• • •
Even before the humiliating end of the Long Strike, acts of violence had set in motion key sequences of events. On a sultry evening in early May, the week after his acquittal, Daniel Dougherty was shot at in Mahanoy City by one of Major’s brothers.40 Toward the end of the month, another attempt on his life came so close to success that, although unscathed, Dougherty could show the bullet holes in his coat.41
In response, John Kehoe, now the Schuylkill County delegate, called a convention of AOH bodymasters to determine how to take retribution. With McAndrew still in the north, McParlan was directed to represent the Shenandoah lodge. The convention, and the plan that came out of it, would prove to be central to several of the most sensational Molly Maguire trials.42
According to McParlan, he first found out about the meeting when he visited Kehoe on May 26. Two days later he was told by Michael O’Brien, the Mahanoy City bodymaster, that Kehoe wanted “to get about six good men, armed with navy revolvers, and he would send a man around with those men, and this man would point out to those strangers who would come who he wanted shot, and that they could do it all in one night.”43
Kehoe’s attitude had changed little by the time the meeting was held at Michael Clarke’s Emerald House on Centre Street in Mahanoy City on June 1. Present were nine lodge or county AOH officials: Kehoe, O’Brien, Northumberland County delegate Dennis Canning, Schuylkill County treasurer Chris Donnelly, Schuylkill County secretary William Gavin, Coaldale bodymaster James Roarity,44 Tuscarora bodymaster John “Yellow Jack” Donahue, McParlan representing Shenandoah, and Mahanoy City secretary Frank McHugh, who was called upon to keep the minutes. Dougherty was brought in to show the bullet holes in his coat and reported that he believed the Majors and their friend “Bully Bill” Thomas were still planning to kill him.
The response of those present was simple. As the Majors were then working at an isolated mine near Tuscarora, Donahue and Donnelly agreed “to take care of their side of the mountain” if McParlan, O’Brien, and Roarity would dispose of Thomas.45 Canning asked if they wanted any men from Northumberland County who would not be recognized, but Donnelly stated that “the job was but a light one”—meaning the seclusion of the site would prevent such problems—so they could easily do it themselves.46
As for Thomas, Kehoe—according to McParlan—stated that “the best plan was to get a couple of men well armed, and go right up to him on the street and shoot him down in daylight.”47 However, O’Brien objected to this, so McParlan and Roarity were ordered to find men for the job. McParlan notified four of the roughest he knew—Hurley, Gibbons, Michael Doyle, and Ned Monaghan—and at a lodge meeting on the side of Ringtown Mountain a few days later the first three agreed to carry out the murder the next day. When they invited McParlan to accompany them, he had no choice but to accept, lest he rouse suspicion. “I had been appointed to go, and, if I refused, I would not have lived,” because “once a deed of that kind has to be committed, any party trying to make inducements for to prevent them from doing it, they are not only expelled from the organization, but the probabilities are, in a hundred cases to one, that they shall lose their lives afterwards.”48
With the plan moving forward, McParlan contacted Franklin that night—he did not know Linden’s location—reporting that “I was satisfied that I could postpone it until perfect arrangements were made to catch them all in the trap.” After all, “[w]e wanted to catch these men right in their tracks. We could not arrest them for what we knew they were going to do, unless they did it, and we wanted to take them right in the act.”49
The next day, in Mahanoy City, he managed to postpone it, telling the others that “it was impossible to shoot Thomas, being that the military, and Coal and Iron Police was stationed all around the neighborhood; and, of course, we would be arrested. This had the desired effect.”50
McAndrew reappeared in the following days, and responsibility for overseeing the operation passed back to him. Concurrently, McParlan became ill, as he had been off and on throughout the year.51 This time, however, it was much more severe, and the doctors initially thought he might be suffering from typhoid fever. He was confined to his bed, where he was delirious for several days, and, even when better, he was ordered to stay in his house for a period of weeks in order not to tire himself.52 Being unwell did not stop him from receiving information, however, and one evening in late June, as he sat in the front stoop of his boardinghouse, McAndrew, the three intended murderers, and a mine worker named John Morris visited to let him know that Thomas would be killed in the morning. Around 9:30 P.M., after Hurley had borrowed McParlan’s coat, the men left.
