Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  Whether Frick had anticipated as much is impossible to know. But this much is clear: While Frick slumbered in his upstairs chambers at Clayton, several miles to the north, and while Andrew Carnegie woke early for a day of fishing on Loch Rannoch, one of the more remote spots in all of Scotland, events in Homestead, Pennsylvania, spun steadily out of control.

  By 11:00 p.m. on the night of July 5, approximately three hundred Pinkerton guards arrived by train at the Bellevue station, just west of Pittsburgh, on the southerly banks of the Ohio River, and some ten miles downstream from the Homestead works. Before retiring, Frick had informed High Sheriff McCleary of the imminent arrival of the Pinkerton men; and chief counsel for the firm, Philander C. Knox (who would later become U.S. attorney general and secretary of state under William Howard Taft), had asked McCleary to send one of his deputies to meet the train, suggesting that this emissary be given the power to deputize the Pinkertons.

  McCleary agreed to send along a deputy, one Colonel Joseph H. Gray. Gray would escort the Pinkerton men from the station at Bellevue to the docks where the Iron Mountain and the Monongahela were tethered, and accompany them during the short voyage to the company docks in Homestead. McCleary, however, was an elected official, caught between a rock and a hard place in all this. While Carnegie Steel exercised significant political clout in the area, McCleary was well aware of the absolute contempt held by the greater part of his constituency for the Pinkertons.

  Ultimately, he balked at deputizing the Pinkertons, warning Gray explicitly that he lacked the power to do so. Although McCleary attempted to justify his actions by reasoning that his office should maintain authority in the matters, his refusal seemed to Frick typical of local politicians.

  No matter, Frick must have concluded. Whether deputized or not, the Pinkertons were on the way, and they would handle matters as they should be handled.

  It took a bit of time for the transfer to be made in Bellevue, but by 2:00 a.m. on July 6, the loaded barges had been pulled away by tugs and, with Deputy Gray and Superintendent John Potter on board, were on their way to the mill. According to historian Paul Krause, author of The Battle for Homestead, the Pinkertons, under the command of Captain Frederick Heinde and his chief deputy, Charles Nordrum, did not plan to arrive defenseless. Along with the distinctive slouch hats and white-bloused Pinkerton uniforms, there were 300 pistols and 250 Winchester rifles on board the barges, as well as crates and crates of ammunition, ancillary armaments, and food enough for a lengthy siege.

  Shortly after their departure, one of the tugs was disabled, and both barges had to be hooked up to the remaining craft, the Little Bill. Scarcely were they under way again, passing beneath the Smithfield Street Bridge, than a union sentry posted there peered down through the darkness and spotted the heavily loaded barges making their way upstream.

  A runner was dispatched to the nearby telegraph office, and at 2:30 word was relayed to union offices in Homestead: “Watch the river. Steamer with barges left here.” Soon the great whistle mounted atop union headquarters was shrieking the alarm, and sleepy citizens of Homestead and Munhall stumbled from their beds, wondering if, this time, the call was real.

  The patrol boat Edna, launched from the Homestead docks and churning quickly downstream toward the mouth of the Monongahela, soon spotted the Little Bill with the barges in tow. Marksmen on the Edna’s decks fired warning shots across the bow of the tug and barges, and the pilot of the Edna sounded the prearranged signal on his craft’s sharp whistle. There was no doubt. The long-feared invasion was under way.

  It was 4:00 a.m. now, and thousands of workers and citizens of Homestead and Munhall had rushed to the southern banks of the river. As the tug began to turn toward shore, angry shouts rose up from the crowd, followed soon after by shots. One volley blew out the windows of the tug’s pilot house, sending the crew sprawling to the decks.

  On shore, Hugh O’Donnell and his division commanders and captains raced about, imploring the crowds for calm, but the situation had careened beyond anyone’s control. “There was no method, no leadership apparent in the response to the [whistle] blast from the light works,” said a report in the New York Herald. “It was the uprising of a population. . . . Not men alone, but women, too; women armed with clubs as they joined the throng which streamed up the Pennsylvania and Pittsburg and McKeesport tracks picking its way with a fleet footedness born of long practice over the ties.”

