During this litigation, however, two of the parties in the conspiracy died, and the others were not prosecuted for complicity, although their actions had put Joseph H. Miles to considerable trouble and expense. They had made several indirect propositions to Mr. Miles looking to a compromise, but he promptly repelled all of them.
Harbaugh's connection with my service has long since been severed, and he is now in the employ of Mr. Joseph H. Miles as manager of his large stock range in Nebraska, not far from Falls City, where the writer is informed he is doing well.
THE BIG SOUTHWEST STRIKE.
HOW THE BLOWS WHICH CAUSED THE DEATH KNELL OF THE
KNIGHTS OF LABOR WERE ADMINISTERED.—STIRRING
SCENES AND INCIDENTS CONNECTED WITH
THE BIG STRIKE OF 1886.
If you have an ambition to lead a strenuous life, young man, and feel that excitement would serve as a tonic for your nervous system, and you want to gratify your ambition and secure the tonic in greater than homeopathic doses, both at the same time, just get yourself appointed chief special agent of a big railroad during a general strike. I am "dopeing" you right, for I have been "on the job" on several occasions during a strike, consequently know what I am writing about. The most strenuous thirty days of my long career, however, were the thirty days in 1886, when the whole southwestern system of Gould roads were tied up, and there was nothing doing in the traffic line. While there had been differences between the shopmen and the company for some time, these differences were considered trivial, and neither side had expected that they would result in a strike, consequently neither the men nor the company were prepared for the struggle when it began—at ten o'clock on the morning of the 4th of March. The shopmen, as well as many other employes of the Gould roads, including engineers, firemen and trainmen, were nearly all members of the Knights of Labor. Organizers and professional labor agitators had been busy all along the line for months, coaxing and coercing the men into the order. Martin Irons had been selected as chairman of the grievance committee, and while in Texas attending a meeting of the committee, called the strike, without consulting the national officers of the organization, a violation of one of the order's most stringent rules. He afterwards admitted that he would not have called the strike had he been sober.
Martin Irons.
Chairman of the Knights of Labor strike committee on
the Gould System in 1886.
Irons was a little weazen-faced Scotch-Irishman, with a past—as most of these professional labor agitators have. At the time of the strike he was on the payroll as a machinist of the Pacific Company at Sedalia, where he was living with what is now-a-days called an affinity, he having deserted his wife and several children in Ray County years before. He was thoroughly unreliable, a drunkard, and was hated by most of his followers. There were two redeeming things about him, however. A good voice was one of them. He could have earned a large salary as a train-caller or a barker for a tent show, and he was a good actor. Notwithstanding his repulsive appearance, and the fact that the shopmen did not like him, he could sway them as he pleased, if granted the privilege of addressing them—fill them with either tears or indignation, as best suited the occasion. He never made a speech in his life, though, during which he did not pay his respects to me and my men, and tell how we were shadowing and hounding him day and night. He did this to create sympathy. As a matter of fact, there never was a time when any of Gould's c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-t-i-c b-l-o-o-d h-o-u-n-d-s, to use his own favorite expression, were ever on his trail. He was always regarded by my men and myself as a harmless demagogue, and not capable of doing anything that would cause us much trouble. In fact, the only thing he ever did in which he did not leave a trail behind him as wide as a railroad right-of-way, was the wire-tapping job he supervised during the strike, which will be referred to later.