In 1903, miners and mill workers in the Cripple Creek district went on strike. Governor James Peabody dispatched the state militia under the command of a mine manager named Sherman Bell. The expedition was paid for by the mine owners and the troops were there to break the union, Bell declared. His job was to “exterminate ’em.” Moyer was arrested on a bogus charge of flag desecration and held for months.
As in Idaho, acts of “union violence” in Colorado were sometimes committed by provocateurs hired by the mining industry to discredit the labor movement. One miner who played both sides for money was a particularly conscienceless killer who had participated in the Coeur d’Alene troubles before coming to Colorado. He went by many names, most recently Harry Orchard. He was of medium height, with a round face and a “deep rounded barrel of a body … balanced sturdily on short, stout legs—a most excellent and workmanlike human machine, with the power and directness of a little Orkney bull,” as one journalist described him. Those who met him were struck by Orchard’s callousness. “He is without the … imagination of the ordinary man,” a reporter wrote. The consequences of his violent acts and the suffering of his victims “simply do not present themselves to him.” In November 1903, as Orchard told it, he helped bomb the Vindicator mine. That won him an invitation to Denver and entree to the leaders of the federation—President Moyer, Secretary-Treasurer William “Big Bill” Haywood, and an explosives expert named George Pettibone.
Moyer was a talented organizer—“brave and determined,” Darrow would recall—with a sharp face and husky voice. Pettibone was “witty, friendly and kindly” and “something of a chemist.” It was widely believed that he had blown up the Frisco mine in Idaho. The third man—Big Bill—was powerfully built and square jawed. He was “hard, tough … [but with] a final touch of idealism, a Jesuitic zeal that carries the man beyond himself,” the journalist Ray Stannard Baker wrote. Haywood had made his mark as a rabble-rousing socialist.8
It was at their request, Orchard would claim, that he and an associate, Steve Adams, blew up the Independence depot of the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad on June 6, 1904. The platform was packed with two dozen nonunion miners whose shift had just ended. Thirteen died and others were horribly mangled, their screams cleaving the summer night. And yet it was the Federation that paid the heaviest price for the bombing. The union hall in the town of Victor was surrounded by vigilantes, and after a gun battle the miners surrendered. Sherman Bell and his militia arrived and hauled hundreds at gunpoint to the Colorado border, where they were dumped in the wasteland and told not to return.
THE WFM HAD been routed in Idaho and Colorado. Its leaders looked outside the West for allies, and helped organize the Industrial Workers of the World—dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism—in Chicago in 1905. The Wobblies, as they became known, believed in a Marxist class struggle and declared in their manifesto that “economic evils … can be eradicated only by a universal working class movement” led by “one great industrial union.” Moyer and Haywood were joined by Debs and other prominent radicals. Haywood urged American workers to follow their Russian counterparts and “rise in revolt against the capitalist system.” If western industrialists needed further motivation to take down Moyer and Haywood, the Red talk offered it. And Orchard gave them the means.9
As Will Steunenberg ran, sliding in the snow, to his dying brother’s side on the night of the bombing, he instantly decided: “It’s the Coeur d’Alenes.” The next morning’s edition of the Daily Statesman, the state’s leading newspaper, barely reported the details before reaching the front-page conclusion that “a great many minds turn to the troubles in the Coeur d’Alenes and to the ‘inner circle’ which was said to rule by blood.”
The Statesman was the voice of Idaho’s anti-union, Republican establishment. With uncanny precision, in that first edition, it likened the Steunenberg bombing to the destruction of the Independence depot. And Sheriff Harvey Brown of Oregon, who knew Orchard, just happened to be on the special train that traveled from Boise to Caldwell that night with the state’s two top Republicans, Governor Frank Gooding and soon-to-be senator William E. Borah. There were other suggestive details that led union men to believe that the bombing was the work of corporate provocateurs or a crazy loner. Orchard had not fled or disposed of the incriminating items stashed in his room and his baggage, including explosives, a sawed-off shotgun, and a postcard addressed to Moyer. After Brown identified him, Orchard had cooperatively surrendered and was formally charged less than forty-eight hours after Steunenberg stooped to close the gate.
