In Spokane, the ‘Last Rush Town,’ labor and love meet

Reading Jess Walter’s new novel, “The Cold Millions,” might be the most fun I’ve ever had with a history lesson.

Set in wild Washington state a century ago, it fairly bursts with energy, adventure, humor, pathos and irresistible characters. Packed into its bravura storytelling is a close-up look at some of the most dangerous days of the labor movement in the United States and at some of the real people who drove it.

“The Cold Millions” is the seventh novel from Walter. His 2006 novel, “The Zero,” was a finalist for the National Book Award; his 2012 book, “Beautiful Ruins,” a New York Times No. 1 bestseller. He’s also a journalist whosework has appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Like several of his other books, “The Cold Millions” is historical fiction, mixing real people and events with imagined ones.

It’s also a tribute to Walter’s hometown, Spokane, set there in 1909 amid the city’s exuberant and sometimes violent growth around the start of the 20th century. “Itwas a boom town that just kept booming,” Walter writes, “doubling in size every six years, going froma few hundred to a hundred-some thousand in just thirty years. ... Spokane felt like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else— the Last Rush Town, Gig called it.”

Gig would be Gregory Do lan, one of the countless men and women who crisscrossed the country in search of work. Called floaters and hoboes and many less pleasant names, many of the mare immigrants or, like Gig, children of immigrants, at a time when anti-immigrant bigotry is in ugly bloom.

This army of workers is always on the hunt for jobs on farms in harvest season, in mines and bars and brothels in rush towns where gold or silver is discovered, onwork gangs building roads and rail tracks, in lumber camps and anyplace elsewhere the labor is hard, the paychecks small and the situation temporary.

At 23, Gig enjoys this life. He decamped from the bitter family home in Montana as a teenager and loves his freedom. He has lately, though, acquired a responsibility: his only surviving family member, baby brother Ryan.

“Rye the last, all of eight years old when his dad dropped dead on the steps of a tavern, the very definition of Irish hell: dying walking into a bar.”

Rye is 16now. He adores his handsome, charming brother and is thrilled to be on the road with him. He’s also intrigued by his brother’s growing involvement in the labor movement, which in Spokane is focusing on “job sharks,” who charge workers like the Dolans a dollar (a day’s wage then) to place them in jobs, then get them fired aweek or two later so they can bring in newhires and score another buck.

The city’s police force meets theworkers’ speeches and marches with swift brutality. Walter writes a heart-stopping set piece about one of the police riots that ends with both Dolan brothers jailed in appalling conditions. Rye is freed much sooner than Gig, partly because of his age and partly because of an enigmatic entanglement with L em Brand, one of Spokane’s flamboyant millionaires.

“Brand’s wealth,” Walter writes, “came from silver-mining the Coeur d’Alenes and the rather broad range of vices his workers spent their money on— cathouses, saloons, hotels, opium dens, and theaters in Spokane’s tenderloin, positions he held behind a series of paper partners. ‘Lem likes to say that every dollar that goes out in payroll,’ Ursula said, ‘comes back through bed, brothel and booze.’ ”

Ursula, aka Ursula the Great, is the connection between Brand and the Dolans. She performs a popular and astounding strip-tease act inside a cage with a live cougar, and both Gig and Brand are smitten with her.

Ursula is not what she seems to be, and neither are several of the other characters Rye falls in with in his quest to get Gig out of jail. Some of those are fictional, but a number of them are real people Walter weaves into his story.

Rye’s complicated journey from boy toman is the main line through “The Cold Millions,” but this big-hearted book is populated by an array of memorable characters who bring a slice of American history to vibrant life.

“The Cold Millions”

By Jess Walter; Harper, 352 Pages, $28.99