Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  Within hours of the discovery, Harry Morse, a local detective, was on the scene, and his biographer claims that he quickly determined the identity of the thief.18 However, no arrest was made until the following day, when W. B. Sayers, by then superintendent of Pinkerton’s San Francisco office; former San Francisco police chief Isaiah Lees; and John Seymour, the captain of San Francisco detectives, tracked a man called Buck Taylor—a former employee at the plant who had been acting suspiciously—to his girlfriend’s house in San Rafael.

  Later that day McParland joined the three officials and interrogated Taylor in the police “sweatbox” in San Francisco. Initially, despite the discovery of Taylor’s cap in the tunnel and several items at his home being covered with tunnel mud, he denied any involvement. But McParland persisted until the prisoner “understood perfectly from me that we had all the evidence to convict him and give him a long term in prison. I warned him that he would never have a chance to get near the bullion he had stolen. I told him that if he was in prison for thirty years, when he came out we would have a man with him day and night until he died.”19

  Hoping that returning the gold would mean a lighter sentence, Taylor confessed, admitted that he was Jack Winters, a longtime criminal from the East Coast, and turned over the bullion. He had dropped it into thick mud that at low tide was covered by only about a foot of water, at a place down the coastline from the smelting plant, hidden behind coal bunkers at the end of a railroad wharf.

  “I am convinced that Winters stole the bullion solely with the idea of securing a big reward,” McParland announced. “His work was crude and he left a clear trail behind him. His idea was to join in the hunt for the gold and when a large reward was offered to fish it up in the presence of witnesses and claim the reward. I consider Winters a far more dangerous criminal under these circumstances than one who intended to get away with his plunder. . . . Our organization secured the evidence against him and the prosecutors will not be delayed.”20 McParland was not wrong about the timing: A little more than a week later, Winters was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  • • •

  At the dawn of the twentieth century Pinkerton’s was synonymous to many union men not with solving crimes but with undercover operatives subverting labor. At McParland’s direction, the previous few years had seen secret operatives infiltrating more and more unions. This pattern had actually been restarted in 1896, when the Cloud City Miners Union, a local branch of the WFM, went on strike in Leadville, Colorado, one of the world’s major sources of lead ore.

  In September of that year the union demanded a pay raise of fifty cents per day for all workers not making at least three dollars daily, returning them to the pre-1893 level.21 The mine owners, who had agreed to be bound by the decision of their majority, making it impossible for the union to play one against the other,22 offered a sliding wage scale tied to the price of silver and lead. This was rejected, leading to nearly a thousand miners striking and the owners locking out more.

  The owners began hiring undercover agents from both Pinkerton’s and the Thiel Detective Service Company to keep them apprised of union decisions and activities.23 They also brought in nonunion workers—primarily from Missouri, where there was stronger opposition to unions24 The strikers attempted to persuade them not to go into the mines, but when that proved unsuccessful the union ordered one hundred rifles, ten to fifteen pistols, and ammunition.25

  On September 21, union members attacked the Coronado and Emmet mines—both of which had been using nonunion miners—causing an estimated fifty thousand dollars in damage by dynamiting an oil tank and a wooden structure. Three union members and a fireman were killed, leading Colorado governor Albert McIntire to send in troops. With armed forces protecting the mines, the violence soon ended.26 By February 1897, most of the miners had gone back to work or moved to other areas.27 However, the actions had driven the two opposing forces further apart than ever.

