by Bill Albert
Martial Law Declared n Colorado!
Habeus Corpus Suspended In Colorado!
Free Press Throttled In Colorado!
Bull-Pens For Union Men In Colorado!
Free Speech Denied In Colorado!
Soldiers Defy The Courts In Colorado!
Wholesale Arrests Without Warrants In Colorado!
Union Men Exiled From Homes And Families In Colorado!
Constitutional Right To Bear Arms Questioned In Colorado!
Corporations Corrupt And Control Administration In Colorado!
Right Of Fair, Impartial And Speedy Trial Abolished In Colorado!
Citizens’ Alliance Resorts To Mob Law And Violence In Colorado!
Militia Hired By Corporations To Break Strikes In Colorado!
By the time it was fancied up, printed in red, white, and blue and out on the street, more had been added underneath the flag, including a photograph of a miner, a Finlander named Henry Maki, chained to a telephone pole in Telluride, and an invitation to help break his chains and the chains of the working class in Colorado.
“What are you doing in there?” Mrs. Haywood asked from the drawing room.
“Making more trouble for Peabody,” Bill answered with a short laugh.
In fact, as forceful and dramatic a piece of poster work as it was, what Bill was really making that night was more trouble for himself, for the Federation, and, especially, and most surprisingly, for the reluctant Charles Moyer. I too got myself caught up in that particular rock fall.
Selling Cremo Cigars or Dr. Williams Pink Pills for Pale People would have been a lot safer for everyone concerned.
23
For me the chaos set loose by Bill’s poster started and ended with visits to the Columbia Hotel. The first time was because the printer was impatient. I was sent to search Bill out and get his approval of the final proofs. Someone in the office suggested I try over at the Columbia on Seventeenth and Market.
It was late afternoon, not the usual time to look for Bill on the Row. As I came through the front door of the hotel I saw him across the lobby talking to a woman. He was holding her ungloved hand and speaking with a relaxed familiarity. I hung back, not wanting to embarrass him. After a few minutes, the woman turned to leave. She wore a hat with a short lace veil at the front and swept by me so quickly that I couldn’t be positive, but she looked too much like Rebecca Smith not to be Rebecca Smith.
I was so surprised, and the possible explanations rushed at me so fast, that I could only stand there looking stupid until Bill spotted me and came over.
“You sickly, Herbert? You looking for . . . Say, what’s that you’ve got there. For me? Close that mouth, son, you’ll be catching flies next.”
It was about then that Harry Orchard returned to Denver. He strolled into the office one day, another miner looking for a grubstake. He gave me a cautious howdy like you might do to a stranger.
As it happened, he came at the right moment, for Moyer was on the point of leaving for Telluride and needed a bodyguard.
“You carry a shooting iron?” Bill asked Harry.
Harry opened his coat. With some difficulty he dragged a long-barreled revolver out of his waistband.
“That’s not much good,” Bill chuckled. “Going to have to drop your pants clean off if you need to use that in any kind of a hurry.”
Harry tried to smile. He didn’t have a lot of luck with the smile or with the bodyguarding. Two days out Moyer was arrested in Ouray without a struggle and taken over to Telluride in chains. The charge was desecration of the flag of the United States of America. As president of the Federation his signature was alongside Bill’s on the poster. The brilliant swipe at Peabody had backfired.
I saw Harry after that from time to time. He became close with George Pettibone and hung around the headquarters. I figured he was still working for the detectives but I was too scared to say anything to Bill.
About three weeks later they brought Moyer back to Denver.
“Meet me at Union Station tomorrow morning, Herbert,” Bill told me. “Want to put on a real good show for Charlie. Let the newspapers and the boys know we’re still out there fighting the good fight. By the way, will you tell Mrs. Haywood I’ve got a couple of important meetings and won’t be getting home tonight?
“Probably stay over at the Baths, you know how it is. Close to the station, you know and . . .”
I returned his manly smile.
