Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  His timing could not have been worse. As he rose, a rifle bullet split his forehead, the force of the shot catapulting him off the tower. He fell sixty feet, dead before he hit the ground.

  Another young man, Henry Striegel, just nineteen and a sympathizing Teamster who had heard about what was happening at Homestead, ran toward the front lines of the conflict with a pistol in hand. Before he could get off a shot, he tripped on a spar of iron and tumbled to the ground. As he fell, his pistol went off and the bullet bored into his leg. Striegel was writhing on the ground, clutching at his leg in agony, as a seasoned striker started up from his cover to drag the lad to cover. There was a shot from one of the barges, then, and a bullet tore through Striegel’s throat, killing him instantly.

  Only moments before the shooting had begun, Peter Fares, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovak who worked as a helper on one of the open-hearth furnaces, had come to the mill yard, curious to see for himself what was going on. Fares carried no weapon. In fact, he had a loaf of bread in one hand, and was about to tear off a chunk for a bit of breakfast, when a bullet from a Pinkerton sniper’s rifle hit him just above the lip. As the slug flattened and proceeded on, it took Fares’s brain matter, and the back of his skull, along with it.

  The fourth member of the union garrison to die met the most ironic fate of all. One group of men had “borrowed” a twenty-pound cannon from the Homestead chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union Army Civil War veterans’ association. The antique brass weapon had been ferried across to the opposite bank of the Monongahela, set up at what was deemed a better vantage point for firing on the barges.

  When the second round of fighting began, the neophyte cannoneers joined in. Amazingly enough, the first of the three-pound balls they launched struck one of the barges with a thundering crash of wood and debris. They hurriedly reloaded and fired again, but as true as the first shot had flown, the second went equally awry. The ball flew far above the barges and into the plant grounds, far from the combat lines, where a twenty-three-year-old laborer named Silas Wain, a recent immigrant from England, was standing beside the boiler house, engaged in earnest conversation with his brother William.

  To William it was an impossible sight. One instant he was talking to Silas about their uncertain prospects in this “land of opportunity.” In the next instant there was a heated rush of air that seemed to atomize his brother before his eyes. It took William, who was unscathed, some moments to realize. But soon enough his astonished eyes traveled to where Silas had been driven by the errant cannonball. His brother’s corpse lay before him, as one newsman put it, “a mangled mass of bloody flesh . . . stretched in the dust of the mill yard.”

  The deaths of these four men, representing a veritable cross-section of the union membership, seemed only to galvanize an already enraged group of strikers. But their marksmanship had done little to elevate the mood on board the Pinkerton barges. The commanders of the force, frustrated by the confines of their position, were aching for the chance to establish a beachhead from which they felt they could mount a successful offensive on their less experienced opponents.

  Among the general rank and file on the barges, however, there was far less unity of purpose. As it turned out, only about 40 of the total force were Pinkerton regulars who knew what to expect. The other 260 were recent conscripts, the usual assortment of would-be toughs, aimless drifters, and otherwise unemployed men who had signed up for a job promising good pay and the prospect of “three squares” a day. Perhaps there were a few among them who relished the prospect of a knock-down, drag-out fight, but it was beginning to look as if there were not nearly enough.

  Many of the men had actually refused the orders of their superiors to open fire, and had run into the holds of the barges to cower under beds and behind tables when the fighting began. And many of those same men had earlier pleaded to be allowed to join the ranks of the wounded taken away by the Little Bill.

  Now they complained bitterly that they had been marooned there on the barges to die. “They were the worst sort of cowards I ever saw,” second-in-command Nordrum would later testify. When the cannonball blew through the side of one barge, it was all he could do to keep many of those cowering belowdecks from jumping overboard on the spot.

  At approximately 11:00 a.m., however, a ray of hope appeared to the less eager among the mercenaries. Like some angel of mercy in mechanical form, the Little Bill was spotted, steaming across the waters toward their embattled position, eliciting a great cheer from the men.

