Bram Hicks

Bram Hicks is a young itinerant worker and member of the Industrial Workers of the World whose friendship helps shape Ben Compton’s passage from strike activism into the wider labor movement. A boilermaker who has also worked as a sailor, Bram brings practical knowledge of travel and work to their partnership; at Everett, he becomes Ben’s companion through a violent assault on labor organizers and its immediate aftermath.

Identity and Introduction

Bram first appears in jail, where he and Ben Compton are serving six-month sentences arising from a strike. Tall and young, with light hair and blue eyes, he comes from Frisco and is a boilermaker by trade. He had shipped as a sailor for a change and arrived in Perth Amboy without money, then worked a mill repair shift before joining the strike. During the breakup of a picket line, he pushed a police officer and was convicted of assault and battery.

The prison yard gives Bram and Ben a chance to meet once a day. For Ben, whose time inside is otherwise difficult to endure, these meetings become an important source of companionship. Bram also offers a political direction: he urges Ben to get an Industrial Workers of the World membership card and travel west if he wants to understand the labor movement. His advice turns their prison acquaintance into a shared journey.

Work and the Road West

Released on the same day, Bram and Ben leave together. The strike has ended, the mills are running, and the streets that had held picket lines and speeches look ordinary again. Against that quiet return to routine, Bram’s proposal takes the two men away from the settled world of the strike and into itinerant labor.

Bram knows how to get across the country without much money. He and Ben walk, ride on freight cars, and catch lifts on delivery wagons and trucks until they reach Buffalo. There, Bram finds an acquaintance in a flophouse who secures them deckhand work on a whaleback bound light for Duluth. From Duluth, they join a crew traveling to Saskatchewan for the wheat harvest. The work is initially so demanding that Bram worries Ben may not last, but Ben adjusts to the long days and begins to take on the speech and habits of a harvest worker.

After the harvest, they work in a fruit cannery on the Columbia River. The job is hot and unpleasant, and Bram loses the forefinger of his right hand while repairing slicing and peeling machinery. The company doctor says he is not entitled to compensation, citing both Bram’s notice that he was leaving and his Canadian nationality. A lawyer visits Bram while he is recovering and tries to persuade him to sue; Bram sends him away. Ben objects to that refusal, arguing that workers should have lawyers of their own. The disagreement marks a difference in their immediate responses to injustice, even as they remain companions in the labor movement.

Everett and Solidarity Under Attack

After Bram’s hand has partly healed, he and Ben travel by boat from Vancouver to Seattle. The local Industrial Workers of the World headquarters is crowded with young workers arriving from across the United States and Canada. Bram and Ben join a group sailing to Everett to attempt a public meeting at the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues, where armed deputies are waiting. Before they disembark, Bram edges close to Ben and advises them to stay together because trouble seems likely.

The workers are arrested as they step off the boat and taken away under guard. Deputies assault them and threaten them as the group is moved from the waterfront to the countryside. When the organizers are forced to run a gauntlet of officers, Ben is separated from his glasses and badly hurt. Bram’s presence remains a point of orientation in the confusion: after Ben has stumbled beyond the railroad crossing, he hears Bram announce that they have crossed the county line. Bram then urges the scattered workers not to forget what happened that night. His words give the immediate ordeal a collective purpose, making it an experience to be remembered together rather than endured only as individual punishment.

At an interurban trolley station, the injured workers collect money to buy tickets to Seattle for those most badly hurt. Ben is too dazed to manage his ticket easily. Bram and the others set out to walk the thirty miles back to the city. The contrast between the two responses captures their circumstances at that moment: Ben needs transport and medical care, while Bram, still with the group, continues on foot with the remaining workers.

Narrative Role and Limits of the Record

Bram’s role is both practical and connective. He helps Ben move between jobs, teaches him how to travel cheaply, and introduces him to a broader labor world that extends from mills and harvest fields to the organizing network in Seattle. His experience also gives the friendship a material basis: they work together, share the road, and face danger as fellow members of a workers’ movement. At Everett, Bram’s insistence on staying together and remembering the attack turns companionship into solidarity.

The account last places Bram among the workers walking toward Seattle after the trolley station collection. It does not establish what happens to him afterward. His importance in the episodes shown lies less in a completed personal arc than in the sustained companionship and guidance he provides to Ben, especially as the two men move from prison and precarious work into a direct confrontation with organized anti-labor violence.