"We Were the Salt of the Earth!": A Narrative of the On-to-Ottawa Trek and the Regina Riot

The Regina Riot, which erupted in that city's Market Square on July 1, 1935, was the climax of a strike by relief camp workers which had begun in British Columbia on April 4. After lingering two months in Vancouver, the participants struck out east by freight train, on to Ottawa, where they intended to tell the Government of Canada that the situation of the unemployed had become intolerable. The origins of the Strike, the Trek, and the Riot -- the character of those events -- are what this book is all about. It is a narrative, composed from federal, provincial and municipal records, from news reports, from interviews with participants, from sworn testimony, from photographs, from maps, from sawn-off baseball bats. It is the story of an event which figured prominently, at the same instant, in the history of the Canadian worker, in the history of the Canadian radical, in the histories of two Canadian cities and in the history of R. B. Bennet's Depression years government. --Publisher's description

OCLC: 12958772