By S Satu u Repo Finn Forum -79’

Because of the mixup in
the final paragraph in the last

issue, we reprint as follow's: "

Because ofunion pressure, a
Coroner’s inquest was conduct-
ed into the causes of their death.
The Voutilainen inquest took
place first. The jury confirmed
the police report of accidental
drowning. In order to get a
better hearing for Rosvall, the
union took up a collection in the
Finnish community to pay fora
lawyer to represent them at the
inquest. Meanwhile reports in
the local paper reflected a
concern that the union would
make martyrs of these two
organanizers if it could be
proven that they had not died
accidentally. © Whether this
worry had any ¢ffect on the
respectable Port Arthur citizens
who aton the jury is hard to say.
In any case they had no trouble
reaching the same verdict in
Rosval’s case: accidental
drowning.

There were severai reasqns

why the Finnish proletarian
community could not accept

this verdict as just. For one
thing, people found it hard to
believe that two experienced
woodsmen could drown in a
shallow creek, near the shore, a

short distance from each other. .

Local residents testified at the
‘inquest that the creek at no time
was deeper than 3-4 feet. In
addition there were witnesses
who said that supplies had been
hauled over this area both a few
days. before and after the supp-
osed drowning. People also
drew their own conclusions
from the fact that Rosvall’s
body was found with a fractured
skull, broken arms and torn
clothes. They argued that this
‘indicated that a violent struggle
had taken place.There was a-
nother fact that didn’t square
with the accidental ‘drowining
hypothesis. Rosvall’s gun was
found frozen in the ice, some
distance from the body. If death
came suddenly and accidental-
ly, why would he have parted
from his gun, the Finns asked.
Despite the official verdict, this
community had its own view of
what had happened: Rosvall
and Voutilainen had been
overwhelmed by a bunch of
hired hands from the Maki
camp and beaten to death.
Afterwards their bodies were
pushed into the creek.

.Gontinued from above..

Keeping a Memory |

Rosvall and Voutilainen
were dead, but by no means
were they forgotten by the Fin-
nish working class community.
As was to be expected, the
siriuediate response was local.

After all, it was the Port Arthur.

Finns who felt the loss most
intensely, knowing these two
men well. However, it was the
national institutions, _ the

i LWIUC and the F innish Orga- .
_ nization, that developed a tradi-

"tion of commemorating Rosvall

and Voutila linen as class heroes.

Away

sidewalk)

lea ee Livagesd bag ai

ned martyrs. In the Lakehead
they continued to live on in a
different fashion, through sto-

“ries and reminiscences passed on

by people who: had witnessed
the tragic events or knew people
who had. _ |

Let us first look at the local

. response:

After the disappointment of
the coroner’s inquests, the Fin-

nish ‘left? community in Port ~ : |
' Bridging, for a moment, the gulf

Arthur rallied to give the dead
unionists a hero’s. farewell. On
April 28, 1930 there was a joint
funeral celebration for Rosvall
and Voutilainen, which drew
such a response from the ge-
neral public, that it is still
remembered as the largest fune-
ral in the city. An estimated
5,000 people of different na-
tionalities marched in the pro-
cession which wound its way
through city streets, from the
funeral parlour on Arthur Street

-up the hill to the Riverdale

cemetary a mile and a half
away. The procession was
headed by a Finnish Organi-
zation brassband, augmented
by -players from the Finnish
IWW.

This is how the event was
described in the Finnish union
paper, METSATYOLAINEN
(Nr3, 1930): ‘The March got
off with a simple, yet dramatic
start. Silently the six pall-
bearers, each one of them one,
two or three inches over six feet,

grabbed hold of the coffin

and began to march. The band
ahead of them began to play
‘The International’. Everybo-
dy, even the burghers (on the
uncovered _ their
heads, willingly or unwillingly,
After the coffin marched 18
stern looking men, waiting for
their turn to provide a last
service for their comrades who
had died for a common cause.

Two sturdy woodsmen who’

walked ahead of the procession,

carrying between them a broad
red sash with the union cards of
Voutilainen and Rosvall attach-

‘ed to it, also made a strong

impression’.

