Jim Bradshaw: Was Leather Britches a killer or a labor hero?

Some say the man known as Leather Britches Smith was the meanest man ever to set foot in Louisiana, a man you’d better not cross. Others say he was the hero of a fledgling Labor movement in the days when lumber mills offered about the only work available in southwest Louisiana and men had to take what they offered or do without.

Leather Britches, was also known in Louisiana as Charles Smith and as Ben Myatt in Robertson County, Texas. That’s where he was arrested in 1910 for the murder of his wife and a neighbor named John Cook.

He was convicted and sentenced to hang, but escaped from jail in Texas and made his way to Louisiana. His nickname came from his propensity to wear dirty, buckskin trousers.  He also wore a pistol on each hip and carried a rifle everywhere he went. People said he had been brought to Louisiana as a “hired gun” by Arthur L. Emerson, president of the union that was trying to organize southwest Louisiana timber workers.

Some folks claimed Leather Britches was a nice man except when he drank. They also said he drank almost all of the time. Drunk or sober, he was a deadly shot who neither townspeople nor the law dared to challenge. It’s said he would sit in the local theater with his two unholstered Colts resting on his lap. He’d “ask” local families for supper by shooting one of their chickens and “requesting” that it be cooked.

We don’t know whether he was drunk or sober on July 7, 1912, when a violent confrontation, known as the Grabow Riot, erupted between men loyal to the Galloway Lumber Co. and mill workers organized by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers.

There are two points of view on why it happened. One is that it was probably inevitable given the hotheads involved and the conditions of the day.  The other is that a group of tired, probably half-drunk, union men just stopped at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Grabow mill was closed when about 200 men who had been demonstrating at the bigger mills at Bon Ami, about six miles away, straggled into town to continue demonstrating there.           

The Grabow mill had been on strike for several weeks, and J. T. Galloway, its owner, had hired several guards to protect strike breakers in his plant.

The melee started with both sides shouting back and forth, then someone fired a shot, and that set the place off like a powder keg.

The Beauregard Parish clash lasted less than 15 minutes. But more than 300 shots were fired, leaving four men dead and 50 others wounded. Leather Britches was on the workers’ side and did his share of the shooting.

Newspapers reported at least 40 men were wounded and four people died, but some say that the number probably was much higher than what newspapers reported.

After the confrontation, most of the union men were taken to DeRidder or went voluntarily.

Sixty-two ended up in jail.  But Leather Britches, who’d said he’d never be sent to jail, ran off into the woods. Deputies eventually found him hiding in an abandoned sawmill near Merryville.

They surrounded the mill on the morning of Sept. 25, and ordered him to surrender. He reached for his gun instead. That was a bad mistake.

Deputies carried his body into Merryville, where it was wired in an upright position holding his guns.

A photographer took a dozen or so pictures of him, some of them with the deputies and people of the town standing beside the corpse. They wanted everyone to know that he had been killed.

It appears that some people wanted Leather Britches to be buried in the Merryville Cemetery, and some didn’t.

According to one account, they compromised by putting him right on the fence line and marked the spot with a cedar board, now long gone.

A century after his death a simple marker was put up at what is believed to be the final resting spot of Charles “Leather Britches” Smith.

But his legend remains, and his general notoriety is only part of the reason that Leather Britches Smith is still remembered. 

Despite its bloody outcome, labor historians say the riot that he’d helped instigate was a defining event in the attempt to organize sawmill workers in Louisiana, and that it led slowly but certainly to  passage in 1940 of The Fair Wages and Hours Act, forerunner to the Fair Labor Standards Act upheld by the Supreme Court on Feb. 3, 1941.
 
That act set a national minimum wage, guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime in certain jobs, and prohibited “oppressive child labor.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.