Biography
James Gossard was from Urbana, Illinois. James Gossard was arrested and scheduled for trial at the mass IWW trial in Wichita. He was held in the Newton County (Kansas) Jail, where he died while awaiting trial, reportedly because of "improperly treated influenza."
The March 1920 One Big Union Monthly prisoner roster, under the printed name GOSSARD , JAMES, reports: Federal . Indicted Wichita , March 14 , 1918. Conspiracy. Died in jail pending trial Dec. 1, 1919 . This is the contemporary labor organization’s account. Indictment, bail and imposed sentence are distinguished from physical admission, actual release and complete time served; no missing custody endpoint is inferred. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/one-big-union-monthly/v02n03-mar-1920_One%20Big%20Union.pdf#page=11
Individual custody-death account, not the Hofer brothers’ case
The June 27, 1919 newspaper individually names James Gossard, from Urbana, Illinois, as the deceased Kansas IWW prisoner and says fellow workers called him Sunny Jim. It reports that he was arrested while working in the oil fields and died following an attack of influenza after roughly a year in the Kansas jails. This is an attributed contemporary account, not an exact first-admission or death-date record; the approximate year is not converted into a day count. An unrelated paragraph about Joseph and Michael Hofer’s Alcatraz and Leavenworth confinement has been removed from Gossard’s biography because it concerns different people. No dates or experiences from the Hofer brothers are assigned to him. Existing individual case fields remain unchanged.
The Workers’ World, Kansas City, volume 1 number 13, June 27, 1919, original printed page 2. All four original newspaper pages, including continuations and surrounding material, were reviewed. Political, medical and mistreatment claims remain attributed to the paper.
