Biography
Henry Maki, born Henrik "Heikki" Iivari Maentaka in Ähtäri, Finland, was a Finnish-American hard-rock miner and a member of the Western Federation of Miners in Telluride, Colorado. During the 1903-1904 Telluride strike, authorities arrested Maki and dozens of other unemployed strikers under a selectively enforced vagrancy law.
Thirty-four striking miners were taken in. Twenty-seven were convicted and ordered to pay $25 plus court costs, and given three choices: pay the fine, leave San Miguel County, or work under the sheriff's direction. The men produced $1,148.25 between them in open court and had their union behind them, which is the answer to the charge that they were destitute vagrants. The prosecutions were a mechanism for making strikers work, leave Telluride, or stay in jail.
Sixteen reported for the compulsory labour and were set to digging and repairing municipal sewers. Maki refused. Deputy sheriff Willard Runnels walked him to a telephone or telegraph pole, made him put his arms around it, and handcuffed his wrists together on the far side. Contemporary reports describe high wind, blowing snow and temperatures around zero. He was chained there for at least ninety minutes and possibly several hours before being returned to the cells, where a union history records that he was refused food for thirty-six hours. County Judge J. M. Wardlaw ordered the remaining vagrancy prisoners released on March 5, 1904.
A photograph of him chained to the pole became the central image of the Western Federation of Miners poster "Is Colorado in America?" The print on this record carries the line the union set beneath it: UNDER THE FOLDS OF THE AMERICAN FLAG IN COLORADO!
He went back to mining and was killed by falling rock at the Gold Pioneer Mine on August 17, 1910, aged 29.
THE ARREST DATE IS NOT SETTLED. One retrospective account puts the arrests on Monday, February 29, 1904, which is the date stored here. Emma Langdon's 1905 history of the strike places both the mass arrest and the justice-court proceedings on March 1. A wire report of March 2 says Maki and the others had been convicted "yesterday," which fixes the conviction on March 1 and is why that is recorded as the sentencing date. If Langdon is right about the arrest, the custody was four days rather than five.