  William B. Rodgers, the frightened captain of the Little Bill, had managed to steer his craft past the massed crowds in Homestead proper. The mob had managed to keep pace as they passed along the town, but finally Rodgers had gained the deserted grounds of the Homestead works, where the infernal mob was stymied by the high fence that Frick had built. It was hardly the sort of thing a tugboat captain was trained for—he had been told by Frick that he would be transporting a number of “watchmen” from Bellevue to the plant grounds—but he was a dedicated man, and no coward, either. His intent was to reach the company docks looming in the darkness just ahead, land the barges that he towed, and make haste away, back to the blessed calm of the normal tugboating life.

  The frenzied crowd was only momentarily frustrated by the battlements of Fort Frick, however. When they saw the Little Bill make its turn toward the company docks, another mighty cry rose up, and men began to batter down the undefended walls. In short order, the fence was flattened and hordes of workers stampeded through the breach, crying wildly as they went. “We’ll send them home on stretchers,” came the cry, according to the Herald report. “Hell will be full of new pictures in the morning.”

  Others streamed into the plant along the unguarded railway tracks that scant days before had carried mundane carloads of ore and coke in, armor plate and rails and steel beams out. According to press accounts, one of the leaders of the mob, no less compelling for having appointed himself to the fore, was a middle-aged Britisher named Billy Foy, whose former “command” had been as chief of the corps of the Homestead Salvation Army. As the Herald put it, “All the fervor of his wild religious training, spent hitherto in emptiness in denouncing the intangible devil and the invisible powers of evil, seemed to find a long looked for object upon which to wreak its will. The man had been longing for a chance for years to grapple with the powers of darkness in bodily form. Now it was coming—coming up the river to rob him and his mates of their very homes and beds.”

  While Foy led the charge through the shattered fences at the waterline of company property, another, even more colorful character stood out in the melee. This was Mrs. Finch, the apparent leader of the women who had joined the pack, that same white-haired grandmother who had guarded the alleyways of Homestead from the first days of the gathering storm.

  “The dirty black sheep,” she cried, brandishing her famous cudgel above her head. “Let me get at them.”

  Mrs. Finch’s fervor had drawn a contingent of followers, some carrying babies, others clutching clubs, as she led the way toward the mill. “High and shrill and strong for her years as the voice of the lustiest fisherwoman who marched on Versailles,” as the Herald reporter put it, “a foolish mob going to war against hopeless odds of arms and discipline, the cries seemed then terrible as the charging cry of the black fanatics of the Sudanese desert.”

  By the time the mob caught up, the captain of the Little Bill had managed to complete his bounden duty. The Monongahela and the Iron Mountain had been docked, and though no men had yet ventured onto shore, gangplanks had been readied for that purpose.

  As the crowds surged toward the tethered barges, an odd quiet descended over what had been bedlam. So much hatred had been brewed over the past weeks, so much invective hurled. Now the masses stood in a state of astonished anticipation, as though awaiting the emergence of creatures from a newly landed spaceship. Hatred palpitated there, no doubt. But also there was awe, and fear.

  One man wearing the slouch hat of a Pinkerton appeared on the deck of the Monongahela, and a murmur swept through the cr
owd. A woman bent to pick up a stone, then hurled it at the barge. “Don’t you land,” another called, “you must not land.”

  A man’s voice followed. “Go back, go back, or we’ll not answer for your lives.” Another voice cried, “Don’t come on land or we’ll brain you.”

  The situation threatened to boil over once again when Hugh O’Donnell finally arrived, shouting mightily over the crowd for silence. Amazingly enough, he was obeyed.

  O’Donnell, portrayed in a widely published New York World sketch as a tall, angular man with a full, dark mustache and striking good looks, turned from the crowd and called out across the ominously quiet waters to the barges: “On behalf of five thousand men, I beg of you to leave here at once. I don’t know who you are nor from whence you came, but I do know that you have no business here.”

