Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886

The Great Southwest railroad strike of 1886 was a labor union strike involving more than 200,000 workers. Beginning on March 1, 1886, railroad workers in five states struck against the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads, owned by Jay Gould. At least ten people were killed. The unravelling of the strike within two months led directly to the collapse of the Knights of Labor and the formation of the American Federation of Labor.

The roots of the strike began in a pattern of labor actions, negotiations and temporary agreements all through 1885. The Knights of Labor and Gould's Union Pacific had reached an agreement that included the principle that "no man should be discharged without due notice and investigation." This was purportedly violated when a Knight named Charles A. Hall in Marshall, Texas was fired for attending a union meeting on company time. The District Assembly # 101 of the Knights, and its leader Martin Irons, called a strike.

Within a week, more than 200,000 workers were on strike throughout Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Texas. A headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch read "Traffic Throttled: The Gould System at the Mercy of the Knights of Labor."

But the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen refused to honor the strike, and its members kept working. Meanwhile, Gould immediately hired strikebreakers to work the railroad, some of them Pinkerton agents. At the time of the strike, Gould held some 12 percent of all railroad track in the U.S.

No serious violence was reported up through March 10. One strikebreaker was reportedly beaten in Fort Worth. Increasing acts of sabotage, though, bordered on lawlessness: assaulting and disabling moving trains, threatening notes and visits to working engineers, arson fires in yards, and one mob of 600 Knights and sympathizers in DeSoto, Missouri marching on the roundhouse to drain the locomotives' boilers. A favorite tactic of the rail workers was to let steam locomotives go cold, forcing the railroad to spend up to six hours slowly reheating the engines for use.

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