Imperial Valley Press

WOMEN MINERS GET INJUNCTION

LOS ANGELES, July 29 (U.P.)—A mining feud in the Panamint country north of here had ended temporarily today with the issuance of a federal court injunction guaranteeing four women prospectors the right to work their claims.

The women, Mrs. Mary A. Thompson, Mrs. Orpha Hart, Miss Harriet Thompson and Miss Elizabeth Hart, were granted the temporary writ by Federal Judge George Cosgrave here upon their assertion that three owners of adjacent claims, Don Clair, W. D. Clair and V. D. Clair, had interfered with work necessary to comply with mining laws.

The three men vigorously denied the charges, saying the women's claims were worth only $100. They also denied, when asked by opposing counsel, ever hearing the claims were valued at $8,000,000.

They became even more angry when the women told how two of their Indian workmen had been killed in an explosion shortly after the Clairs allegedly warned them not to work the mine. The Clairs offered to produce witnesses that the blast resulted from the workmen's own ignorance of dynamite.

'This is an implication that my clients have done murder,' declared Borie Dick Miner, attorney for the Clairs, 'and up in Inyo county we do not stand for that sort of thing when untrue.'

Judge Cosgrave ruled that if the Clairs never had interfered with the women's claims an injunction would not injure them, but ordered the men put under $3,000 bond to assure the women protection until a permanent injunction was argued.