  The WFM leaders, particularly new president Ed Boyce, quickly adopted more militant policies. At the 1897 WFM convention, Boyce stated: “I strongly advise you to provide every member with the latest improved rifle . . . so that in two years we can hear the inspiring music of the martial tread of 25,000 armed men in the ranks of labor.”28 Boyce also campaigned for the WFM to adopt socialism and fight for “the over-throw of the profit-making system.” His vision and vigor made him the role model for new union firebrand Bill Haywood.29

  Following the Leadville strike, mine owners’ associations turned to undercover agents. They were not all McParland’s men: The key supplier in the 1899 Coeur d’Alene labor confrontation—when union men blew up the Bunker Hill concentrator in Wardner—was the Thiel Detective Service Company. Wilson S. Swain—Thiel’s manager in Spokane and a man McParland loathed30—inserted operative Edward L. Zimmerman into a local union in the Coeur d’Alenes. Zimmerman was soon elected financial secretary, allowing him to destabilize the union from within,31 and giving both Zimmerman and Swain star status with some of the Idaho mine owners, thereby providing Thiel the upper hand with them. Conversely, Pinkerton’s was the agency of choice for the mine owners in Colorado, particularly in Telluride and Cripple Creek. It was there that McParland’s secret operatives would wage a deadly war with the WFM.

  Although not all detectives did undercover work, being visible did not necessarily make them more popular. In 1900, in an effort to stop “high-grading”—the theft of high-quality ore as miners exited the mines—eight companies in the Cripple Creek region required everyone working underground to undress and pass naked before a detective prior to getting dressed in the next room. Two such checks were carried out at the Independence Mine at Victor before the miners refused to comply. Eventually mine owners agreed to stop using Pinkerton’s agents for the process, men would strip down only to their underclothes to pass between changing rooms, and anyone suspected of high-grading would be searched by a union representative with a guard present.32 The decision was seen as a WFM victory, because it also included an agreement that the mines would hire only union men.

  Two years later, more serious trouble arose. In 1902, Boyce was replaced as president by Charles Moyer, and the union’s new secretary-treasurer became the volatile socialist Haywood. That autumn, in response to fears about Haywood’s revolutionary ideas, Republican James Peabody—a reactionary candidate of the propertied classes33—was elected Colorado governor. Meanwhile, in a referendum, Colorado voters approved by a 3-to-1 margin an amendment to the state constitution limiting the working day to eight hours. However, neither the legislature nor the new governor acted upon the amendment, thereby letting it die and drawing from muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker the comment: “Rarely has there been in this country a more brazen, conscienceless defeat of the will of the people.”34 The eight-hour working day would be a primary cause of the labor strife soon to follow.

  Among the key groups still working a twelve-hour day were the smelters in Colorado City, a bleak little place near the base of Pikes Peak. Not long after Moyer and Haywood took charge, the WFM organized them into a union.35 Charles MacNeill, the general manager of the United States Reduction and Refining Company (USRRC) was one of the most vehement antiunion operators in the state. He promptly turned to Pinkerton’s, which inserted operative A. H. Crane into the union.36 When Crane was elected secretary of the union he was able to supply MacNeill with the names of members, who MacNeill began discharging, firing twenty-three on the same day in February.

  The union immediately demanded the men be reinstated and pay raised for all workers. When MacNeill refused, the union called a strike. Within a short time, Crane’s role was exposed. Informants later confessed to McParland that “Heywood [sic] had offered fifteen hundred dollars for the assassination of [Crane]. . . . Heywood said it was a nice state of affairs to think that when they organized a union of smelter and mill men they elected for their secretary a detective, and he had to be taught a lesson, an
d the best way to teach him was to kill him, and show that detective agencies could not place men within their ranks.” Several attempts on Crane’s life were unsuccessful, before he was given a “good licking” and “put aboard a train and told to never return.”37

  Despite the presence of other Pinkerton’s operatives in Colorado City, Victor, and Florence,38 MacNeill requested help from the governor, who, over the objections of local authorities, sent in the National Guard. In a short time the troops broke up the picket lines, began protecting replacement workers, and searched the homes of union supporters. But heavy political pressure forced Peabody to negotiate an accord, and a tentative agreement was reached. The National Guard withdrew, the picket lines disappeared, two of the three mills were unionized, and the USRRC agreed to reemploy those men who had been fired.

