38 Facts About Ed Boyce

Edward Boyce was president of the Western Federation of Miners, a radical American labor organizer, socialist and hard rock mine owner.

Edward Ed Boyce was born in County Donegal, Ireland in 1862 and was the youngest of four children.

Ed Boyce took his first job as a construction worker for the Milwaukee Northern Railroad, an interurban line between Milwaukee and Sheboygan, earning $1.25 a day at the job.

Ed Boyce managed to save $100 by 1883 and then moved west to Leadville, Colorado, where he arrived in 1883.

Ed Boyce sent the next four years working in the mines.

Ed Boyce joined the Leadville Miners' Union, an affiliate of the Knights of Labor in 1884.

Ed Boyce left Leadville for Idaho, where he worked at various mines in Coeur d'Alene and in Butte, Montana before moving to Wardner, Idaho.

Ed Boyce joined the Wardner Miners' Union in 1888, and was later elected its corresponding secretary.

In 1892, the 30-year-old Ed Boyce became an active leader in a strike near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Ed Boyce served a six-month jail term for contempt of court for his role in the 1892 Coeur d'Alene miners' strike, and was blacklisted by the mine owners.

Ed Boyce obtained work in the mines and was elected president of the Coeur d'Alene Executive Miners' Union, a post he held until 1895.

In 1894, Ed Boyce was elected to the Idaho state senate as a Populist from Shoshone County, Idaho.

Ed Boyce battled for the eight-hour day for miners, the establishment of an arbitration board to settle labor disputes, and an investigation of the 1892 mining war.

Ed Boyce objected to appropriations for the state militia, charging that it was a tool used by the state and mine owners to suppress labor.

Ed Boyce called for legislation to forbid employment of aliens, to outlaw yellow-dog contracts and prohibit company stores.

In one of the most dramatic speeches he ever made, Ed Boyce denounced the blacklist:.

In 1896, Ed Boyce was elected president of the Western Federation of Miners.

William "Big Bill" Haywood heard Ed Boyce make a speech in that first year as president of the WFM, and Haywood decided to become a union member.

In late 1899, Ed Boyce established the WFM's journal, the Miner's Magazine.

Ed Boyce was one of twenty-seven union men who were jailed, but all of the union's leaders were released for lack of evidence.

At the 1897 WFM convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ed Boyce told his fellow union members to arm themselves:.

Ed Boyce led the WFM to join the American Federation of Labor the year he became WFM president.

Samuel Gompers had refused to give striking Colorado miners strike benefits, and Ed Boyce heatedly debated the issue with Gompers.

But, convinced that the conservative and craft unionism policies of the AFL were inadequate to the task of organizing workers, Ed Boyce led the WFM out of the AFL.

Ed Boyce was charged with conspiring to blow up the concentrator.

Ed Boyce had been in Wardner conferring with local union officers only a week before the explosion.

Ed Boyce denied the charges, and no indictment was ever issued.

Ed Boyce left the position when he retired as union president in 1902.

In 1901, Ed Boyce successfully led a campaign to have the WFM adopt socialism as its official economic policy.

Ed Boyce urged the WFM to slowly buy up mines and mining company stock, to replace the wage system with union-owned mines.

On May 14,1901 in Butte, Montana, Boyce married Eleanor Day, the sister of Harry L Day, a former bookkeeper who had become a wealthy mine owner.

Ed Boyce had become disillusioned with mismanagement in some WFM locals.

Ed Boyce supported the WFM's creation of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, and testified on behalf of Haywood, Moyer and others at their 1907 murder trial.

Ed Boyce became an avid reader of social theory and Irish poetry.

Eleanor Ed Boyce took an interest in art and became a member of the Portland Art Association.

Ed Boyce invested in the luxurious Portland Hotel Company in 1911, as well as in other real estate ventures in the city.

In 1936, Ed Boyce was elected president of the Oregon Hotel Association.

Ed Boyce left an estate valued at slightly over $1 million.