In the summer of 1907 the Idanha Hotel took center stage in one of the West’s most notorious trials. A year and half before, on December 30, 1905, an assassin’s bomb had killed Idaho’s fourth governor as he opened the gate to his Caldwell home.
          The assassination of Governor Frank Steunenberg (1861-1905) exposed a history of seething hatred between the Western Federation of Miners and the beleaguered owners of Idaho’s silver mines. The miners federation, a notorious advocate of violent resistance to the corporate ownership of mines, stood accused of hiring the assassin to settle a score.

Unionist Harry Orchard had already confessed to planting the bomb. Steunenberg, Orchard maintained, had been targeted by the union for using federal troops to crack down on mining strikes. When Orchard fingered the union leadership, when he testified that labor boss William “Big Bill” Haywood and associates Charles Moyer and George Pettibone had masterminded and financed the plot, prosecutors hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to capture the labor bosses and bring them to Boise for trial.         

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