THE MEN BEGAN TO GATHER OUTSIDE THE MILL early in the evening. They had pitched tents at the beginning of the strike. Clay Tatro had set up his headquarters at an old foreman’s shack just outside the gates. There was no telling what the owners would do. They might send in replacement workers who were no better armed than the strikers. They might come with police officers or hastily deputized thugs armed with pistols or even shotguns and submachine guns. If the labor movement had learned one thing during the Great Depression, it was that the bosses did not fight fair. Many a strike had ended with casualties when police or hired thugs opened fire on unarmed workers. Tatro knew that a murdered striker or two could be very useful in drumming up public sympathy and turning people against the bosses. Even when workers lost a battle, they could sometimes use their casualties to win the war.

Rumors flew all night long. Forty strikebreakers were on a bus up from Fresno. Canadian scabs were on their way down from Vancouver. The sheriff had signed up two hundred deputies and was passing out shotguns. The president was going to send Harry Hopkins out in person and ask old Harry to sort out the mess. Someone heard a waitress in a diner at The Dalles say that she heard from her cousin they were sending strikebreakers over from Pendleton. Most of the men were too nervous to sleep, so they kept themselves busy by passing around the latest fourth-hand information. Jake slept soundly until three o’clock and crawled out of his tent into a fog so thick he could hardly make out the outlines of the next tent over. Most of the men were still trying to sleep, some in the tents, some in sleeping rolls on the wet ground.