Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  The period leading up to that day had seen McParland at his conspiratorial finest. On February 8, he prepared a detailed document for Gooding and Hawley outlining the step-by-step procedure by which the three WFM leaders would be detained and brought to Idaho. He also noted that if Adams were located, he should be arrested: “If able to break Steve Adams down or get a confession from him, and at the present it looks to me as though I will be able to do so, we will at the same time have the Colorado authorities arrest Vincent St. John at Burke, Idaho, for the murder of Arthur Collins, manager of the Smuggler Union mine at Telluride.”14

  The next day, McParland visited Orchard, and requested that he sign an affidavit confirming his confession, in case it needed to be presented to Governor McDonald. “I look upon you as my father at the present time,” Orchard responded, “as these statements are correct and true I should not have hesitated a minute to sign them and swear to them, which I will do.”15

  That same afternoon, McParland sent a letter to Colorado Supreme Court associate justice Luther Goddard, whom he hoped would support the plan to grab the WFM leaders and would convince other important individuals in Colorado to do so as well. Praising his own work in extravagant terms, McParland wrote:

  In making my investigation I have unearthed the bloodiest crowd of anarchists that ever existed, I think, in the civilized world, not even excepting Russia. . . . the outrages committed by the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania were simply child’s play when compared with the acts of these bloodthirsty assassins; and I think it was through an act of Devine [sic] Providence that I have been enabled to get at the bottom of this conspiracy.16 This matter is of more importance to the State of Colorado, and all the western states where the blight of the Western Federation of Miners has taken root, than all the cases that you might try on the Supreme Court bench of Colorado in a year, or in fact, during your lifetime.17

  The day after writing to Goddard, McParland took the train to Denver, not knowing that at the same time Gooding was sending a highly complimentary letter to William Pinkerton: “Words fail to express my appreciation of the splendid work done for the State of Idaho by [McParland]. . . . In my judgment he is the only man in America that could have accomplished the results attained by him here.”18

  Those results continued in the following days, starting with confirmation of Judge Goddard’s support. McParland had expected Goddard to be agreeable—after all, Orchard had tried to kill him. In fact, the unexploded bomb was still on his property, and as Goddard met with McParland, Colorado adjutant general Bulkeley Wells—trained as a mining engineer and an expert on explosives—removed it. Goddard “assured me that he will arrange with a few prominent citizens to have the Sheriff act just as I want him to,” McParland noted. “The judge is of the opinion that as soon as the extradition papers arrive here that we should at once have these men arrested and taken out on a special train as we do not know what District Judge they would be tried before providing a writ of habeas corpus is obtained and he doesn’t want any writs or legal points tried here.”19

  On February 16, McParland, Hawley, Goddard, Chief Justice Gabbert, and several others finally met with McDonald.20 McParland summarized Orchard’s confession and explained the plans for taking the WFM officers to Idaho. The governor was initially hesitant to sign the extradition papers, as “[t]he custom in Colorado . . . is for the Governor to refer the application to the Attorney General.” However, it “was shown to the Governor that . . . it would be death to the case to refer the papers.” Therefore, McDonald—who must have thought it was an easy way to get rid of some of the state’s leading trouble-makers—said, “I will sign them, and the record will not go into the Secretary of State’s office until some time next week.”21 The road had been cleared for the transfer of the men to Idaho. The only question was: Could McParland pull it off?

  • • •

  Everything was now ready for the arrests, which were planned for early morning on February 18—a Sunday, chosen so that courts would not be open and lawyers and judges would be more difficult to find.22 A special three-car train was provided by the Oregon Short Line Railroad of the Union Pacific system, with priority over all traffic except one express passenger train. The crews and engines would be changed regularly—at least eight times during the trip—in order to have men familiar with the track as well as engines specifically designed for plains, mountains, or other terrain through which the train would speed. Changing engines would also cut down on the loss of steam caused by the fireboxes filling with ash and on the chances of the friction bearings overheating, forcing a stop. Each engine would be fully fueled and watered when taken on, but other stops would need to be made for coal or water, and rather than these occurring in towns or rail yards (where union men might try to stop the train from restarting), they would take place at isolated sidings, such as Separation, Point of Rocks, and Church Buttes. McParland was particularly concerned about going through Cheyenne, where U.S. Marshal Frank A. Hadsell was based, because he could serve a writ of habeas corpus and release the prisoners. Therefore, it was agreed that the train would maintain a speed of thirty miles per hour through Cheyenne, too fast for anyone to board.

