Leather Britches

The nickname came from buckskin trousers he rarely took off. Charles Smith, probably an alias, had worked as a logger, and local tellings put his sympathies with mill hands who put in sixty-hour weeks for a dollar and a half a day. In July 1912 he went with Brotherhood of Timber Workers president Arthur Emerson into Grabow, where, by one historian's account, he knelt and emptied rounds into the mill before escaping into the woods. The story that he fled murder warrants in West Texas is rumor, never proved. What is documented is the company he kept that day.

Where it stands

More markers nearby

• Sam Houston Jones — steps away
• Charles "Leather Bitches" Smith — steps away
• The Atakapa-Coushatta Trace — 0.4 mi
• Site of the Coushatta Indian Village — 0.4 mi