The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

We had 50 mile an hour winds overnight Monday night into Tuesday, and the cat and I were restless, listening to branches knocking into things. I finally decided I may as well read since I wasn’t falling back to sleep; also reading often helps me drift off. But not this time. Between the things that went bump in the night and the fact that The Cold Millions is hard to put down, I never really got back to sleep until early morning.

When I was describing this book to the Computer Scientist I explained that it’s set mostly in Spokane in the early 1900s and that I found the history interesting. He joked that he didn’t know there was anything interesting about Spokane. We lived in Seattle for five years, and Eastern Washington seemed like far off frontier. Jess Walter lives there, and through the stories of several different characters he shares bits of the city’s story, from occupation and murder of the indigenous people to the building up of the town into a place with glaring disparity between the very rich, who got that way exploiting the area’s natural resources (timber, mines, land) and the people who worked to extract that wealth for them.

The Cold Millions is mostly Ryan Barton’s story. Rye is a sixteen year old orphan when the book opens, but that doesn’t do justice to his situation. He’s had a whole spectrum of adverse experiences in his short life. The only person he has left is his older brother Gregory, or Gig. Rye goes to find him, and they stow away on train cars looking for work together, and eventually end up staying on the porch at a boarding house in Spokane run by a widow with an orchard in her backyard, who has promised them she’ll sell them the orchard so they can build a house among the trees. Gig is a self-taught man of ideas who joins the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, also known as the Wobblies. Among his few possessions are a few volumes of a five volume edition of War and Peace.

The IWW is planning a day of street speeches to protest the exploitative system of employment agencies, wealthy business owners, poverty wages, and abusive police. The city has banned speeches, so one by one people are arrested, and a riot breaks out. Eventually over 500 people are stuffed into the jails. That is all based on true events. As is the arrival of socialist speaker and writer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who arrives to protest the mistreatment of the prisoners, raise money for the IWW, and bring national press attention to the plight of the workers.

The trajectory of Rye’s life is altered by the riot, his (short) and Gig’s (longer) imprisonments, and the friends (and enemies) who circle around as he is freed from prison, helps Gurley, takes care of himself, and struggles to understand who he can trust or not. He is surprised that he, “Ryan J. Dolan of Nothing, Nowhere, having neither house nor bed, nothing a person might call a possession, somehow had a lawyer. Rye wondered if that, more than waking on a ball field or eagles, or George Washington’s hair, was what it really meant to be an American.”

Detectives and former detectives, the aforementioned lawyer, a pair of showgirls who perform with a mountain lion, a clothing salesman, a millionaire, machine shop workers, a librarian, the family of his Rye’s friend Jules who died after contracting pneumonia in prison, union members, police, all figure into the complex plot and what was, for me, a surprising climax to the story. Satisfyingly, there are some wins for the good guy (Rye) but Walter doesn’t make it all neat and tidy. And while this novel magnifies the brutality of its time, it also reflects some of the shameful inequities of our own times: racism, misogyny, classism, a nearly unfathomable wealth gap, blind spots and holes in public and private social safety nets and services for minors, abuse of power, policing, and prisons, bias in the justice system, the need for living wages and exploitation of workers.

The Cold Millions deals with all of this, but Walter spins it into a yarn – a well told tale that kept me reading through the wild windstorm. It’s in some ways a tender book. And I really love the way Rye decides to go to the library and get War and Peace so he can read what was important to Gig while he’s in prison, and how he learns from it and begins to form his own views. (Regular bookconscious readers will recall, I read War and Peace last spring with people around the world as the pandemic began.) Often when I read a book that deals with so many harsh realities I feel as if I’m glad I read it but I didn’t enjoy it. I can’t say that this time. The Cold Millions is both a good read and an enjoyable one.

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