Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  As it turned out, it was not only Eneas who was taken from McParland. Not long after, his nephew’s young widow, Emily—who was also a favorite of McParland and Mary—took her sons Francis, aged two and a half, and Eneas James, seven months, to New Zealand, where they settled with the children’s grandfather, McParland’s older brother Frank.6

  McParland’s distress at these personal losses was intensified during this time by also being under vicious attack as part of an intensive campaign on behalf of Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone by Appeal to Reason, the weekly political newspaper published in Girard, Kansas, “as an advocate of International Socialism.”7 The campaign started with a lead article by labor leader Eugene Debs, in which he declared: “If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.”8

  Soon thereafter, Appeal to Reason began aggressively attacking those people and organizations perceived as enemies to labor, including the governors, legislators, and judicial systems of Idaho and Colorado, the mine owners’ associations, and the Pinkerton’s and Thiel agencies. But a particular object of its venom was McParland. More than Gooding, McDonald, Hawley, or Orchard, more than other investigators, in fact more than any other individual, McParland was the target of vicious diatribes penned by George Shoaf, P. M. Eastwood, or Walter Hurt. His operations against the Molly Maguires and many years of antiunion activities meant that McParland had been bitterly criticized for years in the labor press. Yet these condemnations paled compared to the defamatory articles that were now churned out, particularly by the rabid Shoaf.

  Born in Lockhart, Texas, in 1875, Shoaf had early fallen under the spell of Debs and wanted to be someone who could inspire common people to fight for economic emancipation and socialism.9 However, after starting in journalism in San Antonio, he moved to William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Morning American, which gave him a powerful introduction to “yellow journalism,” and encouraged him to “sidetrack idealism, and pursue the capitalist newspaper game.”10 In 1903, Shoaf found himself able to unite sensationalism and idealism when he joined Appeal to Reason while continuing to write for the Hearst newspapers. Sent to Colorado to cover the conflicts between the WFM and the mine owners, he met Haywood, whom he idolized. He also came across his bête noire—James McParland.

  Shoaf detested McParland, and initiated Appeal to Reason’s practice of calling him “McPartland” in order to tie him to a highly publicized murderer of the same name. He also created the stories linking McParland to Jake McLaughlin in Parsons, Kansas, claiming without evidence that the detective had committed murders beyond count—“crouched in the shadow there with a clenched dagger . . . . An unexpected thrust from behind is in perfect keeping.”11

  Such sensational stories had a certain irony coming from a man who had hoped to commit murder himself. As he wrote:

  Vincent St John . . . and myself were blood brothers in our hatred of capitalism and in our desire to liquidate the damnable economy with force and violence. . . . St John and I concocted a plan to assassinate Pinkerton Detective James McParlan. . . . [I]f we slew the detective chief, the act would put the fear of God in the hearts of Colorado capitalists. . . . For days and nights we camped on the trail of the detective chief, but his ever present body guard of several huskies prevented us from getting near enough, . . . [but] St John and I had murder in our hearts.12

  Little wonder that McParland hoped to find incriminating evidence about St. John. Meanwhile, Shoaf continued to besmirch the detective’s reputation. “McPartland, the premier thug of Pinkerton’s aggregation of assassins,” he raved, “seems utterly to lack all those qualities that attract and which might attach to himself the sympathy or affection of others of his species. He is the one person on record who can not claim a single friend. In all other known cases, even the vilest of human vermin holds the regard of some creature of its kind. But McPartland not only is cut off from the rest of his race, but even the dogs of the street, informed by instinct, slink away at his approach.”13

  Shoaf’s talent for plumbing journalistic depths was perhaps only matched by his colleague Walter Hurt, who wrote: “McPartland is a degenerate whose particular perversion is the shedding of human blood—and to gratify his idiosyncrasy to the greatest extent the blood should be that of an innocent person.” Then, having warmed up, he concluded: “Were the world’s supply of emetic poured down the hot throat of hell, the ultimate imp of the last vile vomit would be an archangel in good standing compared with this feculent fiend.”14

