Soon Coxey and Browne were leading a “ragamuffin pageant” of unemployed workers, spiritualists, women dressed as goddesses, thoroughbred horses, collies and bulldogs from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., waving peace flags and Browne’s (confusing) religious banners. The marchers camped outside of small towns along the way, surviving on donations of bologna and coffee and playing baseball with local supporters.
Journalists joined this ragged legion, breathlessly reporting exaggerations about “the Army” nationwide. Readers loved the story. Coxey and Browne had found a way to make the depressing social crisis into a thrilling narrative, turning gnawing poverty, in the words of historian Carl Schwantes, into “an unemployment adventure story.”
News of the march was especially welcome on the West coast, where the 1893 depression hit isolated boomtowns hard. California authorities had a cruel solution: simply throwing the unemployed on trains bound for the Utah or Arizona territories. To the rootless men and women squatting in hobo camps outside San Francisco or Los Angeles, marching on DC sounded like a fine idea.
“Armies” of out-of-work men and women began streaming cross-country—through deserts, over mountains and rafting the Mississippi. Hundreds hopped trains, infuriating the dictatorial railroad corporations that controlled western infrastructure. To teach these “bums” a lesson, one Southern Pacific locomotive stopped in west Texas, uncoupled the cars holding 500 demonstrators and chugged off, leaving the men stranded in the middle of the desert for nearly a week.
In Montana, out-of-work miners struck back, stealing a whole train and leading federal deputies on a 340-mile railroad-chase across the state. Townspeople helped the miners switch engines and refuel at key junctions. And they blocked their pursuers’ train, fighting the deputies and leaving several dead. Finally, Federal Marshalls peacefully captured the fugitives, but the wild news inspired more than 50 copycats to steal locomotives throughout the nation. Despite these clashes, most of Coxey’s marchers were peaceful. Alcohol was banned in their camps, which often hosted white and black marchers living together, and “respectable” women joined the western armies.
Yet to the wealthy and powerful, Coxey’s marchers looked like the first phase of the much-predicted class war. Authorities had little sympathy for these “idle, useless dregs of humanity,” as the New York police chief put it. Chicago and Pittsburgh banned marchers from entering city limits, and the Virginia militia burned their camp outside of Washington. Treasury officials panicked as the May 1 date of the march approached, arming even their accountants and preparing to fend off Coxey’s peaceful marchers.