There were a couple of dozen soldiers waiting on the station platform. Bill asked the office secretaries and Mr. O’Neill, the editor of the Miners’ Magazine, to remove the small flag posters which they had pinned to their coats. He said there was no call to inflame things with the soldiers any more than they already were. He was being cautious and responsible as befit the leader of a solid union like the Western Federation of Miners.
The train approached, clouds of black smoke pumping from its stack and the brakes squealing sparks against the rails. A bugler jumped off the front coach before it came to a stop and blew a shrill call. Soldiers began dropping from the rear cars and formed themselves into two columns. Only then was Moyer led off the train. Beside him were Captain Bulkeley Wells and Adjutant General Sherman Bell. Next to Governor Peabody, these were the two men in Colorado who the Federation most hated. Surprisingly, Moyer seemed to be smiling and chatting to them as if they were all going on a Sunday outing.
Bill left the rest of us and charged off down the platform with his long strides, pushed in among the soldiers and grabbed Moyer’s hand. A few seconds later Bill’s head and broad shoulders disappeared into a confusion of arms, fists, and rifles butts. He was thrown down between the cars, soldiers piling on top of him. Other soldiers bunched protectively around Moyer, cocked rifles held at the ready. The shouts and curses of the fighting men were lost for a second or two behind the open blast of a steam whistle.
When they dragged him up, Bill was covered in blood, breathing hard, swinging wildly, and swearing like I’d never heard swearing before. All the raw, red meat of language he had ever heard and scrupulously had never used came pouring out in a bellow of white-hot rage. As the fight continued the officers rushed at the crowd on the platform with raised revolvers, shouting to get back. The secretaries screamed and ran; O’Neill pulled me roughly out of the way of a leveled revolver.
Arms pinned behind him, they shoved Bill, still yelling and twisting, next to Moyer and between the ranks of troopers. Moyer was silent. He didn’t even look at Bill.
“That’s just where we want you, Mr. William D. Haywood,” General Bell barked over the noise of the trains and the shouting men. “Take them both to the Oxford. Quick now! March out, you men!”
On hearing this, O’Neill ordered me to run over to the Oxford Hotel like I was on fire and see what they did to Bill and Moyer. He didn’t need to explain why.
The Oxford Hotel is on Wazee, only a block from the depot. I arrived there a few minutes before the soldiers.
When they hustled them into the hotel Bill was still vigorously denouncing the soldiers. Men and women, who a moment before had been enjoying the sedate decorum of the spacious, palm-potted lobby, looked up in alarm at the spectacle of the boisterous, armed invasion. Like stirred-up city pigeons, the hotel guests boiled away in a cackle of fright from the phalanx of troops. However, before they could fly clear of the room, Bill threw up his arms and broke free from the two soldiers holding him. He started for the door, knocking down two more with heavy punches before four or five of them caught up with him, shoved him into a corner, and began viciously beating him with their fists and rifles butts.
By the time one of the officers had intervened to extricate him from his attackers, Bill was bleeding heavily from the head and mouth and covered all over in a thick syrup of gore. With a loud cocking of weapons, soldiers had secured all the exits. Three women who had witnessed th
e fight cowered by the main desk, weeping into their handkerchiefs.
They threw Bill down on a chair by the table where Moyer was already sitting. Finally subdued, he held his head in his hands while Moyer talked severely, occasionally waving an admonishing finger. I was too far away to hear what he was saying but there was no doubt Bill was being told off and that seemed mighty damned hard, not to say unfair and unfraternal, after what he’d just been put through, all for trying to shake Charles Moyer’s ungrateful hand.
In the end, the Governor was forced to order Bill’s release into the custody of Ham Armstrong, the local sheriff, and another of Bill’s friends. Armstrong rescued Bill from the Oxford and took him down to the county jail.
When I returned home and told Mrs. Haywood what had happened she didn’t seem much concerned.
“At least I’ll know exactly where he is every night,” is all she said.
The next time I saw Bill was in his cell. It wasn’t actually a cell, more like a big storeroom that the sheriff had converted into an office with a desk, chairs, and a telephone. His secretaries were allowed in to work and for the next few weeks he ran the Federation from the county jail.