And there were, in fact, other potential motives for the bombing. Steunenberg was a leader of Idaho’s wool growers, whose war with the state’s cattlemen had periodically erupted with deadly violence and histrionic murder trials. Then there was this to consider: Steunenberg’s wife said he had seemed troubled in recent weeks, and particularly on the day he died. Federal investigators had targeted him for his role in a massive timber fraud conspiracy, with links to Borah, Idaho mine owners, and the family that published the Statesman. Idaho’s Republican establishment had ample motive to want the murder case closed quickly, with blame fixed on the union. Orchard most assuredly had killed Steunenberg. But not until Lee Harvey Oswald would an assassin’s motives, and his paymasters, be the topic of such dispute.
GOODING STASHED ORCHARD in the state penitentiary in Boise, where, after time in solitary confinement, he was introduced to the Pinkerton detective who had been hired to lead the investigation. J. P. McParland was a legend: the nerveless private eye who had gone undercover, risked his life, and brought down the Molly Maguires. He had drunk and bunked and schemed with the Pennsylvania coal field rebels, then testified at trials that sent twenty to their deaths. Other famous private eyes cashed in and started their own firms, but McParland stuck with the Pinkertons, who prized his anti-union zeal, and his ability to move with equal facility in the “higher or laboring classes,” and among “sporting men or thieves.” He was past sixty now, afflicted with various ailments and reliant on a cane. He had, of course, prejudged the case. It was the Molly Maguires all over again, and would serve as a spectacular bookend to his career.
Before he ever began to investigate, McParland declared that the “inner circle”—Moyer and Haywood—were behind the crime. Using Steunenberg’s murder to dismember the union was a prime business opportunity, McParland told the Pinkertons: “It means a great deal … so far as the mine owners of Idaho are concerned and in fact all mine operators in the whole district.”10
McParland knew the value of manipulating public opinion, and his conversations with Orchard, which he deftly leaked to the press, were portrayed as sacramental: the killer converted by the sage lawman, finding Jesus, and confessing his sins. “I have been an unnatural monster,” Orchard wrote in a letter that found its way to the newspapers. “But the dear Lord regenerated me, so he could use me.”11
Both the actual transcript of Orchard’s confession and McParland’s notes were kept secret for decades. In truth, it was a pedestrian interrogation, the kind conducted by coppers and DAs everywhere. “If you take my advice you will not be hung,” McParland told Orchard. “If you do not you will be hung in very quick order.”
The authorities knew that Orchard was “simply a tool of the Inner Circle,” McParland told him. If the assassin implicated the Federation chiefs as his co-conspirators, the state would spare his life, and one day even set him free. “We would get the leaders, and that was all that the State of Colorado and the State of Idaho wished,” McParland said. “I recited a number of instances which he knew of himself wherein men had become States witnesses in murder cases and not only saved their necks but also eventually got their liberty.”
Orchard asked for, and McParland supplied, the precise story he needed to relate. He must describe how the Federation leaders “being men in authority, detail you to go and commit the murder, advise you how to do it, furnish you with the means,” McParland said. The deal McParland offered was good for
Harry Orchard, and Harry Orchard grabbed it. He hoped to be free soon, he told a fellow prisoner, and to start a new life overseas. “I awoke, as it were, from a dream,” Orchard said in his confession. “And realized I had been made a tool of, aided and assisted by the members of the Executive Board of the Western Federation of Miners.”
FOR THE NEXT five days, as McParland crafted the questions and a stenographer took notes, Orchard told how he had been dispatched to kill Steunenberg by Haywood and the others. But he did not stop there: He linked every infamous act of western labor violence to the Federation. He had bombed the Vindicator mine and the Independence depot, he said, and the home of a prominent mine owner in San Francisco. He had helped blow up the Bunker Hill mine. He had tried to assassinate Governor Peabody of Colorado, two justices of the state supreme court, and Sherman Bell. He had shot a detective in a dark alley, poisoned a mine owner’s milk, and killed an innocent Denver man who stumbled into one of his plots.
