Even before its inception, the future members of the Western
Federation of Miners were a group prone to getting what they
wanted through the use of violence if all else failed. After a
prolonged stay in jail for taking over a mine with force that
was being worked by scabs, in 1892 the miners went to Butte
where they joined with other mining organizations to found "a
grand federation of underground workers throughout the Western
states" which was called the Western Federation of Miners (WFM).
(BT p. 103-104) The violent nature of the organization in part
stemmed from frustration. William Hard, a Chicago reporter,
wrote of the members of the WFM, most of whom had left their
homes in the east to become frontiersmen, that "these
adventurous characters, going out into a new country...where it
would seem that at last all men would stand on equal footing,
have suddenly discovered that amid these primitive surroundings
the modern industrial system is... found at its worst." (BT p.
104) The WFM won its first strike at