  Concerned lest any unexpected troubles arise, a Union Pacific chief dispatcher was placed in one of the cars to make sure the tracks were kept clear. It was also decided that no Pinkerton’s agents were to be aboard, so that the agency’s participation in the later trials could not be compromised. McParland therefore “wanted not only a man of intelligence but a man of nerve to take charge.” The one he selected was Bulkeley Wells, who, he knew “will not obey the order of any sheriff en route, that you can depend on.”

  McParland even oversaw the train’s provisioning. “It will consist of plenty of good chicken and ham sandwiches,” he wrote. “We will not be able to get any coffee and knowing the men that I am detailing on this matter I will place a case of beer in charge of Gen. Wells . . . as I know he will see to it that nobody will get any more of the beer than they are entitled to.”23 The actual purchase of the supplies also allowed him to throw off potential attempts by supporters of the three men to ascertain where they were being taken. They were obtained at a café where the cook was a friend of Haywood’s. The Pinkerton operative picking up the food would say to him that he had to hurry to take the provisions to Burnham, a station to the south. When news of the arrests broke, it was hoped that the cook would go directly to Haywood’s house and tell them he was being taken south.

  The arrests were carried out under the auspices of one of McParland’s longtime friends, Sheriff Alexander Nisbet. Three coaches were sent out, each containing four trusted deputies and a Pinkerton’s operative who could identify the target. The arrests were to be made concurrently and the prisoners brought to the Fourtieth Street yard, from where the special train would leave. The prisoners would be transported in a locked train car under the watch of Wells; James Mills, the deputy warden of the Idaho state penitentiary; and four special deputies, including Wells’s assistant, “Hair Trigger Bob” Meldrum, a former Telluride deputy sheriff turned gunslinger. Even the Union Pacific’s dispatcher and crews of engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen would not be allowed in this carriage.

  On the afternoon of February 17—with the anticipation building—McParland received what he called the best news yet: Adams had been found at his uncle’s ranch in Haines, Oregon. McParland promptly sent operative Chris Thiele (not to be confused with the Thiel Detective Service Company) from Boise to Oregon. “We will arrest Adams at the same time that we arrest the parties here,” he wrote. “I will then see what can be done with St. John, Carpenter and others, but suppose that I must come up to Idaho right away in order to break Adams down. Put Adams through the same course of sprouts that we put Orchard through.”24

  Within hours McParland’s glee shifted back to anxiety, as his plan required sudden revision. At about 8:00 P.M., Moyer left his home to catch a train to Dea
dwood, South Dakota. McParland had operatives watching all three WFM officers, and the one shadowing Moyer instantly phoned the office. Worried that Moyer would continue to Canada, McParland ordered his immediate arrest, and the party of deputy sheriffs that took him into custody found he was carrying more than $520 in cash, a .44 caliber revolver, and a hundred rounds of ammunition.25 However, his arrest attracted the attention of a large crowd of onlookers, which meant that Haywood and Pettibone needed to be picked up before they got wind of what was happening.