  • • •

  While Appeal to Reason battered him, and his personal losses weighed heavily on him, McParland went about the business of locating evidence to support the confessions. Among the first materials he sought were five bottles of what Adams called Pettibone dope, or hellfire—an incendiary mixture of phosphorus, bisulfide of carbon, alcohol, benzine, and turpentine that could not be extinguished by water and was similar to what in the Middle Ages had been called Greek Fire.15 The bottles of this primitive form of napalm had been produced by Pettibone during the Cripple Creek strike. With nonunion miners traveling there from the Coeur d’Alenes, Moyer ordered Adams to Pocatello, where he could throw the concoction in a window when he saw a cab full of strikebreakers heading south. Finding the scheme impractical because strikebreakers did not travel in the same car together, Adams abandoned the idea and buried the bottles.

  On March 27, a party including McParland, Thiele, Gooding, Warden Whitney, Adams, and a pair of newspaper reporters traveled to Pocatello to try to find the hellfire.16 Although uncertain the bottles could be used in the trial, McParland still wanted them for public relations reasons: “[T]he trades and labor assemblies and other unions have been passing resolutions condemning the action of . . . extraditing these men, we wished to show to the public the class of men the labor organizations were trying to represent as good citizens.”17

  Adams eventually identified what he thought was the old mill in which he had buried the bottles, and after a great deal of digging, a glass stopper and a bucket that might have contained the bottles were discovered. The next day, with the help of a few locals, a large amount of fused glass that had been moved from that location a year or two before was found, suggesting that it had once been the bottles for which they had searched, and that had melted due to the mixture they were holding. The evidence was far from definitive, but McParland nevertheless declared the mission a huge success.18

  Through much of April, McParland continued to interview Orchard and Adams, in hopes of gleaning small details that had been left out of their earlier confessions. Although Orchard acknowledged having previously told falsehoods, McParland still believed he “is a true penitent, notwithstanding all the crimes that he committed, and notwithstanding his weakness, is not a bad man at heart, and if he had fallen into good company he would still be a good citizen.”19

  As his reports show, McParland also believed that both confessions were honest and genuine,20 and he organized a number of missions to prove their accuracy. Orchard’s stories, for example, led McParland to seek the spade the killer had used for hiding the bomb to murder former governor Peabody, as well as to obtain a statement from the secretary of the San Francisco bartenders union, who had helped Orchard collect a registered letter from Pettibone, which included several hundred dollars needed for the assassination of Fred Bradley.21

  McParland also sought the identity of a man in Denver, who, one night while Orchard was planting a bomb, “came across the path. The man came on him so suddenly that Orchard did not observe him until he was right beside him; then Orchard feigned that he was drunk. The man spoke to him but Orchard lay with his face to the ground pretending that he was drunk and said he would be all right in a little while, and the man passed on.”22 Hoping to show Orchard had been in Seattle in September 1905, McParland wrote to P. K. Ahern, superintendent in that city, that: “There is no doubt but what he called on severa
l real estate offices, more especially such real estate men as deal in farms and ranches. . . . [T]ake Orchard’s picture and make a careful canvass of all the real estate offices.”23

  At the same time, McParland tried to corroborate Adams’s confession, asking Cary in Denver to find “Andy Stark, who was either superintendent or foreman of Vindicator No. 2” when Adams and two other men reputedly severely beat him. Further, he ordered Thiele to go to Ogden, Utah, to “investigate the statement made by Adams relative to the time that he was arrested in company with [Ed] Minster, . . . wherein Detective Mason of Ogden at the request of Adams wired Heywood [sic] for seventy-five dollars, which Heywood subsequently sent. . . . There is no doubt but what Adams says . . . is true, but the point is to get the corroboration.”24

  Throughout these investigations, McParland insisted on keeping discoveries secret, so as not to help the defense. “[I]n investigating such matters as this letter contains you must impress upon the parties called upon the necessity of keeping these matters secret,” he instructed Cary, “and also try to find out whether or not they would be willing to come to Caldwell, Idaho, and testify.”25