Now should have been McParlan’s chance to get a message to Linden—but, he claimed, he couldn’t. Not only was he still very sick, but Michael Carey, who was scheduled to replace Doyle at work the next day, stayed until almost midnight, indicating that the doctor had not wanted McParlan left on his own. There was no way to sneak out. “I was ill at the time,” he later testified, “and even if I had been well I would not have done it, as it was as much as my life was worth to have communicated the facts to Captain Linden.”53
Early the next morning, Doyle arrived when McParlan was finishing a report to Franklin. He insisted that no matter how ill he was, McParlan had to accompany him to Ringtown Mountain. As it was right behind the boardinghouse and an easy walk of no more than three hundred yards, McParlan left home for the first time in days, and slowly ambled up to where Morris, Gibbons, and Hurley were waiting. They excitedly told him how they had lain in wait for Thomas at a stables, and when he came in to saddle his horse, first Hurley and then the others each shot him a couple of times. When he fell under one of the horses, they had escaped. The job was done—Bully Bill was dead!54 After retelling the story to McAndrew, the men went their separate ways, thinking that was the end of “a clean job.” But they were wrong—because, although seriously wounded, Thomas was clinging to life, and he would recover to see most of them in court.
CHAPTER 6
THREE DEAD MEN
By the second half of 1875 Franklin Gowen was the virtual ruler of the mining industry in the lower anthracite region. The Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company owned or leased the majority of collieries in Schuylkill County and dominated the others, the mother company controlled the shipping of coal, power was asserted by a private police force, and the Reading had significant influence over the Pennsylvania legislature. With the union in a state of final collapse, the mine workers faced diminishing wage packages, an increase to a ten-hour day, and new regulations that the Reading strictly enforced.1
Gowen realized that the only things standing in the way of achieving his vision of Schuylkill County as a stable entrepot were the unlikely revival of the WBA or actions by what McParlan had shown to be a violent subset of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.2 Neither was likely to impact the Reading’s control, but they could potentially affect the secure social order he envisioned.3 Gowen’s goal now therefore became to firmly connect the Molly Maguires to the AOH—as he had previously linked them to the union—since doing so would likely eliminate any power wielded by the order.
In July 1875, a month after the end of the Long Strike, a joint committee of the state legislature began a second inquiry into the affairs of Gowen’s empire. Once again, his masterful oration aided him, as he linked the union leadership—“a class of agitators, a few men trained in the school of the Manchester cotton-spinner, men brought here for no other purpose than to create confusion, to undermine confidence, and to stir up dissension”—to terrorist activities enumerated in a ten-page “List of Outrages” that he had created. The primary goal of the murders, assaults, arson, and property destruction, he told the legislators, was not to damage the employers’ assets, but “to intimidate the workingmen themselves and to prevent them from going to work.”4
Thus, his own purpose, Gowen proclaimed, was to serve “as the champion of the ri
ghts of labor—as the advocate of those who desire to work.”5 He wanted to help those workers who faced “a tyranny and a despotism such as neither khan nor caliph ever exercised, and such as in the wildest dream of power was ne’er conceived by sultan or by czar,” one that “rewards submission by starvation, and which punishes disobedience by a ghastly and a horrible death.”6 By the time Gowen had concluded speaking of this “tyranny which holds thousands of men in subjection, and which I ask you to do your utmost to destroy,”7 there were few listeners who would not agree that the only way to protect the labor force and achieve peace was to bring the conspirators linking the WBA, AOH, and Molly Maguires to swift and final justice.