  At 9:30, Haywood was arrested at the Granite rooming house, where, only feet away from “a huge revolver that he had laying on the dressing case,” he was found “stark naked and in bed with a woman notwithstanding the fact that he has a wife and child living here in Denver.”26 McParland called the place a “house of assignation,” and undoubtedly would have been even more critical had he known the woman was Haywood’s sister-in-law and longtime lover Winnie Minor.27 Almost three hours later, Pettibone was arrested as he returned home. After being confined in the jail until all three were in custody, they were then moved in the early hours of the morning to the Oxford Hotel, and, at 5:40 A.M., taken to the waiting train, which had been moved from the Fourtieth Street yard to Union Station on the north side of Denver.28

  At exactly 6:00 A.M., the train headed north.29 An hour later Wells told the three prisoners—each of whom was kept handcuffed throughout the journey—that they were under arrest and were being taken to Boise. By 9:00 A.M., the train had passed into Wyoming, and begun chugging west through the southern reaches of the state. While the prisoners played cards, the guards kept a close watch, going on extra alert each time they passed through a town. In the afternoon, between lunch and dinner, Wells broke out the cigars, which, with the compartment hermetically sealed, must have made quite a fug. That night, as the prisoners dozed fitfully in the beds in the back of the carriage, the train reached the Idaho state line, and in the middle of the night it raced at thirty miles per hour through Pocatello, a strong union center. Around 3:00 A.M. they stopped to cool and repair an overheating housing on the undercarriage. Finally, at 9:15 A.M. on February 19, the train rolled into Boise, a little more than twenty-seven hours after leaving Denver. The three prisoners were taken straight to death row—and it was then that all hell broke loose.

  • • •

  Despite the elaborate precautions, the Denver press found out what was happening, and stories were published before the train that would soon be nicknamed “the Pirate Special” even reached Boise.30 The one that most enraged McParland appeared in The Denver Republican, stating that the arrests had come about due to Orchard’s confession.31 McParland furiously blamed the leak on McDonald’s private secretary, who had once worked for the newspaper.32 By the next day the story was in newspapers across the nation; some, such as The Rocky Mountain News, were already calling the act “kidnapping.”33

  Hoping to control the speculation about the case, and particularly Orchard’s role, McParland told Gooding that he gave “a little something to the press in order to assure the public that we will convict all parties now under arrest and others that will be arrested.”34 It was more than “a little,” as he engaged in the highly unusual practice of distributing a press release in which he was acknowledged as author. He blatantly denied that any confession had been made: “There have been statements made by various persons, but I know of none made by Orchard, and as I have been the only man at work on the case I think I would have known of it had there been one.”35

  Nevertheless, he claimed, the authorities had ample evidence of the men’s guilt. And responding to taunts in the socialist press that he was too old for such tasks, he haughtily retorted: “These fellows thought that it was so long ago that I had broken up the Molly Maguires that I must now be in my dotage. They were not afraid of me. But there is a weak spot in every wall, especially such a one as that upon which the Western Federation was founded, and that weak spot I found. It will cost Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and as many more their lives.”36

  In hopes of getting the press totally “onside,” McParland then took the rare step of meeting privately with individual reporters. His message, dutifully relayed in the newspapers, stated: “We have unearthed a conspiracy that will make the blood run cold. This is not a war against organized labor, but it is a war against organized anarchy and dynamite. It is a war against the most damnable and fiendish crimes that ever degraded humanity, and it is a war against as heartless a band of criminals as the authorities of any state or any civilized country have ever had to deal with, and I need not except Russia.”37 In fact, he confided, it was the threat of violence that prompted the manner in which the three men had been brought to Idaho. “They knew that if they were captured they would never be able to clear themselves, and were about to leave the country when arrested,” he blustered, ignoring Haywood’s arrest in his love nest, “They had planned to blow up the train if any attempt were made to remove them to Idaho, and for this reason I insisted on having a special train to take them to Idaho.”38