  Captain Rodgers was at the helm of the Little Bill, the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the flagstaff. It had been his idea to raise the flag—“I did not think the workers would fire upon a vessel flying Old Glory”—but his hopes, and those of the anxious Pinkertons, were soon put to rest.

  The moment the Little Bill got within range, a furious barrage issued from the riverbank. One shot blew through the side of the pilothouse, narrowly missing Rodgers and plowing into the groin of a crewman who stood beside him. From a prone position on the deck, Rodgers swung the Little Bill hard about, guiding his craft downstream as quickly as a tug might go.

  If the disappearance of the Little Bill was not dismaying enough, what the Pinkerton men saw next was something out of a nightmare. Just upstream from the company docks, strikers had loaded a raft high with timbers and creosote-soaked railway ties. Then someone tossed a torch amid the pile and soon the entire raft was engulfed in flames.

  The Pinkertons could only gape in fear as the floating inferno was cut loose and sent drifting toward them. Several of those on board the Iron Mountain and the Monongahela donned life jackets and rushed toward the rails to jump, but grim Pinkerton regulars raised their Winchesters and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to desert. One can only imagine the predicament: take a rifle bullet in the breast from your fellow combatant, or wait to be incinerated alive?

  Fortunately for the frightened men staring into those rifle bores, the strikers had miscalculated. The fire aboard the floating pyre grew so fierce, so quickly, that the pile consumed itself down to the waterline and sank, just as it was about to careen into the barges.

  Hardly had that threat been extinguished, however, than another hellish spectacle presented itself. Workers high atop the hill near the mill itself loaded a railroad flatcar with casks of oil and set the whole thing ablaze. The car’s brakes were released and yet another portable conflagration was loosed, hurtling along the track that led down to the docks from the mill.

  There seemed no possibility of escape this time. The car was meant to fly off the end of the tracks and launch itself atop the wooden barges that lay squarely in its path. Even the Pinkerton regulars were ready to jump ship at this prospect, when, somehow, fate intervened once more. The ponderous car would not hurtle anywhere; its bulk was its own undoing. At the bottom of the tracks it abruptly stopped dead, leaving the Pinkertons to stare as it burned itself harmlessly to cinders on shore.

  It was not the end of the attacks on the Iron Mountain and the Monongahela, however. As John Holway, a student who had had the misfortune to sign up for the siege, would later testify, “There seemed to be sharpshooters picking us off. At first they fired straight at us, but after a while they fired through the aisles on the side, and they would shoot men who thought they were safe. The bullets would come, zip, and you would hear some man yell, and you would know they were not cautious. . . .

  “About 12 o’clock barrels of burning oil were floating around the bank to burn us up, to compel us to go on the wharf and there shoot us down, but they didn’t succeed because the oil was taken up by the water. . . . At about 3 o’clock we heard something; we thought it was a cannon, but it was dynamite. . . . It partially wrecked the other boat. A stick of it fell near me. It broke open the door of the aisles, and it smashed open the door, and the sharpshooters were firing directly at any man in sight. . . .

  “Most of the men were for surrender at this time, but the old detectives held out and said
, ‘If you surrender you will be shot down like dogs; the best thing is to stay here.’ We could not cut our barges loose because there was a fall below, where we would be sunk. We were deserted by our captains and by our tug, and left there to [die].”

  One of Holway’s fellow conscripts was a man named Tom Connors. He was hunched under a table nearby, a life jacket tied about his chest, his hands thrown over his head in terror. A slug whistled through a gap in the barge’s siding, and Connors cried out. Men who ran to Connors’s aid found blood spurting from a severed artery in his arm. His agonized screams began the moment he was hit, and continued unabated for the long minutes it took for him to lapse into unconsciousness.

  It was enough for even the most seasoned of the Pinkertons. If they did not surrender, they all would lose their lives.