The procession kept the
police busy by tying up traffic
for several hours. It was a sunny
April day and a lot of onlookers
had gathered to watch the
funeral march and listen to the
revolutionary funeral dirges.
Then nature decided to add its
own flourish to this massive
demonstration of grief and
solidarity. While the cortage
was moving slowly through the
city streets, an eclipse of the sun
took place. A dark gloom fell
over the city.Although the
eclipse, no doubt, had been
predicted, it caught many of the
participant. and onlookers by
suprise. One of the pallbearers,
Reino Keto, recalls ina taped.
interview that they were half-
way to the cemetary when the

sky suddenly turned almost

completely ‘dark: ‘We. didn’t
know anything about the ec-

_lipse. I thought surely. the world
was. coming. to an.end. -I was
scared stiff, but.I kept marching

mer ate te a Ban Np ace

religion

a eee a ePRed eae oe vane tba ast

-Beliets Miracles, when they

on. When we. reached the
cemetary the sun was shining
again’.

Alfred Ciawearnakd: the na-
tional secretary of the LWIUC,
gave the funeral speech. Among
the Finns Hautamaki was
renown for his oratory, and it
was Said afterwards that no eyes

remained dry by the time he

finished speaking. He even
managed to work in the eclipse.

between the materialist and the
religious Finns, he declared that
‘God himself has shown us
today that he, too, is ashamed of
this despicable crime, ashamed
that the murderers remain free’.
Later on that same evening the
Finnish ‘left’ community gat-
hered at the FO hall on 316 Bay
Street for a more elaborate
funeral service.

There was yet another com-
munal ceremony for Rosvall
and Voutilainen in Port Arthur.
A few months after the funeral
the Shabaqua strike was givena
more permanent form in a play
written by Alfred Hautamaki,
who, like many Finnish prole-
tarian leaders, combined the
role of a union activist and
POLITICO with that of a
journalist, playright’ and poet.

Unfortunately, no copies of the

play have been found. There

are, however, references to it in|

the taped interview with Reino
Keto mentioned earlier. Keto,
one of the pallbearers at the
funeral, played Rosvall in it. It
was an one-act play, Keto
recalls. It sounds from his des-
cription that it stressed the
confrontation between the stri-
king and strike-breaking Finns.
It is very likely that it enacted
the assumed murder of the two
unionists by a group of com-
pany men in the woods of Onion
Lake, thus giving visual images
to the scenes that already exist-
ed vividly in many people’s
imagination. Keto is able to
recall -‘diabolically looking
scabs sneaking through the
forest’ and he also remembers
feeling suffocated in the grave
during the funeral scene with
the FO choir singing on top of
him. The play was performed in
the FO hall at 316 Bay Street.
in his interview Keto also
makes an interesting reference
to audience reaction. He said
that he created quite a stirr
when he mingled with the au-

dience after the performance,

still made to look like Rosvall.
People came over, wanting to
touch him. For some the play
had temporarily ~blurred the
distinction between reality and
make-believe. They went on to
exclaim: ‘Vilho, so you are
alive, after all! We knew they
would never get you’, or words
to that effect. Like the eclipse
during the furieral,~the real’
looking Rosvall added-a magic
dimension to the event. While

‘this section of the community

had resolutely.turned-its back to
and.» embraced -the
doctrine of class struggle. not

7 everybody ‘had entirely vanish: -

va | Ree”

shoved

seemed to happening right in

front of view, could at least
temporarily shake your mate-

rialist worldview.
Rosvall and Voutilainen oe

Aa neni tinnhnn o>

came ‘folkloric figures in the

Lakehead almost from the
momenet they disappeared. No
Finn, it seems, believed that
they could have perished acci-
dentally. However, before the
bodies were found, there was a
‘conservative’ as well as a ‘left’
theory about what had happen-
ed to them. The conservative
Finns argued that the whole
disappearance was.a hoax. In

their view it was nothing but a

publicity stunt to keep a sagging
strike going. The union had sent
Rosvall and Voutilainen secret-
ly out of the country, they hint-
ed, either to the United States or
to the Soviet Union.