• • •
Gowen’s arguments were legitimized to the public by a rampage of violence in the months following the end of the Long Strike. In the most deadly period yet, at least six killings were attributed to the Molly Maguires. For a while this was perceived as opposition to the owners, and it made the organization popular. “Applications from men to join the association are very numerous,” McParlan wrote, adding that “men who last winter would not notice a ‘Molly Maguire’ are now glad to take them by the hand and make much of them. If the bosses exercise tyranny over the men they appear to look to the association for help.”8
The growing troubles actually indicated exactly the opposite of what Gowen implied: The WBA was a key force in preventing such violence and was a strong opponent of the Molly Maguires. However, this point did not sink in with many, although it was clear to McParlan: “Now you can see yourself, how this is, and what I predicted at the time of the suspension—‘that if the Union would fail there would be rough times.’ . . . [T]here was very little killing a doing whilst Union stood, but now it is quite the reverse.”9
The first of those killings occured within a week of the botched assassination of Bully Bill Thomas. The Fourth of July was a Sunday, and with many AOH members seriously liquored, McParlan—who was still recovering his health—heard about a plan to murder a mine boss named Fresythe, who had discharged a miner called Patrick Garvey. Remarkably, even Tom Hurley, one of the most vicious of the bunch, felt this was a step too far, saying that Fresythe had fired Garvey for insolence, and that if he had been boss he would have done the same. That did not satisfy several others, however, and the next day at a picnic held to celebrate the national holiday that fell on Monday the fifth, McParlan was told that “if the boys in Shenandoah were willing, they were going to finish Fresythe that night after the dance.” McParlan quickly made an excuse to leave and went to notify Linden, who saw to it that Fresythe disappeared.
A few hours later—very early on the morning of July 6—Benjamin Yost, a thirty-four-year-old policeman in Tamaqua, fifteen miles east of Shenandoah, was not so lucky. Born in Schuylkill County of German parents, Yost had been appointed to his position only two years before, but his no-nonsense approach and his ethnic background quickly earned him the intense dislike of several Irish miners, particularly Jimmy “Powderkeg” Kerrigan, the tiny but volatile bodymaster in Tamaqua. Yost had arrested Kerrigan for drunkenness several times, at least once beating him with his baton for resisting being taken into custody. Such events led to threats against Yost, but being a hardened war veteran, he dismissed any attempted intimidation.
One of the duties Yost and his Irish police partner, Barney McCarron, carried out before retiring each night was extinguishing the town’s gas streetlamps. At two in the morning Yost was climbing a ladder to put out the last one—outside his own home, from where his wife was watching him through the window—when two men approached through the shadows and shot him twice. The thinly clad Mrs. Yost raced out to her husband who, blood spurting from his chest, could only faintly mumble, “Sis, give me a kiss! I’m shot and I have to die!”11
Meanwhile, McCarron, who had wandered down the street the other way, came running back to give chase. He fired at the assassins, but they managed to escape in the dark. Carried into his home, Yost died in agony about seven hours later, after indicating that he thought his assailants were two men he and McCarron had seen earlier that night when they stopped by Union House, a tavern run by James Carroll, the secretary of the Tamaqua AOH. When asked, both Yost and McCarron were certain that Kerrigan, who had joined them for a drink, was not one of the killers, because his height—five feet at a push—made him easily identifiable.
The murder of Yost did not immediately send McParlan into action, because he had not heard a single word about an attempt on the policeman’s life and had no idea that the Molly Maguires might be involved. Moreover, the next day he was sent to Pottsville for what Franklin initially thought a much more significant assignment. The members of the legislative committee hearing testimony about the Reading had decided to spend several days there, and Gowen accompanied them. McParlan’s orders were to pass on a warning if any of the Molly Maguires mentioned plans to attack Gowen or the other participants.
For most of his three and a half days there, McParlan found considerable grumbling but little concerted action from the men he was supposed to monitor, so he spent much of the period with Linden, smoking and planning future contacts.12 But then he noticed a suspicious-looking man who more than once appeared near Gowen. McParlan put him under surveillance, and followed the man to several drinking establishments frequented by Molly Maguires, including Dormer’s tavern and that of Danny Hughes. The man finally left his last bar after ten that night, scurrying along and looking about in such an apprehensive manner that McParlan had no doubt that the time for mischief had arrived. He tailed the man to a small house, followed him over a garden fence, and looked through the kitchen window when the man entered the house. Able to see and hear everything, McParlan was shocked to find that the man was, in fact, only carrying on a relationship with the cook in the back apartment of the house!
