Many baby boomers have a vague perception of a guy named Joe Hill because of a song that Joan Baez sang on the soundtrack for the movie “Woodstock.” It was on side 2, sandwiched between “The Fish Cheer” and the first time that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young “ever sang in front of people.”
But who knew that Joe Hill passed through Park City, just weeks before the die was cast that sent him to a firing squad in Salt Lake City? According to the song, Joe Hill never died because he lives on where “working folks defend their rights.”
Who was he, anyway?
Born in Sweden as Joel Emmanuel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, his “immigrant name” was Joe Hillstrom. He was a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as “The Wobblies.” He worked as a miner “to keep body and soul together,” as well as to meet the audience for his activism. To stir that audience, he wrote protest songs, which is what brought him to the attention of Joan Baez (although the song about Joe was written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson in the 1930s).
His activist travels brought him to Park City in late 1913, where he found employment with the Silver King Coalition Mines Company. He was arrested for murder in Salt Lake City in January 1914, tried, convicted and sent to the firing squad in November 1915. The first labor strike at the Coalition happened in December of that year. Could this have been Joe’s first posthumous labor activity?
The details behind his murder conviction leave enough doubt that many modern writers question his guilt. Some believe that he was protecting the identity of a woman with whom he was having an affair at the time. Others say he simply decided to become the martyr he became through his silence on his whereabouts at the time of the murder. One thing is certain: In a letter from his jail cell, he requested to be “buried anywhere but Utah.”
In a fitting epilogue to this request, Joe was cremated, and his ashes were sent to the union. Over the ensuing years, his ashes have been spread in most of the remaining 49 states, except, of course, Utah.
Joe Hill lives on in Park City through the more recent actions of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, a union of the ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort. Through their actions in a strike held in late 2024, they defended their rights to a living wage.
For additional details on the strike, as well as Joe’s murder and execution, you may want to join Emmet Murray, of the PCPSA, and Sandy Brumley, local history raconteur, from 5 to 6 p.m. on June 10 at the Museum’s Education and Collection Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.