Remembering The Drumheller Strike

“Hell’s Hole,” “the Devil’s Row,” and “the Western Front” – these were the nicknames for the coal mines of the Drumheller valley. In 1919, around 6,500 Drumheller coal miners walked off the job after voting to join the radical and militant One Big Union. Nearly a hundred years later, the 1919 Drumheller strike remains one of the most famous examples of workers’ power on the Prairies.

- Kate Jacobson

Robert MacDonald was walking down a street in Drumheller, Alberta, on a summer Saturday evening in 1919 when he saw a group of men walking toward him. One of the men pointed at him and said to the others, “Here’s another One Big Union guy. Take him away.”

The men hustled MacDonald into a car and drove him to a barn outside of town where other local coal miners were also being dropped off. One man showed MacDonald his loaded shotgun. Another, pointing at a beam on the roof, told the captured coal miners, “We’re going to hang you on that beam.”

MacDonald was one of thousands of Drumheller coal miners who, two months earlier, had voted to join the radical and militant One Big Union (OBU) and strike for union recognition. The men who had grabbed him off the street were working for the bosses, and threatened to kill him for no other reason than that he was a worker on strike who had dared to walk down the street alone.

DRUMHELLER’S DISGRACE

The swath of southern Alberta which included the Drumheller Valley was originally the home of mostly Niitsitapi, Assiniboine, and Tsuut’ina peoples, and became Treaty 7 territory in 1877. Mine owners in the Drumheller valley who began buying up parcels of coal-rich land in the early 20th century wanted to make money as quickly as possible. Bosses lured new immigrants from Europe to work in the valley with promises of company housing and good wages.