  In July 1903, after the legislature adjourned without passing laws pertaining to the eight-hour day, men working for the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) of Denver requested that Franklin Guiterman, the general manager, reduce their workday by four hours, to the agreed limit.39 When he refused, the local union went on strike against the two main mills in Denver, and the Colorado City union followed suit when it became obvious MacNeill would not fulfill his promises at USRRC. After a tense month, about thirty-five hundred miners in Cripple Creek joined them, thereby drying up the supply of ore to the mills, effectively shutting them down.

  Within days, Guiterman requested an operative from Pinkerton’s. McParland supplied A. W. Gratias, and personally oversaw the operation. The union members soon recognized Gratias’s abilities, and he was elected secretary of the local.40 McParland then ordered him to agitate among the men for strike benefits, so that the WFM would be forced to pay them. When this was accomplished, the grateful strikers elected Gratias chairman of the relief committee, allowing him to control payments. At McParland’s instruction, he paid the strikers extremely liberally, helping to drain the federation’s treasury while becoming so popular he was elected president. The next year, with the strike still dragging on, Haywood objected to the payments. McParland thereupon ordered them cut, so that the strikers could barely make ends meet. This, he hoped, would throw blame on Haywood, resulting in his dismissal and the appointment of a less able opponent. The plan did not work, but it did make life difficult for Haywood.

  “At first we had been giving out relief at such a rate that I had to tell the chairman that he was providing the smelter men with more than they had had while at work,” Haywood wrote. “Then he cut down the rations until the wives of the smelter men began to complain that they were not getting enough to eat. Years later . . . I discovered that the chairman of the relief committe [sic] was a Pinkerton detective, who was carrying out the instructions of the agency in . . . deliberately trying to stir up bad feeling between the strikers and the relief committee.”41

  Meanwhile, soon after the strike started, members of the Citizens’ Alliance—a large, well-funded group organized to support the mine and mill owners42—began pressuring shopkeepers and merchants to stop extending credit, further increasing hardship for the strikers. When the mines reopened with nonunion workers from Missouri and Minnesota, tensions mounted and sporadic violence followed, including, on August 29, the burning of the shaft house at the Sunset-Eclipse Mine.43 That was all the mine owners needed to appeal to Peabody for a return of the National Guard. When the governor dithered due to expense, the owners agreed to pay.

  By the end of September more than one thousand troops had been sent to Cripple Creek under the command of Sherman Bell, the state’s adjutant general. Bell made no bones about his goals. “I came to do up this damned anarchistic federation,” he said, adding that he intended to “[k]ill ’em—when one of ’em pokes his head up, slug it—shoot ’em down—exterminate ’em.”44 When labor leaders protested that the National Guard exceeded its authority by holding union men without charge, suspending the right of habeas corpus, shutting down newspapers, and denying the right to free assembly, Thomas McClelland, judge advocate of the National Guard and one of Bell’s cronies, spat out: “To hell with the Constitution; we are not following the Constitution!”45

  By this time the strike had spread throughout the state. Efforts had also been made to organize the bituminous coal miners in central and southern Colorado, but the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had hired Pinkerton’s undercover agents to thwart such attempts. McParland’s operatives were so successful that one was named the national organizer for the United Mine Workers at the same time that he was helping prevent the formation of a local.46

  As dissatisfaction mounted on both sides, violence increased. In November, an attempt was made to derail a train carrying replacement miners by pulling spikes from the tracks. No one died, but killing had already been a part of the scene at Telluride, where Arthur Collins, the Cornish manager of the Smuggler-Union Mine, was murdered in his parlor by an assailant who blasted him through the window with a shotgun while he and three friends played bridge whist.47 The killing led to Collins’s replacement by Bulkeley Wells, who became one of the most vehemently antiunion managers in Colorado, and in April 1905 succeeded Bell as adjutant general of the National Guard.

  Almost a year to the day later—on November 21, 1903—an explosion at the six-hundred-foot level of the nonunion Vindicator Mine outside of Goldfield killed the superintendent and the shift boss, who were descending in a cage. This occurred despite the presence of the National Guard, leading to the claim that it had been perpetrated by the mine owners to make it look like a union atrocity. Two months later, a cable hauling sixteen nonunion miners to the surface at the nearby Independence Mine was cut, and all but one were killed when the cage dropped down the shaft. Arrests were made, but nothing was proven.