  A white flag was thrust up from a gap in one barge’s side. In seconds, a marksman’s bullet shot it down. Disbelieving Pinkertons raised a second flag, and another volley from the riverbank blew it to smithereens as well. According to historian Krause, there was a reason for such disregard: workers had learned that a call had gone out from company headquarters to Pennsylvania governor Robert E. Pattison requesting that state militia be sent in. The workers wanted to finish off the hated Pinkertons before outside aid could arrive.

  As early as nine o’clock that morning, once he had learned of the casualties at Homestead, William Weihe, national president of the Amalgamated, hurried to the Pittsburgh offices of High Sheriff McCleary, imploring him to arrange a negotiating session with Frick. Despite a briefing on the terrible events of the previous night, Frick dismissed Weihe’s appeals out of hand.

  “I told the gentleman who called that we would not confer with the Amalgamated association officials,” he told a Philadelphia reporter. “It was their followers who were rioting and destroying our property, and we would not accept his proposition. At the same time this representative of our former workmen said they were willing to accept the terms offered, and concede everything we asked except the date of the termination of the scale, which they insisted should be June 30 in place of December 31.”

  When the reporter pressed Frick about whether that would resolve the conflict, Frick brushed the possibility aside: “It is in the hands of the authorities of Allegheny County. If they are unable to cope with it, it certainly is the duty of the Governor of the State to see that we are permitted to operate our establishment unmolested. The men engaged by us through the Pinkerton agencies were sent up to Homestead with the full knowledge of the sheriff and by him placed in charge of his chief deputy, Colonel Gray, and as we know, with instructions to deputize them in case it became necessary.”

  In other words, it seemed, even the Pinkertons had become dispensable pawns in a ploy to bring the irresistible force of the militia into play. Frick was washing his hands of responsibility altogether, shunting everything off onto elected officials. The company’s official statement was published in the press later that day, concluding, “We are not taking any active part in the matter at present, as we cannot interfere with the Sheriff in the discharge of his duty and are now awaiting his further action.”

  While Frick awaited favorable word of direct intervention from Harrisburg, strikers continued their siege on the hapless Pinkertons. At 4:00 p.m., Amalgamated president Weihe made his way to the mill yard in Homestead and managed to attract the attention of a significant number of the forces arrayed there. He begged the men to lay down their arms and allow the Pinkertons to leave the barges without fear of harm.

  All the while that Weihe spoke, gunfire and dynamite explosions continued from the hillside behind them. He warned the men that if they persisted, the militia would be sent in, but this inflamed as many as it frightened.

  Hugh O’Donnell had arrived by then, and took his place beside Weihe. A rescue boat bearing a white flag was on its way to the barges, O’Donnell announced. They should let the tug hitch up to the barges and pull the Pinkertons away.

  “No,” one of the self-appointed leaders of the more militant strikers replied. “Let the Pinkertons lay down their arms and march out.”

  This brought a cheer from the assemblage, and O’Donnell asked if in fact that would solve the impasse. A quick straw vote seemed to indicate that it would. The only question that remained was how to convey this offer to the men on the barges. “Go down yourself,” someone called to O’Donnell.

  Meanwhile, a great shouting had sprung up from the battlements on the riverbank and the crowd rushed to see what had caused the alarm. O’Donnell and Weihe ran with the others to the edge of the hilltop to find that two Pinkerton men had emerged on the decks of one of the barges, white handkerchiefs held in their upraised hands. Hundreds of rifles were trained upon the pair, and an ominous silence held.

  “Don’t shoot,” O’Donnell cried, and others echoed the command as he made his way quickly down the steep hillside and climbed up the gangplank to confer with the two Pinkerton men. Workers on the hillside stood with their trigger fingers poised, ready to strike at the first sign of treachery.

  After a moment, O’Donnell turned back to shore and withdrew a handkerchief from his own pocket. He raised his hand and waved the white square above his head for everyone to see. Surrender had finally been brokered. The bloody “Battle of Homestead” was at an end, or so it seemed.