  Even more secret was a plan to take Adams to Telluride to find the body of William Barney, a one-time stonemason at the Smuggler-Union Mine who disappeared in June 1901 and was rumored to have been killed by members of the WFM, including St. John. It was one of at least four disappearances speculated to be murder.26 It was also one of the deaths that Adams had confessed to knowing about. “I helped to move the body of Barney from the place where he was first killed,” he was quoted by Hawley as stating. “Assisted O.N. [sic] Carpenter to do this. Mr Carpenter seemed to know I had killed Collins and that I was a safe man. He told me that St. John had once moved this body and had buried it but wanted it moved again. I did so and can take you to the place where the body is now buried.”27

  The idea of taking Adams to Colorado came to McParland within a couple weeks of Adams’s confession. At that time Adams had mentioned reburying Barney with the help of a man named Kelly, who disappeared from later reports and was replaced by Carpenter, the secretary of the Telluride union when St. John was president. As Carpenter was one of the men McParland hoped to prove was involved in the Steunenberg murder, this convenient alteration seems more than a little suspicious.28 It also led to one of the more bizarre footnotes to McParland’s reports. Commenting on a meeting with Adams on March 14, the detective recorded:

  I took up the matter of the location of Barney’s body, and he again informed me that it would be utterly impossible for him to describe where they put this body, and except by the best of luck it would take him personally a couple or three hours to locate this body. He said, however, he was satisfied he could locate it, but it was impossible for him to describe just where they put it. He said the time he was out riding with Kelly-the-bum when he got the latter to indicate where the body of Barney was located that he and Kelly met General Bulkeley Wells going into Telluride.29

  How Kelly the Bum was transported from 1870s Pennsylvania to twentieth-century Colorado is a mystery. McParland’s reports were typed by a stenographer, in theory checked by McParland, then forwarded to the Denver office and, at least officially, on to William Pinkerton, who signed off on them before they were sent to Governor Gooding. That such a faux pas could get through that many stages of the agency’s rigorous process is astonishing.

  • • •

  Although not directly relevant to the Steunenberg case, the idea of finding Barney’s remains did not fade away. Rather, it became a significant part of McParland’s ongoing investigation for one primary reason: money. The Steunenberg inquiry was not only one of the largest ever mounted by Pinkerton’s, it was also one of the most costly, involving fees for several of the highest-paid attorneys in Idaho and numerous other costs. Neither Idaho nor Canyon County were able to pay for all this, and Gooding was extremely worried because he had ill-advisedly signed the financial guarantee that the agency always required previous to starting an investigation. This meant that if the State did not pay, Gooding himself would be liable for the charges.30 Although the Idaho mine owners were covering some expenses, there were political pressures—including from President Theodore Roosevelt—not to let them be seen to be behind the prosecution of a case so flagrantly in their interests, as opposed to those of the workingman. So the money trickled rather than poured in.

  The problem was suddenly resolved when Hawley received a letter from Bulkeley Wells setting up a new—and confidential—fiscal conduit. “The various parties in interest in Colorado have retained in the interest of you gentlemen in Idaho, who are prosecuting these cases, Mr Jacob Filius [sic] of Denver, an attorney of long and large experience and one in whom we all have the greatest confidence.”31 They were not the only ones with such confidence. Any lawyer involved in labor issues knew of the fifty-nine-year-old Fillius, who was general counsel for the Smuggler-Union Mine and Wells’s other holdings, as well as principal legal counsel for the Colorado Mining Association (CMA), the organization uniting the state’s mine owners. Now those engaged in the death struggle with the WFM found themselves flush with funds, as the Colorado owners saw the chance of eliminating the hated unions while ostensibly keeping their own hands clean. As Lukas observed: “Their message to their counterparts in Idaho was blunt: Here are the bodies, here is the money, please kill them for us.”32

