Biography
Frank Little was arrested on September 29, 1909 in the Missoula IWW street-speaking free-speech fight in Montana. He was released by October 8, 1909.
Labor Defender, August 1932, printed page 155 (PDF page 17): They Won't Be Forgotten retrospectively describes Little, then walking with a crutch, seized from his bed in a North Wyoming Street lodging house in Butte during the August 1917 Anaconda copper strike, assaulted, dragged by automobile and left hanging. It presents the killing as corporate retaliation and a warning to William F. Dunne and Campbell. Those causal claims remain attributed; naming threatened leaders does not establish their arrest or custody in this episode. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1932/v08n08-aug-1932-LD.pdf
Contemporary reference to Little’s killing at Butte
In discussing the Wichita IWW indictment, the June 27, 1919 newspaper individually names Frank Little and says he had been hanged at Butte, Montana, while his activities were being invoked against the defendants. The paper’s attribution of responsibility to hired assassins is its own contemporary characterization, not a new judicial finding here. This adds a source-bound reference to his death beyond the existing Missoula free-speech case, but the passage provides no numerical death date or new custody interval. No birth date, death day, release endpoint or counter is inferred from the issue date.
The Workers’ World, Kansas City, volume 1 number 13, June 27, 1919, original printed page 1. All four original newspaper pages, including continuations and surrounding material, were reviewed. Political, medical and mistreatment claims remain attributed to the paper.
Labor Defender, August 1932; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
Thompson reports that on August 8 in the 1913 Duluth/Superior organizing campaign Little was abducted to a farm about thirty-five miles away and rescued by reporters. In the 1916 Mesabi dispute he is individually named among organizers arrested on the theory that their speeches caused deputies’ deaths; the account says a plea arrangement for three miners secured the organizers’ freedom, without individual custody endpoints. It separately dates Little’s Iron River, Michigan arrest to August 16, 1916: he was removed from jail, beaten, threatened with hanging and left near Watersmeet. Neither the collective strike settlement nor a trial disposition establishes a precise physical discharge or total. The book dates his subsequent Butte abduction and hanging to August 1, 1917; descriptions of responsibility remain the author’s account.
Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, The IWW: Its First 100 Years, physical PDF pages 94, 129, 148. Source179 SHA256 aa128f62023cae68c84b07606880c2cb665c80266f78854951758922bab40afa.