Despite his alleged reconciliation with Christ, the prisoner lied from the first. His real name was not Harry Orchard, as he swore, but Alfred E. Horsley. Pinkerton operative S. Chris Thiele spent as much time with Orchard as anyone and privately scoffed at his supposed religious awakening. The killer was distilled evil, Thiele told his superiors in an agency memorandum, and he “at no time found Orchard saying that he … had any pity for those to whose hearts he brought sorrow.” Darrow would find Orchard “remarkable … a man whom nothing could touch; he was above all ordinary influences: fear, hope, reward, threats; everything.” Even McParland was impressed. He had known many criminals but never had he seen, until Harry Orchard, such “cold, cruel” eyes.
WITH ORCHARD’S CONFESSION in hand, McParland faced the task of arresting Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone. “Owing to the fact that neither of these three parties had been in Idaho during this conspiracy, we cannot say that they are fugitives from justice,” he warned Gooding, “and we may have considerable trouble in extraditing them.”
And so Idaho kidnapped the three union leaders. To Colorado’s compliant governor, McParland sold the legal fable that the three were “constructively” present in Caldwell on the night of the crime. McParland had them seized on a Saturday night and spirited away on a fast train before the Federation’s lawyers could ask a court to intervene. The Union Pacific Railroad agreed to clear its tracks. Engines, watered and fueled, stood waiting along the route. Sandwiches, bottles of beer, a hundred cigars, and a quart of Old Crow were packed aboard. Cryptic messages flew back and forth. Everyone had a code name. McParland was Owl. Haywood was Viper. Moyer was Copperhead. Pettibone was Rattler. And Harry Orchard, the gifted poser, was Possum.
Moyer was grabbed, without warrant, at Union Station in Denver. Pettibone was picked up without incident at home. And the Viper was arrested in a rooming house, “stark naked and in bed with a woman,” the Owl told Gooding. Haywood’s bedmate was the younger sister of his invalid wife, Nevada Jane. It was to be expected, said McParland, for the Viper was a degenerate.
The abduction infuriated American labor leaders—even moderates, like Samuel Gompers, who loathed the Wobblies. AROUSE, YE SLAVES! read the headline in the socialist Appeal to Reason. “It is a foul plot; a damnable conspiracy; a hellish outrage,” Debs wrote. “If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns … A general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising.”
One WFM leader evaded the manhunt. Jack Simpkins, who was indicted for helping Orchard plan the Steunenberg murder, vanished. But Steve Adams, whom Orchard named as his accomplice in the bombing of the Independence depot, was seized in Oregon. McParland made his well-rehearsed pitch, and Adams signed a statement linking the WFM chieftains to Orchard’s crime spree. In composing the confession, “McParland led me on step by step and showed me all that he wanted me to say,” Adams later testified. He was a critical witness in the case, for Idaho law was insistent: no defendant could be convicted of a crime on the testimony of a single conspirator. Corroborating proof was required, and in Adams, the state now had corroboration.12
THE WFM REACHED out to Darrow in March 1906. “This is a matter which I would rather avoid … on account of the hard fight and the serious odds,” he told John Mitchell. “However, I do not see how I can get out of it. I presume that they are trying to railroad these fellows.”
After being assured that organized labor would raise sufficient funds for the defense, Darrow took the case. He traveled to Idaho at the end of May for pretrial hearings. “Public sentiment … is very necessary in a great case of this kind,” he told Mitchell. He was genial and folksy, far from the cloven-hoofed anarchist whom Idaho expected. He informed the Statesman that he found Boise “a mighty nice town” and teased reporters who asked him for inside information. In court Darrow made a show of demanding a quick trial for his clients, though he knew that his union’s challenge of their extradition would take months to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. “They are ready for trial,” he declared. “They are entitled to trial. They demand trial.”
The Supreme Court heard the extradition case in October. The Constitution permits that a person “who shall flee from justice” in one state may be extradited from others, the defense acknowledged. But Haywood and his companions had not fled anywhere. The governor of Colorado “had full knowledge of the falsity of the proceedings,” the Federation argued. “This is not a case of actual fugitives.” But only one member of the court, Justice Joseph McKenna, agreed. “Kidnapping is a crime, pure and simple,” he said, in a lonely dissent.
