Tale of the Three "Murders" (flavor)

[Judge Sam]

In 1901 the WFM Local Union in Telluride had won a strike, and some local businessmen plotted a campaign of vilification against the union. With no evidence whatsoever, this group — which included a banker, a judge, a newspaper publisher and the local sheriff — publicized lurid newspaper reports about the union. They created a condemnatory shop window display with a skull of an unknown individual dug up for the purpose, accusing the union of murdering three men who had disappeared from the district.


Agent McParland used the fictional disappearances as persuasion to sell Pinkerton services to Bulkeley Wells, the president and manager of the Smuggler-Union Mining Company in Telluride. McParland also saw the alleged murders as a way to bolster Harry Orchard's testimony in a conspiracy trial for the assassination of Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg. McParland was attempting to implicate top leaders of the WFM Union in the assassination.

Together with Wells and others, McParland helped to concoct a plan to charge WFM miner Steve Adams with involvement after-the-fact in the murder of mine guard William J. Barney, who had disappeared one week after accepting the job of guarding the Smuggler-Union mine.


There was one difficulty with the accusations: at least two of the men claimed as the murder victims of the union, and possibly all three, were still alive.


One of the three happened to return to the area and, informed that he'd been murdered, signed an affidavit attesting to his continuing status among the living. That fellow was quietly dropped from the list of union "victims."


But another of the three, William J. Barney, an out-of-towner, also hadn't been murdered. Unaware of the intrigue surrounding his absence, he appeared in a San Miguel County court — the very location of his alleged murder — to obtain a divorce decree one year after he had "disappeared."


Although the county sheriff and judge who dealt with his divorce case knew Barney had been declared a murder victim, they were among the circle of conspirators seeking to vilify the union, and they kept quiet about Barney's court appearance so that the alleged "reign of terror" attributed to the union would not be seen as a sham. The false "reign of terror" was devised as justification for the eventual banishment, at bayonet point, of all union members from the district.