Ballad of the Grüntal March

"Actually it was from someone else down in Sagbruk that I learned the whole story of Grüntal. It happened bout thity years ago. The lumberjacks had been trying to organize under the ILWU at the time, but the lumber companies pulled of a real slick deal, they paid the state government and got state prisoners, convicts, to work in the exploitations. Well the lumberjacks protested, said it wasn't fair for convict labour to be competing with free labour and that they couldn't organize under those conditions. The governor didn't pay any attention to their petitions so one dark night several hundred lumberjacks walked down to the prison stockade and at gunpoint they demanded the warden free all the prisoners. They burned down the stockade, helped the prisoners escape across state borders to Larvik.

Well for four years they called it the Grüntal rebellion. The governor was forced to send down troops from Saggen and Astor and some of the battles had as many as two or three thousand people in it. Of course the lumber workers won every battle but the last one. They were actually starved into submission by a year long siege of the town. The whole thing looked like they'd lost the struggle against the convict-labour system, but as so often happens in history, the fact they'd put up a struggle got them some publicity. So all round Sagbruk people became aware of this prison labour system and a new governor was elected with a plank in his platform of getting rid of said system, and he did, so all wasn't lost in the end. Sagbruk became the first Hartland state to ban this controversial practice. This was followed a few years later in Tinnset, but sadly remains in place elsewhere."