“Don’t look so all-fired worried, Herbert. I’ve got all the comforts here. Almost all of them anyway. Safest place for me right about now, safer than with Bulkeley Wells over in Telluride.”
Bill seemed too much at ease for someone who was stuck in jail and had been so badly beaten. Both eyes were swollen blue-black, blood was caked on the spiky stitches in his right ear and on those the doctor had sewn into his forehead.
“You ladies excuse us for a moment? Thank you very much.”
After they left the room, Bill beckoned me over.
“Got an important job for you, Herbert. You’re my chief messenger, right? Well, there are certain messages that need delivering, confidential messages, confidential delivering. I want you to take this one here,” he handed me an envelope, “to Peter Calderwood. He runs the cooperative store in Anaconda but you’re most likely to find him at the Union Hall in Victor. You ask Barney over at the office for twenty-five dollars for your expenses. No one else but Peter Calderwood, got that? Not his wife, not his boy, or someone at the local saying ‘don’t worry I’ll give it to him.’ And make sure he’s alone when he opens it. I’d also like you to stay down there for a while, until he’s got something for you to bring back for me. You see, it’s like this, Herbert, I need someone I can trust one hundred percent. Can’t tell you more than that. Wouldn’t be safe for you to know. No, nothing illegal, if that’s what you’re thinking. Confidential is all. Extremely confidential.”
Why did everyone trust me so damn much? The curse of a speechlessly seductive listener who can’t help himself? I had been ready to sell him out a few months before. I am about to sell him out right now.
“What do you say, Herbert?
“Good, lad. I’d knew you’d come through for me. And one more message I want you to deliver. Personal one this time, but like the other one confidential. Here, take this over to the Columbia Hotel, will you.”
He handed me another envelope. It was addressed to “Miss R. Smith.”
24
There was a dead horse lying in the street just outside the railroad station in Victor. But for the flies, the eye sockets were empty and its big yellow teeth were set in a grin. The body must have been there some time. It had started to bloat, the expanding stomach forcing the two top legs to rise stiffly into the air. Most of the hair had been stripped from its mane and tail, probably by kids to weave into rings. As everyone knows, horsehair rings are especially lucky.
Dead horses abandoned like that in the gutter are a common sight. I must have seen dozens of them without bothering to notice. I noticed this one though. I knew for sure it was a bad omen, telling me that I should not have returned to Cripple Creek.
It seemed a lot more peacefully normal in May of 1904 than when I left there the previous October. Many mines were back working, with scabs of course, and as far as I could see the militia had been withdrawn. If the activity on the Row is a reasonable barometer then the district was definitely on the up. The saloons in Myers Avenue were full and noisy and all the cribs were occupied, the girls as rude as spit on a church ceiling. I spotted a lot of my former customers. By the looks of things they were doing a roaring good trade. It was hard to believe there was still a strike going on. But there was, and that’s why I’d come back.
I found Peter Calderwood at the Union Hall in the center of Victor. He wasn’t very welcoming.
“What the hell do you want?” he growled at me.
He was playing stud poker with five other men at the back of the building. I guessed he was losing.
He read the note I passed to him.
“Yeah, OK, OK,” he said. “Can’t it wait until I’m finished?”
By the way he was fingering the ends of his mustache, I put Calderwood down as a poor card player. I was right. He bet two pair into what he should have read straight off as a full house.
“Shit!” he fumed, throwing his cards down on the table. “How’d someone so uncommonly ugly as you get so uncommonly lucky?”
The winner laughed softly and gathered in the pot, maybe a whole dollar and a half.
We walked outside. Calderwood carried a stiff left leg. He had to swing it in a wide circle at each step.
“What you looking at?” he snapped.
Outside in the street I gave him the envelope. He read the letter and let out a sharp grunt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“I’ll be damned! You got this straight from Big Bill himself? Damn! OK, boy. You come back tomorrow and I’ll have something for you.”
