Animated by America’s last gold rush, Goldfield was a lively city, if singularly focused. “People have no time to be amused,” Beatty wrote, “and if they had time they would not care for it. The game they are playing is more fascinating than any man has ever devised.” For Beatty, that game was the contest between labor and capital. That year, the local Goldfield mining union, a partnership between the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), won two major victories, securing higher wages for skilled and unskilled laborers and a voice for the union in workplace policies concerning theft. Labor’s boosted morale was short-lived; later that winter, federal t