  However, a problem more dangerous than the involvement of the press was emerging. Within twelve hours of the men’s departure from Denver, Edmund F. Richardson, the WFM’s leading lawyer, was hot on their heels. Born on a farm in Massachusetts in 1862, Richardson had studied law while working in a tailoring business, and at the age of twenty-two had moved to San Francisco, where he was admitted to the bar.39 In 1886, he moved to Del Norte, Colorado, nine years later joining a prominent firm in Denver, through which he became affiliated with the WFM. Despite a big-city elegance and hauteur, he was tall, powerfully built, and considered a man’s man. In the courtroom he was keen, aggressive, shrewd, and one who “scorned oratorical and sensational methods, and sought to win on merit.”40

  Richardson immediately approached the Idaho Supreme Court to ask for a writ of habeas corpus for his three clients. Stressing the constitutional requirement that an individual must have fled from a state to be extradited back, he pointed out that his clients had clearly not been in Idaho at the time of the murder, and that the governors of the two states had conspired to perpetrate a fraud in the claim that “these men were present and actually committed, by their own hand, the crime of murder upon the body of Governor Steunenberg.” Their removal from Colorado had therefore been “under the semblance of the forms of law, preserving the shadow, but destroying the substance.”41 His argument filed, Richardson turned his attention to an event that would have an incalculable impact upon the case—the hiring of his “associate counsel.” The man selected was already on his way to becoming a legend: Clarence Darrow.

  Born in rural Farmdale, Ohio, in 1857,42 Darrow attended Allegheny College for a year before returning home and spending three years studying law on an informal basis. He then went to the University of Michigan Law School for a year before working in a Youngstown, Ohio, law firm. After being admitted to the bar in 1879, he practiced in Ohio for eight years before moving to Chicago. There his campaign work for a successful mayoral candidate helped lead to his appointment as a special assessment attorney for the city. Three months later he was promoted to assistant corporation counsel, and within a year he had become the head of Chicago’s legal department.

  Darrow’s political connections soon enabled him to join the legal department of the Chicago and North Western Railway, but even while seemingly in the pocket of big business, he joined liberal colleagues demanding a pardon for three men imprisoned for their roles in the Haymarket affair and the overturning of the death penalty for Eugene Prendergast, the convicted assassin of former Chicago mayor Carter Harrison. But the big shift in Darrow’s career came in 1894, when he began acting on behalf of labor. His first major case in this new calling was defending union leader Eugene Debs, who had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the mail and contempt of court during the American Railway Union strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company.43

  In 1898 Darrow successfully
defended Thomas Kidd and several other union members against charges of criminal and civil conspiracy for their roles in a contentious woodworkers’ strike in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. His closing argument was immediately regarded as a classic, and was quickly published.44 Then, in 1902 and 1903, he became a legal celebrity for his defense of the United Mine Workers before the government arbitration commission following the miners’ strike in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. Darrow’s eight-hour closing argument was an important factor in the commission eventually awarding union members back pay, significant pay raises, and a maximum nine-hour working day.

  Upon being approached about the Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone case, Darrow traveled to Denver, where, on February 26, after meeting with labor leaders and Richardson, he agreed to join the defense,45 although in exactly what capacity would later be vehemently disputed.

  • • •

  While the defense was recruiting its team, the prosecution made two important moves. On the very night that the train carrying Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone rattled toward Boise, Shoshone County Sheriff Angus Sutherland and several deputies burst into the house in Burke rented by Vincent St. John and took him to the county jail in Wallace. Four days later, Coyote was placed in the state penitentiary in Boise.46

  Meanwhile, on the day the train reached its destination, Pinkerton’s operative Chris Thiele and Baker County Sheriff Harvey Brown visited the Oregon ranch owned by James Warren Lillard, who happened to be on business in Texas. They found, as expected, Lillard’s thirty-nine-year-old nephew Steve Adams—a native Missourian with “a marked face, a wide mouth, a cunning eye with curious drooping eyelids, and a complexion blotched by liquor and exposure”47—who had quietly moved there with his wife and two stepchildren. Held in the Baker County jail overnight, Adams was sent to Boise the next day, having, he claimed, been reassured by Brown that “you go down there and do what those fellows want you to and you will come out all right. I am on the inside and I know what I am talking about.”48