For the next month I traveled between Denver and the district carrying those confidential messages.
Very slowly the taciturn Calderwood got so he’d talk to me some. He was a bald-domed Scot, about forty years old, and had lived in the district since the 1890s. His brother had been the first president of the Altaian local and a charter member of the Federation. Five years before a runaway ore cart had sliced off his leg above the knee.
“I was lucky. Took it off clean. Never felt it. Lucky for me one of the boys was working some molten lead nearby. Put a red-hot iron to it right there. Doctor says it saved me from bleeding to death. Lucky, that says me all over.”
My waiting time in Cripple Creek I spent in the saloons working at my old trade. I should have spent that time tucked up somewhere out of sight because it was in a saloon that Harry found me, sitting there trapped behind my shingle.
“Hello, boy! Good to see ya again. How ya been? I thought ya was settled down up in Denver. Why’d ya come back to the district? Back to the letter writin I see. No, course not, haven’t seen those two dodgers since the trial. Didn’t ya know? Got me out from under, that train business did. You too, if I don’t miss my guess. Never did catch up with ya, did they? No? So, there we are. Both of us allowed the room to be good union men. Ain’t that right, Herbert?”
He was better dressed than I remember. A fine quality derby hat, a gold chain low down across his rounded belly, soft leather boots.
“Mrs. Orchard would be mighty pleased to see ya, Herbert, mighty pleased.”
I wasn’t about to let that happen again. I made my apologies. The next day, Calderwood’s message safe in my jacket, I caught the train back to Denver.
“Wasn’t Orchard up in Denver about then too?” McParland asks, checking my pages against his own notes. “Let’s see here. That’s right, at the union convention. You see him there?”
Yes, of course I did, at the convention that’s right. Probably mixed things up. I remember now, it was at the convention I saw Orchard. At the Odd Fellows’ Hall, I think.
“And he was there with Haywood and Pettibone and Davis?”
Right, Haywood, Pettibone, and Davis.
&n
bsp; McParland glances over at Siringo.
“Doing real well you are,” the old man says. “Did you hear Haywood tell Orchard how he wanted something pulled off in Cripple Creek? Something real special to bring those feuding delegates together?”
So, here I am at long last, at that mighty fork in the road. Nothing I’ve told them up to now has actually delivered the fatal connection between Bill and Orchard, the connection the old Cobra needs to link the bombs at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan, the Vindicator, the Independence Depot, and Steunenberg’s front gate, the connection to make his story noose-tight and trapdoor-sprung.
I’m sorry, Bill, but there’s nothing more I can do. It’s down to you or me, and you’re a whole lot tougher at this kind of thing than I am. I’m not a union man, not a Socialist, not even a miner. Not brave, not courageous, not heroic. Just a reluctant listener who got caught up in something he never wanted, that’s all. Not enough to hang for, is it? Of course not. Loyalty? Important. I know that. One of the most important things there is. But only one of them. And what about my loyalty to me? Anyway, you’ll know how to handle McParland and Siringo and the rest. Sorry as hell. Bill.
Pull something off. Sure, that’s exactly what he said to Orchard. I heard him say it. Pull something off in Cripple Creek. Something big, he said.
I should be feeling worse than I do running off down this road, telling McParland his story. I know I should. Funny thing is, looking inside, down deeper than what I should feel, I don’t feel bad at all. Relieved is more the word for it. Maybe I’ll just have to wait until later for feeling guilty, when I’m on the outside and the guilt won’t cost me more than the thinking on it.
When I did see Harry shortly after, it wasn’t with Bill Haywood or George Pettibone, but with Steve Adams and C. D. Scott. I’m dead certain it was Scott because at the time I was on the Electric coming over from Cripple Creek to Victor and although they were standing in front of a saloon not twenty yards away, as we came abreast of them Scott turned his face square onto the tram. That was a couple of days before the explosion at the depot. I can’t say if there was any connection. Besides, McParland already has the connection he wants. That’s the only important connection for me.