Uncertain if he needed to wait any longer, McParlan crossed the street to sit briefly under a large tree, but within moments he heard someone coming up behind him. Taking off his boot and fiddling with it as if it had a hole, McParlan hoped whoever it was would pass by. But the newcomer turned out to be a rather drunken policeman, who told the detective to get on the move. As McParlan pulled on his boot, the man suddenly cracked him over the head with a heavy blow from his club. A second stroke went wide, and McParlan managed to escape down the street before the policeman could take further action.13
• • •
McParlan’s bruised and broken forehead was only just healing when he received an unexpected order to investigate Yost’s murder. The decision came on the heels of Franklin receiving a commission from the policeman’s close friends Michael Beard and Daniel Shepp—the latter also Yost’s brother-in-law—who were on a borough council committee formed to ensure the killers did not escape.14 McParlan, who had long used a fictitious sister as one of his reasons to explain his traveling to Philadelphia to meet Franklin, now told McAndrew that he had to disappear, because she had warned him that detectives from Buffalo would be searching for him in Shenandoah.
If McParlan had truly wanted to lie low, he went about it the wrong way, as he made a boisterous entrance into Tamaqua on July 15 by spending large sums treating AOH members to prodigious amounts of alcohol, first at Carroll’s tavern—where he said he was out on “a bit of a spree”—then five miles on, at the liquor store of Alexander Campbell, the treasurer at Storm Hill in Carbon County, and finally the saloons of Patrick McKenna, the Summit Hill bodymaster, and Thomas Fisher, the former Carbon County delegate for the AOH. One of McParlan’s most effective methods of gathering intelligence was encouraging his targets to drink so much that they finally lost any inhibitions about passing on information they might otherwise have kept to themselves. Meanwhile, he had developed a sophisticated technique of staying relatively sober, by claiming he preferred to switch his drinks back and forth between whiskey and gin, and then swapping the gin with the water inevitably also sitting on the counter, deftly throwing
the liquor out the door, and imbibing large quantities of the water. This trip was a clear example of how alcohol was a key component of his investigation, as his costs for “treating” to whiskey (at a nickel a glass) were $6.85 on the fifteenth and $5.20 two days later.15
Whether due to the drink or not, his investigation moved ahead quickly. First, Carroll acknowledged that it was “a clean job well done” and then Campbell “walked with me from his own house at Storm Hill to Summit Hill [just south of Lansford] and on our way we talked of this murder. . . . He said it was a very clean job. He guessed they would not have bothered with it but it was done on a trade.”16
The previous year McParlan had reported about the way lodges exchanged men to carry out beatings and murder, thus avoiding being identified. This was clearly such a case, but who was the other target? The next day he visited McKenna’s saloon in Storm Hill and took the landlord’s son Mike into an adjacent vacant lot to talk. Having primed the younger man with stories of his own involvement in crime, McParlan was told in return the basic background of the Yost murder, which had been carried out by two men from Summit Hill—Hugh McGehan and James Boyle—in an exchange of killings. In the following days and weeks, McParlan conducted one of his most successful investigations, discovering the stunning details of how such an operation actually worked.17
Apparently Yost had made deadly enemies of Kerrigan and Thomas Duffy, another member of the Tamaqua AOH, the previous winter. While breaking up a fight between Kerrigan and a man named Flynn, McCarron had tried to restrain Kerrigan, who was then stabbed by Flynn. When a drunken Duffy became involved in the scuffle, Yost and McCarron proceeded to knock him about before taking him to jail. After Duffy had paid a fine to be released, he and Kerrigan shared a bottle with Carroll, who—Kerrigan later testified—said: “Never mind, we will make Yost pay for this. We will make his head softer than his arse for what he done to you.”18
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