  For months the strike ground on.48 Then, early in the morning of June 6, 1904, a large gang of workers from the Findley Mine were at the Independence depot waiting for their train when a colossal explosion rocked the area, destroying much of the station, killing thirteen, seriously injuring six, and flinging arms, legs, and torsos hundreds of yards in every direction. The cause of the explosion: 150 to 200 pounds of dynamite placed beneath the station.

  Events moved quickly thereafter—owners and the Citizens’ Alliance lay the blame on the WFM, as all of the casualties had been nonunion workers. Within hours the local sheriff, a member of the WFM, was forced to resign, as a coiled rope was dangled in front of him with the threat of being handed over to a mob. The new sheriff, Edward Bell, was a member of the Mine Owners’ Association, and he rapidly appointed a hundred new deputies.

  Bell then accompanied Clarence C. Hamlin, the secretary of the Mine Owners’ Association, to a large lot in Victor—about six miles from Independence—where several thousand people had gathered. Perched above the crowd on top of a wagon, Hamlin proclaimed: “The badge of the Western Federation of Miners is a badge of murder, and everyone who is responsible for the outrage at Independence should be driven from the district.”49 As things turned ugly, about fifty union men fled to the union hall for protection. Sheriff Bell demanded they leave, and when they refused, a group opened fire, wounding four before the others surrendered. Hamlin’s call went far and wide, and Citizens’ Alliance members smashed union halls and wrecked four WFM cooperative stores. They also occupied several union mines. By that night, hundreds of union men had been detained and placed in hurriedly built bullpens in Victor, Goldfield, and other communities.

  Individuals who were not part of the union but were sympathetic to it were also taken into custody. That night, McParland’s brother Edward, a shoemaker in Victor, was forcibly taken from his shop. “They marched me up the street and about every five steps I got a blow from a gun across the kidneys until I reached the bullpen,” he testified.50 He was left there for four days with two hundred other men, after which seventy-three of them were marched to a train between lines of deputy sheriffs and militia with fixed bayonets. They were forced
aboard and “at five o’clock on Sunday morning we were dumped off in a swamp at the Kansas line and three volleys were fired over our heads with the instructions, ‘don’t come back under the penalty of death.’”51

  Edward’s case was not uncommon. Within days, a seven-man commission was appointed to determine who had the “right to remain” in Cripple Creek. People wishing to stay were required to renounce any allegiance to the WFM and needed a card issued by the Mine Owners’ Association to gain employment. Within a few months the commission “tried” 1,569 men, of whom more than 230—including elected officials—were deported to Kansas or New Mexico. Sherman Bell did not mind that they had not been legally convicted. “They are men against whom crime can not be specified,” he stated, “but their presence is regarded as dangerous to law and order.”52 Numerous other union workers and sympathizers were beaten and driven from the region in a violent process known as “whitecapping” for the masks worn by the perpetrators.53

  These events—known as the Colorado Labor Wars—had more losers than those run out of the state. The strike in Denver resulted in the closing of ASARCO’s giant Grant Smelter, leaving its plant unoccupied and its 375 employees out of work. Its massive 350-foot chimney was a sad reminder of the strife until it was demolished in 1950 to make way for the Denver Coliseum.54 The political process was also a loser. Governor Peabody’s handling of the strikes gave powerful ammunition to his opposition when he ran for a second term in 1904. Former Democratic governor Alva Adams apparently won the election, but the Republican-controlled legislature voted to unseat him due to voter fraud. Siringo later confirmed this, writing that he “voted eight times, as per McParland’s orders—three times before the same election judges.” But Peabody’s side was equally at fault, and he was declared winner only upon condition that he resign immediately after taking the oath of office. He was succeeded by Republican lieutenant governor Jesse F. McDonald, giving Colorado three different governors in one day.55