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:: Sunday, January 04, 2004 ::

Coal miners' mother By ROD MICKLEBURGH, The Globe and Mail
Mother Jones was as unlikely looking a union firebrand as might be imagined. But at 67, she was the United Mine Workers' most revered organizer, a tireless advocate for her 'boys' in the mines and a ferocious opponent of the companies that ran them. 'I'm not a humanitarian,' she liked to proclaim. 'I'm a hell-raiser.'

When Mother Jones died in 1930, the miners' self-styled guardian angel was mourned in song by an up-and-coming country singer named Gene Autry. Less known is that her early life was spent in Canada.

Mother Jones was as unlikely looking a union firebrand as might be imagined. But at 67, she was the United Mine Workers' most revered organizer, a tireless advocate for her 'boys' in the mines and a ferocious opponent of the companies that ran them. 'I'm not a humanitarian,' she liked to proclaim. 'I'm a hell-raiser.'

When Mother Jones died in 1930, the miners' self-styled guardian angel was mourned in song by an up-and-coming country singer named Gene Autry. Less known is that her early life was spent in Canada.

Her immigrant Irish family lived at 210 Bathurst St. in Toronto. Mary Harris, as she was then, attended Toronto Normal School in 1857, after receiving a certificate from a priest at St. Michael's Cathedral affirming her good moral character. But she left Toronto for good in 1860, accepting a teaching job at a convent in Michigan that began a shadowy 35-year odyssey of which little is known until she emerged in the late 1890s as Mother Jones, tirelessly crisscrossing the country from strike to strike. She was still at it in her mid-80s.

She did return once to Canada, journeying north to boost the spirits of striking coal miners in Cumberland, on Vancouver Island. Years later, one of the strikers remembered: "She was a fiery one. I think she was 4-foot-5 or something. A short woman but, by God, she was something."

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