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Monday January 15, 1906
Boise, Idaho - Pinkerton Detective James McParland Meets with Gov. Gooding

James McParland, the Pinkerton Detective who assisted in the frame-up and judicial murders of the Martyred Miners of Pennsylvania (1877-1879), is now active in the investigation of the Steunenberg murder case.

From The Salt Lake Tribune of January 13, 1906:

ORCHARD HEARING WILL BE SECRET
-----

[...]

Special to the Tribune.
BOISE, Ida. Jan. 12-Fred Miller, attorney for Orchard in the Steunenberg murder case at Caldwell, will take advantage of statutory right and ask that the preliminary examination be held behind closed doors, which he stated he thought would be to the public interest to do.....

Pinkertons Are Engaged

A five-hour conference between Chief Detective McFarland [James McParland] of Pinkerton's Denver agency and Gov. Gooding was held at the Idaho hotel here last night. They went over all circumstances surrounding the assassination. As a result the Pinkertons will now take an active part in solving the mystery, although Pinkerton men have been on the scene since a few hours after the assassination.

McFarland will direct the operations of his men from this city. Next Tuesday he will go to Denver, returning to Idaho in a short time. McFarland says he has little doubt of Orchard's guilt and in his opinion others aided him and he is sorry that more arrests were not made immediately after the assassination....

[Photograph of James McParland added.]

The author of the following diatribe against the Western Federation of Miners is not identified. But one wonders if that author could be James McParland, Chief Detective of the Pinkerton's Denver agency. The article paints the Western Federation of Miners as a terror-promoting organizations, and insists that they are following in the tradition of the "Molly Maguires."

Reading the following, one might well wonder if another frame-up of union men is in the making.

Hellraisers presents part one today and will continue with part two of the article tomorrow.

From The Inter Ocean of January 14, 1906:

STEUNENBERG MURDER ALARMS ENEMIES OF
WESTERN FEDERATION.
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DENVER, Colo., Jan. 12.-Does the assassination of Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho mark the first victim on a list of prominent Western men who are doomed to die? The question has been asked here this week as a result of a statement made by former Adjutant General Bell. General Bell declares that he is on the schedule of the Western Federation of Miners and that former Governor Peabody may also be killed. Officers of the federation make light, however, of the former Adjutant General's gloomy prediction and call attention to the fact that he is very fond of talking.

Of course, General Bell sees the motive in the possible murders in his activity against the federation during the Cripple Creek strike. There seems to be little doubt in the West that Governor Steunenberg was killed because of a long hatred held by the man who killed him for the Governor's action during the Coeur d'Alene troubles in Idaho. Whether this hatred was a personal matter or was shared in by the Western federation is, of course, a matter of opinion.

At any rate, the assassination of the former Idaho Governor gives retrospect to a very interesting phase of Western history. Steunenberg was entering the gate of his home when a dynamite bomb exploded and both his legs were torn off, one arm was left hanging by a shred, and his whole body mangled and cut and bruised.

A price of $5,000 was set on the heads of the assassins, and the detectives searching for the criminals directed their first attention to the survivors of the bloody Coeur d' Alene riots of the '90s, when striking miners overrode the power of the state, defied federal authority, and committed outrage after outrage with perfect safety.

There was no surprise therefore when Harry Orchard, alias Hagan, was arrested for the crime. Nor was it at all astonishing that Orchard was demanded by the Colorado authorities for an even greater crime-the blowing up of the railroad station at Independence, in the Cripple Creek district, during the last big strike, when innocent men were hurled to destruction or maimed for life.

Mr. Steunenberg was Governor during the bitter Coeur d'Alene strike, and his acts at that time, when he called for United States troops to do the work his militia and civil officers could not perform, undoubtedly led to his violent death.

"Molly Maguire" Methods.

That dynamite was used and plotters of no mean ability used it at once directed suspicion to the remnants of the now widely scattered band of malcontents known as "Molly Maguires."

Driven out of Pennsylvania after a period of violence that appalled the nation, these men, wherever they have gone in search of a safe refuge, have left a trail of wreck, ruin, and murder. At every stopping place they placed a stick of giant powder to blow into eternity and destroy the property of those who had the temerity to oppose them.

They blazed a path with bloody axes to Colorado, to Idaho, and Montana and back again to Colorado, where they made their last open stand at Cripple Creek and the contiguous mining districts.

Defeat has eventually met them everywhere, and it would seem that the spirit of the "Molly Maguires" would die, but not so. Where one died or was put away in prison another was there to take his place. Secret recruiting was going on constantly. In every mining camp where criminals sought safety from the laws of the East there were found willing recruits to attend midnight meetings, characterized by inky darkness, masks, black gowns terrible oaths, and vows of vengeance on traitors to the cause of "labor" and "humanity." Thus the propaganda spread and thus the ranks of the dynamiters were kept full to repletion-until they encountered federal bayonets.

Lives of men counted for nothing. The property of their employers they treated as their own, to do with as they please. To make themselves more secure they entered politics-when permitted to remain in a place long enough to become voters. With state officers behind them, they planned to make themselves immune from punishment for their acts of crime.

Why They Hated Steunenberg.

