"The mining companies were under pressure from railroad rates and smelter costs," said Katherine Aiken, a history professor at the University of Idaho. "The one area they felt they could cut costs and have some control was wages."

In her two-room shack along a mud road in Worden, Idaho, Hutton served up the tenets of unionism along with her coffee and pies. Even after she married railroad engineer Levi Hutton in 1887, the friendly, opinionated woman continued to listen and encourage the men around her to band together.

She was quoted as saying: " (He) who does not possess that badge of decent living, a union card, is fit only to be a slave of corporate greed."

A few years into their marriage, the Huttons found themselves in the midst of one of the biggest union actions to explode in the region.

"The 1890s was kind of a famous time around the Coeur d'Alenes," said Mercier of WSU. "It represented this very dramatic, violent conflict between workers and employers over who was to control the means of production."

The miners wanted higher wages and better conditions and "the companies were very desperately trying to keep that from happening," said Mercier.

In April of 1899, the union workers decided to punish their employer by blowing up the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine. They commandeered Levi Hutton's train and forced him to drive them and their explosives to the mine. The trip later became known as the Dynamite Express.

When the Huttons made their fortune in 1901 as partners in the Hercules Mine, May gave up her restaurant business but not her passions. In fact, she became even more politically active, playing hostess to the likes of Clarence Darrow and President Theodore Roosevelt.

In Spokane she was a champion of women's suffrage and a constant meddler in city politics. She was one of the first two women to sit on a jury in Washington as well as the first woman from the state to attend the Democratic National Convention.

Hutton died in 1915 a rich and accomplished citizen.

Even at her death, she was still thinking of "the cause." In her will, she left $5,000 to build the Labor Temple in Spokane.

Her union legacy, however, extends beyond the Inland Northwest.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union enrollment is on the rise, increasing faster last year than it has during the past two decades. Today, unions represent 15 percent of the American workforce and new membership in both the public and private sectors is increasing.

But this victory comes after nearly a half-century of decline. Memberships aren't what they were in the heyday of the 1950s when about 35 percent of the U.S. workforce was union.

"Part of their decline is because the unions focused on certain industries," such as metal, automobiles and mining, Mercier said. "Those industries have died or they are rapidly changing or declining."

That's the case with Kaiser Aluminum, Mercier said. It's also true for the longshore workers on the West Coast. "There are fewer jobs associated with those industries, therefore union numbers have declined," she said.

Cathy Gunderson is both a Kaiser Steelworker and an heir to Hutton's legacy. Not only does she champion the union's issues, Gunderson is involved in politics.

Where Hutton was loud, Gunderson is quiet. She does not answer quickly when asked questions, and every reply is well-considered.

But Gunderson, 48, has more in common with Hutton than observers may think. Tireless when it comes to her beliefs, Gunderson chose to spend the past 23 months of the labor dispute not only supporting Steelworkers, but speaking out on national union issues.

At the start of the labor dispute, the Mead Steelworker spent three months in Washington, D.C., learning to lobby in the marbled halls of the Capitol. Then she came home to Washington to visit other unions and city halls, explaining the Steelworkers' side of the Kaiser labor dispute.

Last winter she marched with 20,000 union members at the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, hoping to deliver a message that U.S. companies are sending too many jobs overseas.

"The past couple of years has been an ongoing war effort," said Gunderson, a Kaiser worker since 1973. "We're basically trying to put some force on our coming back to the (Kaiser) plants -- bringing us to where we are right now."

Gunderson has been active in the union since 1992, when she was one of the first members of a women's committee at the Mead plant. When she's in town, she's always at the union hall.

Today, more union organizers like Gunderson are stumping for new members the old-fashioned way -- by talking to them face-to-face the way Hutton did.

According to John Leinen of the Spokane Labor Council, the Roofers Union is one of the fastest growing labor organizations in Spokane. "They're a small local, but they've doubled their size here," Leinen said.

Joe Checchio, an organizer for the roofers, said membership has climbed to 220 in the past year, thanks in part to his traditional organizing methods.

"We went out and made it a social issue," he said. He visited work sites and explained to the roofers that they could have medical and retirement benefits through the union.

"On the whole in the Spokane area for roofers, the wages are fair," Checchio said. "but they lack the benefits."

The practice more than paid off, he said.

While the trade unions still are strong, the fastest growing organizations today represent people who work in the service industry, said labor expert Mercier. "Unions were kind of slow to start organizing in that sector."

In Spokane, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is one of the largest and fastest growing union bodies. The organization now represents 7,000 workers in Eastern Washington.

Sue Bonnet is the first woman to be elected to represent retail clerks _ 75 percent of whom are female -- in UFCW's Spokane local.

She sees similarities between Hutton's approach and union organizing today