Review by Ed Quillen
Western History – March 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Big Trouble – A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America
by J. Anthony Lukas
Published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 0684846179
THIS BOOK has been amply reviewed elsewhere. Its author, so far as I know, has never been within a day’s ride of Central Colorado. And its focus is on a murder that took place nearly a thousand miles from here. So why review it in these pages?
Because the 1905 murder of Frank Steunenberg in Caldwell, Idaho, was only one “battle” in a long and brutal industrial war about how the Mountain West would be operated, and some of those battles were fought hereabouts, especially Cripple Creek, Florence, and Leadville.
In a way, it’s just happenstance that the great courtroom confrontation of this war happened in Idaho — it could have just as easily occurred in Salida or Fairplay.
To set the scene, we can go back to various rushes into the mountains. As long as the gold lay in streams, accessible to a man with hand tools, then just about anybody might become rich. But when the easy pickings were gone, the remaining riches lay underground.
Substantial investments of capital were required to dig the adits and shafts, to install the drills and hoisting machinery, to grind and concentrate the ore, to smelt and refine it. That capital generally came from elsewhere.
The result was that the mine owner wasn’t some fellow prospector who got lucky, but a group of faceless capitalists in San Francisco, Chicago, or Boston. They wanted maximum production at minimum cost; the miners in the mountains wanted a living wage, and to get it, they organized unions, most notoriously the Western Federation of Miners.
Men whose daily work involved risk of life and limb, men who routinely handled vast quantities of high explosives — these were men who did not fear violence to get what they wanted when the ballot box failed them.
The miners did “work within the system” in Colorado a century ago. They passed a constitutional amendment for an eight-hour day — and the governor, James H. Peabody of Cañon City, refused to enforce it. They elected sheriffs and mayors — whose powers were usurped when a governor declared martial law and sent in the National Guard. They even elected labor-friendly governors, like Davis H. “Bloody Bridles” Waite.
And in 1896, Idaho miners believed they had put a friend in the governor’s mansion, Democrat Frank Steunenberg. When the miners went on strike in the Couer d’Alene district in 1899, the mine owners responded by importing scabs from the Missouri lead mines. The miners commandeered a Northern Pacific train, fought their way through the scabs and company guards, then dynamited the concentrator at the Bunker Hill & Sullivan works, thus guaranteeing that the district’s mines would close on account of their strike.
STEUNENBERG WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to call his own state’s National Guard under his command, but its soldiers were on federal duty in the Spanish-American War. So he felt compelled to ask for federal troops to “restore order” — which meant martial law, public beatings, arrests without warrants, detention without hearings, exile for alleged “troublemakers” without anything like due process.
This pleased the mine owners, but it looked like treason to the miners who had supported Steunenberg, who left office in 1901 and returned to his home in Caldwell. On the last Saturday of 1905, as he returned home from the bank, he opened the yard gate. That tripped a bomb that ripped Steunenberg apart.
Local authorities quickly learned that the bomb had been set off by a visiting man who turned out to be Harry Orchard — a bomb-wielding terrorist reputed to be connected to the militant Western Federation of Miners, and a man who confessed to killing 13 scab miners in the Cripple Creek district.
Idaho’s respectable element, along with President Theodore Roosevelt, saw this as a chance to destroy the Federation and its allied socialists, anarchists, communists, syndicalists, etc. Get Orchard to turn state’s evidence and to name certain co-conspirators — George Pettibone, Charles Moyer, and Big Bill Haywood, all officers of the Federation. They could be tried for murder, and upon their conviction, the Federation would be destroyed as an effective force in the West.
To that end, William Borah, an eloquent orator just elected to the U.S. Senate, was named a special prosecutor, and when the state treasury suffered for funds to hire Pinkerton detectives and spies, Colorado mine-owners like David H. Moffat donated to the cause.
COLORADO ALSO COÖPERATED in the kidnapping of Pettibone, Moyer, and Haywood. They were all Denver residents and they had not been in Idaho at the time in question. They could not be legally extradited, since they were not fugitives from Idaho justice, but Colorado’s governor conspired to send them north on a special Union Pacific train.
The Western Federation of Miners was not going down without a fight. Miners and millhands from Butte to Bisbee reached into their pockets to fund a courtroom defense for Haywood, the first to be tried, and Clarence Darrow was engaged.
Both sides had informants, spies, and private detectives hard at work, and the result is a byzantine maze surrounding this century’s first “trial of the century.”
IF LUKAS HAD STUCK to this part, he’d have written a much shorter book, but also a better book. As it is, he disrupts the narrative with extensive side excursions.
For instance, the defense is ready to start presenting its side on page 577. Then comes an interlude — Ethel Barrymore and the theater trust, Hugo Münsterberg and psychology in America, Walter Johnson and baseball rivalries in the Idaho State League, Gifford Pinchot and the founding of the U.S. Forest Service, local publisher Calvin Cobb and the state of the nation’s press in 1907.
By the time the trial resumed on page 687 with Darrow calling his first witness, I’d almost forgotten there was a trial.
So, this isn’t a well organized book. Despite its ramblings, though, it tells a good story with an all-star cast. Lukas shows us how deep the American establishment of the day was willing to stoop to get a conviction, how sick Colorado was to put a right-wing poppinjay like Bulkeley Wells into a position of authority, how the Denver & Rio Grande Railway fired employees who subscribed to the wrong publications.
It is also a story with repercussions that last to this day. With the labor wars and the patriotic hysteria of World War I, the American West was purged of its home-grown radicals who tried to grasp some local control from the hands of distant capital. The region learned to march in docile step with the rest of the republic.
The West, once the most radical part of America, is now the most reliable Republican precinct, and people profess suprise when there’s “violence in the heartland.” This came about, in part, as a result of the “Big Trouble” that culminated in an Idaho trial a century ago. On that account, Big Trouble is well worth reading, despite all its digressions.
— Ed Quillen