Biography
Charles H. Moyer (1866–1929) was president of the Western Federation of Miners. He was born in Iowa in 1866 — usually described as near Ames, though one family source gives Moingona in Boone County — and no reliable month and day has been established. An Iowa genealogical compilation expands his middle initial as Henry, but contemporary legal, union and newspaper records identify him only as Charles H. Moyer, and that is the form kept here.
He was first arrested at Ouray, Colorado on March 26, 1904, on a charge of desecrating the American flag. He had authorized a Western Federation of Miners poster headed "Is Colorado in America?", which set out across the stripes of a flag a list of the rights suspended in the mining districts — martial law, habeas corpus, free speech, free press — beside a photograph of the union miner Henry Maki, chained to a telegraph pole by the militia. Released on a reported $500 bond on the flag charge, he was taken straight back into custody by the Colorado militia and held at Telluride, in the city jail under military guard, from the morning of March 30 until the afternoon of June 15, 1904. The state justified it by Governor James Peabody's declaration of insurrection and the claim that a union leader at liberty might help perpetuate the disturbance; Moyer's later federal complaint alleged that no criminal complaint was filed against him during those seventy-seven days and that he was held without probable cause. The Colorado Supreme Court rejected his habeas corpus challenge, and his damages action reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled against him in Moyer v. Peabody, 212 U.S. 78, on January 18, 1909.
On the evening of February 17, 1906, Moyer was arrested in Denver together with William D. Haywood and George A. Pettibone, held in the city jail and briefly at the Oxford Hotel where the three were kept from reaching their lawyers or families, and put aboard a special train to Idaho at daybreak on February 18. The charge was the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, on the theory that the Western Federation leadership had conspired to have Harry Orchard kill him with a bomb. Moyer was held in the Ada County Jail at Boise and was never brought to trial. After Pettibone was acquitted, prosecutors asked the court to dismiss the case against Moyer, and he was released on the afternoon of January 4, 1908 — six hundred and eighty-six days after his arrest, with no conviction and no sentence.
He remained president of the Western Federation of Miners until 1926 and died at Pomona, California on June 2, 1929.