  There was no immediate response, of course, and O’Donnell pressed on: “We, the workers in these mills, are peaceably inclined. We have not damaged any property, and we do not intend to. If you will send a committee with us, we will take them through the works . . . and promise them a safe return to their boats. But in the name of God and humanity, don’t attempt to land! Don’t attempt to enter these works by force.”

  Perhaps the last sounded like a challenge, or perhaps he had simply been biding his time, but at that, Captain Heinde, leader of the Pinkerton force, stepped finally onto the decks of the Iron Mountain to deliver his response, unequivocally and imperturbably: “We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for this company. . . . We don’t wish to shed blood, but . . . if you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down and enter in spite of you. You had better disperse, for land we will.”

  O’Donnell surveyed the scene around him. In addition to the armed thousands who had occupied the steep banks of the river where the barges were tied off, hundreds more looked down upon the scene from the vantage of the Pmickey (Pennsylvania, McKeesport, and Youghiogheny) Railroad Bridge just upstream. On the opposite side of the Monongahela, more sympathizers had gathered. O’Donnell had spent weeks and months in the attempt to engineer a peaceful resolution to a dispute that, in his mind, cried out for a meeting of reasonable minds. How had it come to this?

  What could he say now that had not already been said? What could he do but accept the inevitable?

  Finally he took a breath and shouted back to Heinde. “I have no more to say,” he called. “What you do here is at the risk of many lives. Before you enter those mills, you will trample over the dead bodies of three thousand honest workingmen.”

  With that, O’Donnell turned away.

  15

  OVER THE EDGE

  HAD THIS BEEN A MODERN-DAY standoff, with Frick in close touch with his emissaries by cell phone and Carnegie observing the scene via CNN satellite feed, there might have been some last-minute intercession, some barked command to send history down a different path. But for the slumbering Frick, the matter was out of his hands. His terms had been dictated, and events would proceed however they would.

  As for Carnegie, he had given Frick free rein. If he glimpsed any dire omens in the mists above a secluded lake in Scotland’s wilderness that early July morning, there was little he could do about it.

  As it was, the exchange between Heinde and O’Donnell was followed by a period of motionless silence on the banks of the Monongahela, broken finally when Heinde ordered a group of his men to lower the Iron Mountain’s gangplank to the shore. The moment the plank hit ground, William Foy, the former Salvation Army commander, strode to its foot, followed by a group of striking workers.

  Heinde, with a riot stick in hand, stepped onto the gangplank. “Now, men,” he warned, “we are coming ashore to guard these works and we want to come without bloodshed. There are three hundred men behind me and you cannot stop us. . . .”

  “Come on, and you’ll come over my dead carcass,” Foy shouted back.

  It was enough for Heinde, who stepped forward suddenly, slashing his stick at Foy’s temple. Foy managed to duck in time, but Heinde’s momentum sent him stumbling down the gangplank, his men surging after.

  Heinde’s foot clipped the flat end of an oar left untended on the dock, sending its knotted handle flying upward. The knurled end of the oar cracked against the cheek of one of Foy’s companions, who went down with a cry of pain. Another of Foy’s men jumped forward and drove a club of his own into Heinde, sending him onto his back.

  Accounts differ as to what exactly happened next—historians, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and eyewitness accounts debate who fired first according to their predispositions. The only certainty is that two shots were fired in quick succession.

  One hit Foy, the other Heinde. And the battle was on.

  Pinkerton captain J. W. Cooper shouted his orders, and from a row of Winchester rifle barrels poised from the Monongahela’s stem to its stern, flashes of fire shot out. Incredibly, only two men on the tightly packed shore, scant yards from the tethered barges, were dropped by that first wave of Winchester fire.

  Hugh O’Donnell had just raised his hands in a futile attempt to quell the crowd. “For God’s sake put down your guns and look to the protection of your families,” he cried, when he felt a burning sensation on one of his hands. He snatched it down to see that the flesh of his thumb had been notched by a rifle bullet, taking along with it the last hope of reason. As O’Donnell clutched his bloody hand, the men on shore opened up with return fire of their own, riddling the Iron Mountain, the Monongahela, and the Little Bill with an array of fire from pistols, shotguns, rifles, even antique muskets.

