two meals were served daily. They were long on clams, crab, salmon, and beans, short on meat and bread.
Cantwell and Shepard arranged that their Tacoma and Seattle armies would meet at Puyallup at the end of the month. They would then ask the Northern Pacific for train service east. While preparations were being made for the Puyallup encampment, a Commonweal contingent from Butte, Montana, flagged down a freight train, piled four hundred men into fourteen empty boxcars, put an unemployed engineer at the throttle, and headed east.
The Coxeyites regarded this as hitching a ride, the NP as stealing a train. Railroad officials obtained a court order forbidding anyone to deprive rightful owners of the use of their boxcars. Fifteen deputy marshals were hastily sworn in. They caught up with the train at Billings, where a crowd had gathered to wish the Butte army godspeed.
The deputies started shooting and several bystanders were wounded before the engine was uncoupled from the freight and the engineer arrested. The townsfolk sided with the unemployed. They helped the army liberate another engine and supplied the Commonwealers with food. The train pulled out for the East with flags flying and a live rooster perched on the locomotive. President Cleveland called out the United States Army. Regulars from Fort Koegh found the freight parked on a siding at Forsythe, Montana, the engineer catching some sleep. The Industrials surrendered without resistance.
A reporter asked Jumbo Cantwell his views about commandeering trains. Cantwell at the time was trying on a uniform that had been presented him by fellow members of Tacoma's gambling fraternity: a longtailed coat with epaulets, dark pants with blue stripes down the leg, a broad-brimmed black hat heavy with braid.

"We'll get back there one way or another," he promised, admiring his finery in a mirror. "We ain't too proud to steal a train. Them fellers in Congress has broke the law. Why can't we?"

United States Marshal James C. Drake began swearing in deputies to guard railroad property. Deputies were easy to find: why, the pay was five dollars a day, and room and board. Drake dispatched a dozen to Puyallup where the Commonweal armies were to rendezvous; others patrolled train yards in Seattle, Ellensberg, Yakima, and Spokane.
They were armed with .45s and Winchester rifles requisitioned from Tacoma sporting goods stores, and they carried copies of a restraining order issued by United States Circuit Court Judge C. H. Hanford of Seattle. It prohibited any action which would deprive the receivers of the bankrupt Northern Pacific from the regular use of the line's locomotives, cars, and equipment.
The Seattle Commonwealers under "General" Shepard started for Puyallup on April 28, Jumbo's Tacoma troops a day later. A light drizzle was falling as the unemployed marched down Pacific Avenue that Saturday afternoon, through a thin line of spectators on the plank sidewalks. A guard of honor carried a flag presented the Commonwealers by the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic. It hung limply.
General Cantwell, his uniform partly concealed by a macintosh, followed the flag. He kept the Colonel, his pet Saint Bernard, on a long leash. Some four hundred Coxeyites marched after him. They sang as they went down Pacific to Puyallup Boulevard then over to the river, Civil War songs, and "Good Night, Ladies," and, to an old tune, the new words of "Coxey's March":