through in this manner was far from encouraging. However, when the ban of martial law was finally removed from Telluride, March nth, 1904, it was found that law and order had been indeed restored in the district. The jails were all empty, the streets were very quiet, and the soldiers were preparing to leave for their
The Pinkerton Labor Spy. 123
homes. The leaders of the union who had ''^conspired to break the law," the vagrants, the impressed street cleaners, and many other union men, close on to a total of one hundred, had all been forcibly torn from their homes and their families, and driven from San Miguel County at the point of the bayonet.
In considering the wholesale deportations of the Cripple Creek miners by the militia in June, 1904, after the Independence depot explosion, some people might have argued that the expulsion was due to the over-wrought condition of the public mind. But the deportation of the Telluride miners occurred five months before the explosion of the Independence depot, and at a time when the public mind was not wrought up over anything except the flagrant violations of the law by the military. What excuse can be offered for the Telluride deportations? None! A deliberate conspiracy of mine owners to exile unionists is as clear in one case as in the other.
Directly it became known that the militia had left Telluride, the deported miners quietly returned to their homes, so that on the very next day the strike was in exactly the same condition as before martial law had been proclaimed.
The return of the exiles angered and alarmed the mine owners beyond expression. In the first place the magnates resented the impudence of the miners in returning to their homes after having been deported by the militia, an 1 told, in the name of His Excellency the Governor, never to