Steunenberg was a union printer. He was Governor of Idaho from 1897 to 1901. It was thought by the lawless element of the miners' union, which dominated their organization, that the Governor's union affiliations would cause him to wink at any unlawful enterprises they might project. They did not know their man. Of a high order of intelligence, fairness was his watch word and the enforcement of the law his main object as the state's chief executive. When, therefore, he called for the aid of the United States to protect mine owners against outrageous violence, he earned the hatred of every union miner who had absorbed the murderous spirit of the "Molly Maguires," and his end could then have been foretold.

Many of the lawbreakers, when confined within the famous "bull pen" in the heart of the Coeur d'Alene mining district, and right on the scene of the principal outrages, no doubt remembered their oaths prescribing death for "traitors." His doom was sealed.

There are others who fear the same fate. They know that vengeance does not sleep in the heart of the "Molly Maguire." Now General Bell and former Governor Peabody of Colorado have expressed a belief that vendetta had been sworn against them and their lives would be attempted. They are the last two officials to come in open conflict with the dynamiting miners. They were merciless in their methods of running down and punishing the conspirators of the deadly Independence plot, when an infernal machine was planted under the railway station platform and innocent men were blown to pieces.

Dark is the chapter of events that led up to the assassination of eight days ago. Mr. Steunenberg had barely been re-elected Governor, as a Democrat, when the miners began showing their discontent. In the previous year they had sent out "feelers" to ascertain how the governor would stand in case of trouble, and they had found no reason to think that their acts would not be condoned or that the Governor and courts would not be on their side. As a matter of fact, Steunenberg had never gone further than to say that as chief executive of a growing state and as a union man, too, he wanted to see labor better itself. Never a word about violence or the means to be employed in lifting up the workingman. Certainly nothing about lifting him by dynamite.

So the strike was declared in 1899. At a later date, during a congressional inquiry, 500 witnesses told a story of lawlessness and crime that equaled if it did not exceed the black history of the Molly Maguire" ascendancy in Pennsylvania.

Admission by the labor men themselves at this inquiry showed that inoffensive men were assassinated, nine bosses and superintendents were killed in the night, and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property destroyed-all in the name of organized labor.

This organized labor consisted of the miners' unions of Burke, Gem, Wardner, and Mullan, all camps in the Coeur d'Alene district. The unions were tributary to the Western Federation of Miners that came upon the scene as a parent organization after the decay of the Knights of Labor.

There were twelve mines, employing 2,500 men in the region which the unions assumed to control. Agitators began their activities by trying to unionize the labor engaged in these twelve mines and to enforce an equality of wages without reference to the comparative case or difficulty of the work in them....

[Photograph of Governor Steunenberg added.]

SOURCES

The Salt Lake Tribune
(Salt Lake City, Utah)
-Jan 13, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/76365147/
Note: The newspapers begin to get McParland's name right in Feb of 1906.
https://www.newspapers.com/search/#query=%22James+McParland%22+pinkerton...

The Inter Ocean
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Jan 14, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/34530469

IMAGES
James McParland, Spartacus Ed
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmcparlan.htm
Gov Steunenberg, Idaho 1897-1901
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/photo.php?pid=358

See also:

James McParland re: prosecution of so-called "Molly Maguires"
& re: interaction with Orchard in 1906-07
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmcparlan.htm
Historian Mary Joy Martin argued in The Corpse On Boomerang Road (2004):

McParland would stop at nothing to take down (unions such as the Western Federation of Miners) because he believed his authority came from "Divine Providence." To carry out God's Will meant he was free to break laws and lie until every man he judged evil was hanging on the gallows. Since his days in Pennsylvania he was comfortable lying under oath. In the Haywood trial and the Adams trials, he lied frequently, even claiming he never joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Documents showed he had.

DK Tag: Cripple Creek Strike of 1903-04
http://www.dailykos.com/news/CrippleCreekStrikeof1903-04

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho labor strike of 1892
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeur_d%27Alene,_Idaho_labor_strike_of_1892

Coeur d'Alene Labor Troubles of 1899
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeur_d%27Alene,_Idaho_labor_confrontation...

The Confessions and Autobiography of Harry Orchard
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/harry_orchard_confession00.html

"Hellraisers Journal: W. F. of M. Blamed for Horrific Loss of Life
at Independence Station Explosion" by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/07/1305134/-Hellraisers-Journal-W-...

The Labor History of the Cripple Creek District; A Study in Industrial Evolution
by Benjamin McKie Rastall
Chap. V, The Final Crisis, The Sixth Day Of June. Independence Explosion And Riots
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/rastall24.html

"Ten things to understand about the Molly Maguires" by Kevin Kenny,
author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires
http://blog.oup.com/2013/12/ten-things-to-understand-about-the-molly-mag...

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Note: the attempted frame-up of the leaders of the WFM in 1906-07, came straight out of the same play book used to frame up the Miners of Pennsylvania, 1877-79.

WE NEVER FORGET
John Kehoe
Alex Campbell
Mickey Doyle
Edward Kelly
Hugh McGeehan
Thomas Munley
James Carroll
James Roarity
James Boyle
Thomas Duffy
John Donahue
Thomas Fisher
Patrick Hester
Peter McHugh
Patrick Tully
Peter McManus
Charles Sharpe
Denis Donnelly
Martin Bergan
James McDonald