William J. Anthony

United Mine Workers Of America Dept: It's long ago now, but I remember how the slope shimmered under the tawny mountain light and that high summer lassitude in which everything goes still, drowsing beneath the electric throbbing of cicadas and the click of grasshoppers. A sudden breeze came down from the crags of the Three Sisters across the valley, a dry rustle, stirring like the ghosts of long-buried memory itself, according to Vancouver Sun. One gravestone, erected by his union, the United Mine Workers of America, was for William J. Anthony. He died in 1904. The epitaph was plain: "8 Hours" - that would be for the eight-hour working day, the modest, yet bitterly contested objective of British Columbia's working class during the last decades of the 19th century and driving a dusty road back to Fernie from a reunion picnic at the long-vanished Crowsnest Pass mining camp of Coal Creek in the south eastern corner of the province, I stopped to stretch my legs in an old cemetery. Most of the graves were unmarked, poor people's graves, faint rows dimpling the long grass, punctuated by a few Victorian obelisks, here and there a stone slab scabbed by weather, sometimes a marker made by a friend, simple as a pale ring of stones. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.