workingclasshistory:

On this day, 18 November 1929, during a strike of lumber workers in Ontario, Finnish-Canadian communist workers Viljo Rosvall (pictured, left) and Janne Voutilainen (right) were last seen alive as they headed out to try to recruit sympathetic workers at a nearby logging camp. The strike of the Lumber Workers Industrial Union of Canada had begun at Shabaqua on 22 October. Rosvall, a union organiser and Voutilainen, a trapper working as his guide headed out to a camp of the Pigeon Timber Company north of Onion Lake to try to grow the strike. They were seen by several Pigeon Timber employees. But they were never seen again by their colleagues. The following spring their bodies were found in the lake. The official cause of death was ruled to be accidental drownings, but loggers and the Finnish community believed they were murdered by company thugs. Their funeral took place on 28 April 1930, and was the biggest ever held in Port Arthur as thousands of people took to the streets and marched to the cemetery. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1857086534476488/?type=3