The Idaho prosecutor, James Hawley, read the court correctly. He was an archetypical sagebrush lawyer: a beefy, hot-tempered, cigar-smoking cowboy with a law book in his saddlebag who grew up with the territory. In the 1892 troubles, Hawley had defended Pettibone and the other union men and helped organize the Federation. But with all the zeal of a convert, he had switched sides. He told the justices that the prisoners had other legal remedies that they could seek if they thought they were improperly snatched. “The parties abducting them could be tried for kidnapping, or the defendants could sue for damages,” he said. Once they were charged on Idaho soil, the route they took was irrelevant: “They are there, and the question is are they guilty or innocent.” On December 3, 1906, the Supreme Court agreed. The “vital fact” was that the defendants were now in Idaho, said Justice Harlan, in a 7-to-1 decision. “It is not necessary to go behind the indictment and inquire as to how it happened.”
“Whether it was law or not, I do not know,” Darrow wrote to Henry Lloyd’s sister Caro. “It certainly wasn’t justice.”13
THE THREE PRISONERS were stoic when they heard the news, in part because Darrow had scored gains of his own that summer. After bidding goodbye to the Boise press in June and telling them “there will be nothing more doing” in the case until the fall, he had found his way to eastern Oregon and the door of James W. Lillard, an uncle of Steve Adams. There are two stories of how Darrow got Lillard to persuade his nephew not to testify. The first comes from the Darrow camp; it’s a nice tale in which the lawyer is turned away from Lillard’s door but, like a wise traveling salesman, asks for a drink of water to stall for time and make a successful pitch. The second version is from McParland. According to the Pinkertons, the defense bought Lillard with a staggering bribe.14
Both versions could be grounded in truth. Darrow had no qualms about paying witnesses or members of their families for helping the defense in a high-stakes case. He was reimbursing them, he would claim, for their trouble and their time. It was in character for Darrow to spend tens of thousands of dollars in this manner if the money was available, and one can easily see him sweet-talking Lillard and cinching the deal with a payoff.15
This much is certain: the supposedly penniless Adams suddenly repudiated his confession and hired an expensive lawyer—a former Republican governor—to win his freedom. The state responded with its own hardbal
l tactics: it charged Adams with an unrelated murder and carted him through the forest roads to a jail in rural Wallace, high in the panhandle. There, McParland threatened to hang him unless he cooperated.
The case against Adams rested on a tale he supposedly told Orchard about visiting friends in the north woods and helping them murder a “claim jumper” named Fred Tyler. The claim jumpers were despised opportunists who, for themselves or a timber or mining interest, took advantage of a homesteader’s absence to file a counterclaim for the land. “Probably never before had any one been convicted for killing a claim jumper in that part of the state,” Darrow recalled.
A crucial witness was offered a lucrative federal job, and agreed to testify for the prosecution, but when McParland returned for the trial he was furious to discover that the local sheriff had been outmaneuvered, and the jury pool stocked with union sympathizers. The prosecutors did the best they could with their peremptory challenges, but in the end Darrow secured a jury with “two very doubtful, and one we are sure will never fetch in a verdict of guilty,” the downcast detective reported.
Darrow was helped by the rambling opening statement made by the local prosecutor, Henry Knight, who demonstrated how much the state relied upon conjecture.
The evidence will show that on or about the 29th or 30th day of June, possibly, 1904, Mr. Tyler left the town of Santo, or his mother’s residence near that place, for the purpose of going out into the forests and taking up a homestead—or a timber claim, [Knight began. A year later,] in the month of August, or September, I think, 1905 … about in the month of August, or September, I think … the coroner with some deputy, or some deputy of the coroner, went to the place … I am not sure whether in exact proximity to the cabin or claim of Fred Tyler, or, at any rate near there … The evidence, we believe, will show that the deceased was shot from behind, that the bullet entered near the ear; back of the ear—one of the ears, I have forgotten which … Whether it was before or after breakfast I am not sure, I am not sure whether they gave him breakfast or not, at any rate it was quite early in the morning.
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 19