  16

  THE BETTER PART OF VALOR

  THE DECISION TO SURRENDER had not been easily made aboard the barges. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the Pinkerton men remained adamantly opposed to going ashore, even with their ammunition virtually gone and most of his colleagues joined against him. Death was preferable to crawling ashore like a whipped dog, he said. He would stay on board and fight it out to the end.

  Another Pinkerton, a hard-bitten veteran, hefted the Winchester that he carried under one arm. “You’ll come in or I will blow your brains out,” he told the holdout, adding a few choice epithets that contemporary sources declined to specify.

  The holdout stared back contemptuously, then turned and began to walk away, toward the stern of the boat. As the other men looked on, he suddenly stopped and whipped his Colt pistol from his holster. Before anyone could react, he raised the Colt’s barrel to his head and fired. He toppled over as the stunned men looked on, “his brains oozing out on the already blood-soaked boards.”

  If there had been any fight left in them, this display squelched it. To a man, the rest of them turned and raised their hands and watched the strikers pour on board.

  AS THE NEW YORK WORLD REPORTED, “The mob started for the boat . . . and took complete possession. They ran like wild men about the edges and in a twinkling of an eye filled the cabins of both boats from both ends. The Pinkerton guards shook like the traditional aspen leaf. They huddled in groups in the corners and waited for death. Of mercy they expected none, but they were pleasantly disappointed.

  “They were jostled about, kicked and cuffed and sworn at but their lives were spared, although rougher treatment was in store for them at the hands of the main army of the mob still left on the river bank.”

  For a disbelieving American public, the “gauntlet” that the Pinkertons were forced to run on shore may have constituted the most indelible and shocking images associated with the Homestead battle. According to press accounts, things went reasonably well for the Pinkertons as they were led down the barges’ gangplanks and up the opposite shore, suffering little more than jeers and catcalls as they hurried along with their gazes cast down.

  It was when they reached the top of the bank and were forced to pass between two large piles of discarded scrap that things changed. There they were forced, as the World put it, “to enter a lane formed by two long lines of infuriated men who did not act like human beings.” Exhausted and sleepless, their nerves frayed by the tensions of some twelve hours of armed combat and their passions inflamed by witnessing the shooting of scores of their fellows, this group of strikers snapped.

 
The Pinkerton men “screamed for mercy,” said the World. “They were beaten over the head with clubs and the butt ends of rifles. You could almost hear the skulls crack. They were kicked, knocked down and jumped upon. Their clothes were torn from their backs, and when they finally escaped it was with faces of ashen paleness and with the blood in streams rushing down the backs of their heads staining their clothes. It ran in rivulets down their faces, which in the melee they had covered with their hands.”

  John Holway, the unfortunate student turned Pinkerton guard, lent his own voice to the description of the scene. “What we wanted was that our steam tug pull us away, but instead of that the strikers held that we should depart by way of the depot. . . . I started up the embankment with the men who went out . . . but I looked up the hill and there were our men being struck as they went up, and it looked rather disheartening. I . . . went about halfway down to the mill yards without being hurt, when three fellows sprang at me and knocked me down twice. One said, ‘You have killed two men this morning; I saw you.’ I dropped my satchel, and [ran]. . . . I got on further toward the depot and there were tremendous crowds on both sides and the men were just hauling and striking our men, and you would see them stumble as they passed.”

  With his satchel gone, Holway hit upon a means of escape. He simply pulled his hat low and walked out of the line of Pinkerton men, hoping to blend in with the mob. He had passed through the first lines of the mob and thought he had made it when he heard a shout rise up behind him. “A Pinkerton,” someone cried. “He’s getting away!”

  Holway didn’t hesitate. He burst between a pair of astonished workers in front of him, making for the gap that the mob had torn in the company fence. As he jumped over the debris, he risked a backward glance to find a crowd of at least a hundred men running after him.