  One of the first steelworkers to go down was a man named Martin Murray. He lay bleeding and semiconscious while the bullets continued to fly above him and his friends ran screaming for cover. There was a momentary lull in the firing, then, and Murray realized that someone was standing over him now. He felt hands go under his shoulders, felt himself being lifted up.

  He heard a familiar voice, encouraging him to hang on, that they would find help soon. It was his friend and fellow striker Joseph Sotak who had come to rescue him, Murray realized. He had no idea how badly he had been wounded, or if Sotak’s words were the kind of commonplace assurances you gave a dying man, but still Murray was comforted—until he heard another shot and he felt Sotak’s hands go limp.

  “Joseph?” Murray cried, but there was only a moment’s gurgling in response. Sotak had taken a round squarely in the mouth. He was dead by the time the two of them hit the ground.

  For ten minutes the firing continued. In addition to Foy and Heinde and Sotak and Murray, at least twenty-three others—eleven union men and another dozen of the Pinkertons—fell.

  The men on shore had scrambled behind hastily thrown together barricades of scrap iron and lumber scavenged from the mill grounds, and with their targets hidden, the Pinkertons were holding fire. While the wounded were being dragged away and tended to, Superintendent Potter held a heated strategy session with the Pinkerton captains.

  The Pinkertons wanted to mount a fresh assault and gain a foothold on dry land; they were sitting ducks on the barges, they argued. But Potter, a factory manager in the everyday world that seemed so far away now, was adamant. “I will not take the responsibility for any further bloodshed,” he said, staring in disbelief at the carnage that surrounded him. He insisted that no further initiatives be taken until High Sheriff McCleary arrived from Pittsburgh.

  Reluctantly the Pinkertons went along. It was agreed that the Little Bill would quit the scene immediately, taking the badly bleeding Captain Heinde and the other wounded Pinkerton men across the Monongahela, where they could be put on board a train and taken to a hospital in Pittsburgh. The barges would stay where they were, and the rest of the men would remain on board.

  Captains Cooper and Nordrum issued the orders, and their men retreated from the decks. Soon the union men on shore could see the Pinkertons hard at work chiseling firing ports in the hulls of the barges, whether to prepare for a
n assault of sniper fire or to repel anyone who might attempt to board, it was impossible to tell.

  For their part, the men on shore went about fortifying their positions, supplanting their hastily formed barricades with a long battlement built, ironically, of steel beams taken from company stockpiles. Others were sent to scour the surrounding neighborhoods for more stores of guns and ammunition. Word of the battle had meanwhile reached Pittsburgh, and several hundred armed sympathizers were on the way to reinforce the strikers’ ranks.

  Though much of the armed resistance went on as if by reflex, Hugh O’Donnell bound up his hand and did what he could to bring reason to bear. His first task was to persuade the five hundred or more women who had gathered at the scene to go home. When that was finally accomplished, and the wounded men had been removed for medical care, O’Donnell prevailed upon McLuckie to issue word that all saloons in Homestead would remain closed until further notice.

  By 6:00 a.m., a relative calm had descended upon the scene. The early-morning fog had burned off, allowing onlookers gathered atop the hills overlooking the plant and the river to view the spectacle from a safe vantage point. A few skiffs now surrounded the Pinkerton barges, firing occasional rounds at their quarry and taking desultory fire in return.

  By 8:00 a.m., the frustrated Pinkertons had had enough of being pinned down. One of the captains shouted their intention to come ashore, but he received no reply from an emplacement of union men close by. When a door on one of the barges began to creak open, a shot from somewhere on shore rattled off the planks.

  In moments the firing was once again at full bore. John Morris, a twenty-eight-year-old Welsh immigrant and a skilled worker in the plant’s blooming mill, the place where steel is given its first preliminary shape, had taken a position atop the pump house overlooking the wharf. When Morris squeezed off a round that he thought had struck one of the Pinkertons, he raised his head just to seek confirmation.