Governor Sparks, honest as the day was long and unsuspecting of any trickery or jobbery, listened to a Goldfield committee and permitted a dispatch to be sent to Washington over his signature representing that such conditions existed.
Thereupon Brigadier-General Funston, at the head of two thousand troops, was ordered to Goldfield. The State being without any militia and the representations made by Governor Sparks in his dispatches being strong on the point that a state of anarchy actually existed in Goldfield, the President finally succumbed.
The maneuver was as swift as it was unexpected. Nevada people at first could not understand what it was all about. Dispatches from Goldfield to Reno said the town was quiet. The nearest approach to an overt act of recent occurrence that had been chronicled was the alleged theft a few days before of a box or two of dynamite, about 300 feet of fuse and a quantity of caps that were said to have been clandestinely removed from the Booth mine in Goldfield. The theft, if theft there was, was charged to the miners, but proof was lacking.
On the arrival of the troops in Goldfield the Goldfield Consolidated announced a new wage scale, reducing the miners' wages from $5 to $4 and in some cases from $5 to $3.50. This was a new move, calculated to rouse the ire of the wage workers and to prolong the lockout. Messrs. Nixon and Wingfield's bank in Goldfield announced at the same time that it would thereafter discharge all of the pay-rolls of the company in gold. But there were no pay-rolls of any consequence then, the mines being shut down.
General Funston on his arrival in Goldfield interviewed mine operators, union miners and citizens generally with a view to determining the necessity for maintaining Government troops there. He discovered that the Administration had been buncoed. The General wired the President his opinion. President Roosevelt quickly dispatched a commission to Goldfield to conduct a public inquiry. This commission consisted of Charles B. Neal, Labor Commissioner; Herbert Knox Smith, Commissioner of Corporations, and Lawrence O. Murray, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor. They heard testimony day and night for a week.