On the evening of December 30, 1905, Frank Steunenberg walked home through fresh snow in Caldwell and opened the side gate of his house at Sixteenth Avenue and Dearborn Street. A bomb wired to the gate went off. He died that evening. He had been out of the governor's office for nearly five years, and the men who wanted him dead had been waiting for six.
The Coeur d'Alenes
The reason lay three hundred miles north, in the silver mines of the Coeur d'Alene district. Miners and owners there had already fought one small war, in 1892, when strikers found a Pinkerton spy among them, dynamited the Frisco mill at Gem and marched on the mines, and the state answered with troops and bullpens. By 1899 the fight was over wages and over one company in particular, the Bunker Hill and Sullivan at Wardner, which refused to recognize the union.
On April 29, 1899, union men took over a Northern Pacific train at Burke and rode it down the canyon, picking up dynamite and more men as they went, until something like a thousand of them reached Wardner. They carried about three thousand pounds of dynamite into the company's concentrator, one of the largest in the world, and blew it apart. Two men were killed that day, one of them a nonunion worker and the other a union miner.
Steunenberg was a Populist and a Democrat, elected with labor votes, and he did not hesitate. He declared martial law in Shoshone County and asked President McKinley for federal troops, and they came. Soldiers rounded up hundreds of miners, often with no charges at all, and held them for months in stockades the miners called bullpens, at Wardner, Wallace and Burke. A permit system kept union men from working in the mines. Martial law stayed in force into 1901, past the end of Steunenberg's term. The mine owners had helped pay for the prosecutions.
The man with the bomb
The bomber made little effort to leave town. Harry Orchard, whose real name was Albert Horsley, had been staying at the Saratoga Hotel in Caldwell for months, posing as a sheep buyer under the name Tom Hogan, and he was arrested within days. In prison he was questioned by James McParland, the Pinkerton detective, and he talked. Orchard confessed not only to Steunenberg's murder but to a string of bombings across the West, and he said he had been paid for this one by the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, the union behind the Coeur d'Alene men: its president Charles Moyer, its secretary-treasurer William Haywood, and George Pettibone.
In February 1906 the three were arrested in Denver at night and put aboard a special train to Idaho before they could see a lawyer or challenge their extradition. The Supreme Court later let the prosecution stand anyway.
The trial
Haywood went on trial first, in Boise, in the summer of 1907, and the country watched. The state hired William Borah, just elected to the United States Senate, and James Hawley, a future governor, to prosecute; Idaho spent enormous sums on the case. The defense brought Clarence Darrow. For days Orchard sat in the witness box and described, calmly and in detail, a career of killing. Darrow told the jury that Orchard was a monster lying to save his own neck, and that the case was a war by mine owners on organized labor.
The law in Idaho required more than an accomplice's word, and the prosecution never found a witness who could independently tie Haywood to the bombing. In July 1907 the jury acquitted him. Pettibone was acquitted later, and the charges against Moyer were dropped. Haywood, already a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, later fled a sedition conviction to Soviet Russia and is buried in the Kremlin wall.
After
Orchard was convicted of the murder in 1908 and sentenced to hang. The sentence was commuted to life. He spent the next forty-six years at the Old Idaho Penitentiary east of Boise, most of them as a trusty keeping chickens and growing strawberries outside the walls, and he became a devout Seventh-day Adventist and wrote an autobiography. He died in the prison hospital on April 13, 1954, at eighty-eight, the last of the trial's principals, and is buried in Boise's Morris Hill Cemetery.
Steunenberg stands in Boise in bronze, facing the Statehouse, in a statue by Gilbert Riswold unveiled in December 1927. The man who ordered the bullpens stands there still; the man who planted the bomb spent his last decades a few miles east, in the prison's garden.