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May Hutton of Wallace
by Bill Loftus
Idahoans can credit May Arkwright Hutton, a cook who became a wealthy silver mine owner in Wallace, with helping women win the right to vote in 1896, making our state fourth in the union to do so.
“In Idaho, she was a worker for social justice and a character,” Katherine G. Aiken, UI history professor and associate dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, told a UI Extension tour audience. They sat on the lawn of the Huttons’ former Wallace home one July evening, after touring the home, now owned by local antique dealers.
Raised by her blind Ohio grandfather, May Arkwright accompanied him to public meetings, where she learned about the hard life of coal miners. She and her grandfather also listened to street orators. One, William McKinney, later president of the United States, patted the young May on the head and said, “I hope that one day you might live and vote under equal suffrage.” Her love for politics and the downtrodden never dimmed.
UI historian/author
Katherine Aiken stands just
outside former Hutton home
in Wallace, Idaho, to share
tales of their influence in Idaho.
In 1885 she signed on as a cook and joined a crew of coal miners aboard a train to Idaho in search of riches.
At Silver Valley, she cooked at a boarding house along the railroad tracks in Wardner near Kellogg. A locomotive engineer, Levi W. (Al) Hutton, became a regular customer, then her husband in 1887.
The Huttons bought a share in the Hercules Mine, where May mostly served as the cook while the men worked, although accounts note that she at times worked in the mine alongside them.
Speaking out for underdogs
Large of spirit and body (6-foot tall, 225 pounds), May Hutton worked hard and spoke her mind.
Arguing that women were smart enough to vote, and worked hard, she gave speeches and entertained the rich and famous, including Sen. William Borah and Clarence Darrow, to make her case. In1896 Idaho passed a constitutional amendment allowing women to vote. She also was a voice for miners during disputes with management.
When Al Hutton’s train was commandeered by a mob of miners before the Bunker Hill concentrator was dynamited in 1899, her husband was arrested. Al spent several days imprisoned in the bull-pen guarded by federal troops after martial law.
Tough and dangerous work awaited miners in Wallace, as elsewhere in the late 1800s. Poor pay and lack of benefits (if injured, you're on your own) stirred keen interests in unionizing, an issue that echoes in Idaho still today.
Al’s leading defender was May. She wrote a book, The Coeur d’Alenes: or A Tale of the Modern Inquisition in Idaho, dedicating it “To my husband, who, an innocent man, was arrested and confined in the ‘Bull-Pen’ for days in an effort to coerce him into giving testimony…”
The Huttons’ lives changed Friday, June 13, 1901, when the Hercules yielded evidence of a vein of high-grade silver ore. Their 3/32-share in the mine made them rich.
Aiken first encountered the couple’s history through Spokane’s Hutton Settlement, a still active philanthropic effort to help needy children that honored both their childhoods as orphans.
In their Wallace dining room, where the Huttons entertained President Teddy Roosevelt during a 1903 visit, stood a copy of May’s book. After becoming a millionaire, May sought to retract that bit of history by collecting all copies by any means. “There was a story,” Aiken said, “that when May visited a house and found a copy, she would slip the book into her purse.” However, it can still be found in some Idaho libraries.
After moving to Spokane in 1907, her determination led her to renew her suffrage efforts for Washington women. May’s style offended members of the west-side Washington Suffrage Association, which refused to accept her membership dues.
She continued her campaign, including an unsuccessful run for the Washington State Senate, and in 1910 Washington women won the right to vote. In 1912,
May Hutton became the first woman to attend the Democratic Party’s national convention as a delegate.
She died in 1915 at age 55.
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