Everest was drafted into the army in November 1917 and was a member of the Spruce Production Division in Vancouver, Washington, which supplied timber for building airplanes, railroad cars, and other vital wartime equipment.

During the celebration of Armistice Day in 1919, members of the American Legion stormed the IWW Union Hall, although it is debated who initiated the incident.

He had been invited to join the parade because he had served in the U.S. Army[3] Everest escaped out the rear of the Roderick Hotel, firing at his pursuers and reloading as he ran.

Legionnaire Alva Coleman grabbed a non-functioning revolver from a captured Wobbly or a nearby house and began to chase Everest.

Everest, unable to cross the river, turned and shot Hubbard before he was overpowered, beaten, and dragged to the town's jail.

Later his body was buried in a pauper's graveyard in Centralia and the burial plot, the Wesley Everest Gravesite, was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

The first published account of castration appeared four months later in Ralph Chaplin's sensational publication, The Centralia Conspiracy.

Prints taken in the Jail at Centralia, Wash. room very dark to see any thing on the body in line [of] scars: rope was still around the neck of the man."

[7] John Dos Passos treated the castration as a proven fact in his account of Wesley Everest's life and death included in his U.S.A. Trilogy, which reflects the author's sympathy at the time of writing for the IWW and his outrage at its suppression.