Violence in the Coeur d'Alenes spread with union resentment to the political power of America's industrial corporations.
Idaho hard rock miners, about 1900.

Harper’s Weekly's Thomas Nast lampoons a labor agitator, 1886.

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union workers had battled a state militia and dynamited a silver mine. Again in 1899 the miners union defeated a private militia guarding the Bunker Hill mine. On April 29, soon after the company announced it had fired seventeen agitators, 200 miners with rifles swarmed and hijacked a Northern Pacific train. Stopping to pick up 3,000 pounds of dynamite and another 600 or 700 miners, the hijackers drove to the foot of the giant smelter twelve miles west of Wallace. Gunfire scattered the guards as fire swept through the compound. Three great explosions reduced the smelter to broken timbers and ash.

          Governor Frank Steunenberg had to respond. With the Idaho National Guard deployed in the Philippines for the

Spanish-American War, Steunenberg wired President William
McKinley. “At least 500 troops will be necessary,” said Steunenberg.

          What followed was a notorious dragnet, a “reign of terror” according to the labor press. Federal troops, many of them African-American, captured hundreds of suspects. Some were imprisoned in boxcars. Others languished for weeks and months exposed to the weather in makeshift pens.
          One of the captives was Albert Horsley, a.k.a. Harry Orchard. Six years later, at Steunenberg’s garden gate with a colt revolver and ten pounds of dynamite, Orchard exacted his revenge.

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