  Fillius was also an old friend of McParland’s,33 which was not surprising, as the detective had long before helped establish Pinkerton’s as an essential service provider for the Colorado mine owners, and had become particularly enmeshed with Wells. It was Wells who exerted the pressure to rid the CMA not just of the three men awaiting trial in Boise but of one of Wells’s greatest annoyances—Vincent St. John. In early March, Cary wired McParland: “Wells suggests get sketch from Adams location Barney’s body, mail it to Telluride. Wells goes there Sunday night, motive, exhume body before others interested dispose same.”34

  McParland was unable to act on Wells’s demands immediately, but the adjutant general persisted, and on April 17, the two met with Hawley and Fillius to discuss the case. “During our conference the matter came up as to how Steve Adams could be taken from Boise to Telluride in order to locate the place where Barney’s body is buried,” McParland reported, continuing:

  We readily agreed on a plan whereby this could be done without any person knowing that Steve Adams was in Colorado, but the matter will have to be taken up with Gov. Gooding and Mr Borah as the former and probably both would object to letting Adams out of the state until after the trial. . . . We are placed in a very peculiar position; it is all important that we should recover the body of Barney before Carpenter might take a notion to have the same removed, and while there is no risk in taking Adams into Colorado so far as anybody recognizing him is concerned, still there is one risk, that is in case of an accident and Adams getting killed we lost the most important witness we have got.35

  With snow blanketing Telluride, it was not a good time to start digging for corpses, but Wells did not let the others forget his intentions and brought the idea up again at a meeting in Denver on May 2.36 Finally, at the end of the month, the plan went ahead, with Wells, deputy warden Mills, and Telluride Marshal Willard Runnels taking Adams to Colorado. He was guarded day and night and kept for three days at the Smuggler-Union office in Pandora.37 Due to the snow making the area unrecognizable to Adams, nothing was accomplished, but he did tell McParland, “[I]f General Wells is not able to discover this body after the snow has gone he could go there at night just as he did at the time that Carpenter and he re-buried the body, and could uncover it, as there is no doubt about it providing that it has not been removed, and he does not believe it has.”38

  Five days later Adams had another long talk with McParland, in which he revealed gruesome details about Barney’s body, including that Carpenter, who “took sick at his stomach as he could not stand the stench,” le
ft most of the work to Adams. “He said he [Adams] just pulled the feet out of the sockets at the knees and put them into the sack, then pulled the thigh bones out of the socket at the hips and put them in the sack. He said the magots had got their work in in the intestines and were just in black balls about the size of eggs.”39

  Yet another three weeks passed, and Wells—still searching—told McParland that he had discovered a sack containing boots and some pieces of bone, and asked “if it might not be possible that some of the bones were placed in the sack that contained the clothing and boots. He would also like . . . [to] have Adams draw a description showing the location of the body to the place where the boots and clothes were buried.”40 Adams obliged, but the map was so vague, it was useless. And when McParland raised the idea of Adams returning to Colorado,41 the notion was forcefully rejected by the attorneys. Despite Wells’s financial power, this particular mystery would have to wait in the queue.

  • • •

  Finance was not a problem faced solely by the prosecution. The defense, too, needed scads of money, at least in part because Darrow received a minimum of thirty-five thousand dollars for his services.42 There were hopes that at least some of this would come from organized labor, but no matter how many donations were made, it was a huge sum—and Richardson was on a retainer of ten thousand dollars a year.43

  Funds were also needed for the corps of detectives that Darrow hired. Unlike Pinkerton’s, many detective agencies were willing to work for unions, and McParland more than once accused Thiel’s agency of doing so after Swain had been cut out of the State’s investigation.44 Since he was based in Chicago, Darrow was familiar with the Mooney and Boland Detective Agency, founded in 1871, from which he hired some twenty operatives. These operatives performed a wide variety of tasks, from shadowing Pinkerton’s field operatives to attempting to infiltrate the Boise Elks lodge, hoping to pick up gossip dropped by Gooding, Hawley, Borah, Van Duyn, or the members of the professional and business elite who were on social terms with them.45 For undercover agents to discover the prosecution’s most precious secrets, he went to George Dickson of the Workmen’s Legal Security Company.46