Frank Little reached Butte on July 18, 1917, on crutches, with a leg broken in an accident in Arizona. He was about forty, a former miner of white and Cherokee descent by most accounts, and one of the best-known organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union that meant to organize every worker in an industry into one body and, eventually, to overturn the wage system itself. He had been on the IWW's executive board since 1916, and he opposed the war and the draft out loud.
Butte was on strike. The fire in the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines on June 8 had set off a walkout against the Anaconda Company and the other mine owners, over safety, pay and the hated rustling card that decided who could work. Little came to help organize it. He spoke to crowds of miners against the company, against the war and against conscription, and the company, the newspapers it controlled and local officials pressed for his arrest for disloyal speech. Federal officials looked and found nothing they could charge.
Wyoming Street
At about three in the morning on August 1, six masked men came to the boardinghouse at 320 North Wyoming Street run by Nora Byrne. They told her they were officers and went for Little's room. They took him without letting him dress or reach his crutches, tied him behind a car and dragged him through the streets toward the edge of town, beat him, and hanged him from the Milwaukee Road trestle. His body was found there about six o'clock. Pinned to it was a card: Others take notice, first and last warning. Under it were the numbers 3-7-77, the sign of the vigilantes who had hanged men in the gold camps half a century before, and a row of initials of other strike leaders, with the L circled.
Thousands lined the streets for his funeral, and thousands more followed his coffin to Mountain View Cemetery, the largest funeral Butte had ever seen. The killers were never named, never arrested and never charged, and most who have studied the case suspect men working for the company or for police it controlled. Every August 1 people still gather at his grave to sing union songs.
The law that followed
The strike collapsed. In February 1918 the governor called the legislature into special session, and in eleven days it passed a criminal syndicalism act and a sedition law making it a crime to say or write anything disloyal, profane or contemptuous about the government, the flag, the armed forces or the war, with penalties up to twenty years in prison and a $20,000 fine. Montana prosecutors arrested at least two hundred people under it, and seventy-nine were convicted. That May Congress passed a federal Sedition Act copied almost word for word from Montana's. In 2006 the governor posthumously pardoned the Montanans convicted under the state law.
The numbers pinned to Frank Little did not go away. Since 1956 the Montana Highway Patrol has worn 3-7-77 on its shoulder patch, in honor, the troopers' association says, of the territory's first organized law enforcement.