Underground gold mining was difficult, dangerous, labor-intensive work, and two major labor conflicts between the Association of Mine Owners and the Western Federation of Miners labor union changed Victor and the Gold Camp forever. The first labor war began with a union strike in 1894 over wages and the number of hours miners worked each day; two men were killed in a gun battle between striking miners and sheriff’s deputies, and the dispute ended in the union’s favor when mine owners agreed to pay miners $3 for an eight-hour day. The second labor war began in 1903, when the union called on Gold Camp miners to strike in sympathy with smelter workers in Colorado City who earned $1.85 per day. With 3,500 to 4,000 workers on strike, most mining operations stopped, and violence followed as some mines tried to reopen with nonunion labor. At the Independence Mine, 15 men died after someone tampered with shaft guides, a bomb at the Vindicator Mine killed several more, and trains carrying nonunion men were wrecked. The governor placed the Gold Camp under martial law, and by September 1903 more than 1,000 National Guard troops occupied the camp. During the six-month occupation, hundreds of union members and sympathizers were rounded up and imprisoned in bull pens or ordered out of the district, and in September 1903 editor George Kyner of the Victor Record and some of his staff were arrested while the paper was placed under censorship for pro-union sympathies. After the troops were withdrawn in the spring of 1904, violence flared again. On June 6, 1904, a depot at the town of Independence where nonunion miners were waiting for a train was blown up, killing 13 men and injuring many others; years later, Harry Orchard, a henchman for the union, confessed to the crime. The next day, the Mine Owners Association held a rally in Victor to blame the union, but shots broke out, two men were killed, and others were injured in the riot. Twelve-year-old Lowell Thomas watched from a nearby building, while his father, Dr. Harry Thomas, ran into the street, carried a wounded man to his office, and saved his life. Union sympathizers fled up 4th Street to the union hall, where a gun battle left bullet holes still visible on the building’s front before the occupants finally raised a white flag of surrender. Union offices and union stores were destroyed, and union members and sympathizers were arrested and confined in the basement of the Armory. The governor again sent in the National Guard, the Gold Camp was again placed under martial law, and the press was silenced while freedom of speech and assembly were abolished. Two days after the June 1904 riot, the Victor Record was raided again and its printing press and linotype machines were destroyed. Union members and sympathizers were once more herded into a bull pen, and 225 men were deported without trial in railroad boxcars to the Kansas and New Mexico borders with orders not to return. Within days, the labor war ended, the union was driven from the Gold Camp, the mines reopened, and organized labor was totally defeated. From June 1904 to the present, miners in the Gold Camp have had no union representation, and they were allowed to work only if they carried identification cards from the Mine Owners Association stating that they were not affiliated with the union.