Another version of this story
‘can be found on tape in the
Thunder Bay Labour History
Interview Project, which is a
major source for local stories
about the two unionists. A-
ccording to one interviewee,
Ray Koski, who had been a
barber in Port Arthur during the
strike, there was a rumour Cir-
culating at the time that some-
body had received a letter from
Rosvall in Toronto. People
simply could not believe that
they were lost. says Koski.
Many felt that they probably
just chickened out because of
the danger involved.

After the bodies were found,
it was obviously impossible to

maintain that the disappearance :

was a hoax. Most of the stories
that have been preserved, there-
fore, support the ‘left’ interp-
retation that they were murder-
ed. Koski in the above interview
also recalls that posters went
up, after Rosvall and Voutilai-
nen had been missing for

awhile, with pictures of a Finn.

who was accused of murdering
them. He says that the police
ordered the posters to come
down. Koski mentions later on
that he had gone to the funeral
parlour to see the bodies after
they had been recovered. ‘It
made me sick’, he said. “There
was a hole in the forehead of
Voutilainen, covered up’.
There is a powerful re-
miniscence in the same inter-
view project by Ivar Seppala.
He also mentions a bullet
wound, in this case in the head
of Rosvall. Seppala says that he
met a man in Finland who told
him that he had been part of a
gang of seven men hired by
Maki to keep union organizers
away from his camp. Seppala
refers to this man by name and
says that he admitted being part

of the killing. The man had

described how..the seven of
them were hiding, waiting for
Rosvall and Voutilainen, after
makin a hole in the ice.. They
suprised and‘ overwhelmed. the
two unionists. Voutilainen was
knocked unconscious with .a
piece of wood and was then
into the Icy creek,
Rosvall, on the other hand, put
on_such a fight th at he had to be
shot. Seppala says that he has
seen the hole in the’ head of
Rosvall. He examined it with

- shot.

| through i it,

‘ Helmer Borg, a Swede, also

contributed a reminiscence a~
bout the. incident. to the same
project. Borg says that he talked

to a sympathetic policeman at
the time who had said that both
the men had bullet eas in their
heads. ,

Edwin Suksi, who n now uv lives-
in Sudbury, was a former or
ganizer for the LWIUC in the.
Port Arthur area. By the time of
the 1929 strike he had changed
occupation and was working as
a barber. He remained close to
the union, however, and no
doubt some of his customers
were Strikers. Suksi has saidina-
taped interview that he believes
the organizers were murdered,
but he doubted that they were
He stressed that it was
significant that two men who
had been working for Maki
during the strike afterwards re-
turned to Finland.

A more recent contribution
to stories about the death of the

two organizers comes from

Mrs. Taimi Davis, formerly
from the Lakehead, who now
lives in Toronto. She was quot-
ed in an article in the Thunder
Bay CHRONICLE -JOUR-
NAL earlier this year which

‘dealt with the mystery of the

disappearing unionists. Mrs. Da-
vis is the sister of the man who-
found Rosvall’s body. Her Ya-
mily was part of the ‘left’ com-
munity. Incensed by the deaths,
her father at one point began to
erect a stone memorial at the
site where the bodies were
found. ‘Oh, yes, ‘they were
murdered alright’, she- was
quoted saying. ‘There were
marks on their bodies, in fact I
think there were bullet holes’.
Mrs. Davis, who had received
her infromation from people
who were on the scene, went on
to say that one of the men
definitely had a hole inhis head.
A bushworker examining the
body put a match into the hole
to prove it was there and to see
how deeply it went.

These stories and many
others, some elaborating, some

contradicting each other, are

still alive in Thunder Bay today.
Perhaps because it is an in-
dustrial town, with a history of
union struggles, the story has a
special resonence there. In any
case it is firmly embedded in the
local industrial folklore. It still
generates newspaper articles
and at the present time a local
theatre group is considering
doing a play about it.

It is interesting to note that
locally the story of Rosvall and
Voutilainen does not come with
much interpreting or editoriali-
zing. The political meaning is
embedded in it rather than made
explicit. It is the union and the
Finnish Organisation, which is
giving it'a more political signi-
ficance. In the write-ups in the
union publication'and inthe FO:
national newspaper VAPAUS

they are seen’ as heroes and

martyrs to their class and to the
union movement.
Here are somé example - of
this kind of interpretation: :
The Finnish- language us on :

- Cont: page’ -

s Saget Sag & yea :