The next day the Italian wildcat strikers held the company town of Boomer.  No casualties had occurred.  The conflict wasn’t over though.  The company wasn’t willing to meet their demands of honoring the 1902 & 1908 agreements and paying miners by the standard ton.  The Italian miners weren’t backing down either.

*English translation:

You who cast us out with a vile lie

you, bourgeois republic, one day you’ll be ashamed of it.

And today we accuse you in the face of the future.

And today we accuse you in the face of the future.

We’re cast out from earth to earth

to preach the peace and ban the war.

The peace between the oppressed, war to the oppressors.

The peace between the oppressed, war to the oppressors.

Full lyrics of Addo Lugano

Addio Lugano was written by Italian Anarchist Pietro Gori while in prison in Switzerland in 1894.  He later immigrated to the Americas and propagated his ideas throughout both South and North America.  While we don’t know what songs the armed and instrumented band in Boomer sang and played, this popular song fits both with the flag they flew and the cause they championed.

This 1906 photo of the Boomer Company Store gives us a peek of an already in-use rail track in the bottom right corner with more rails next to it, ready to be laid.  The handwritten note lists the superintendent as B. Killy while newspaper reports identify the 1909 superintendent as A. J. Gillie (or Gillies).  Killy and Gillie are close enough that with the looser spelling common at the time, they may indicate the same person or the mine may have just had two supers in a row with similar names.

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