Big Trouble

Big Trouble begins on a snowy evening at Christmastime 1905 in the little town of Caldwell, Idaho, to which the state's former governor, Frank Steunenberg, had returned to head his family bank while contemplating his political future.

As he walked home that night, he sensed all about him the bold, exuberant, unashamedly acquisitive spirit of Caldwell's young entrepreneurs, who - as his brother had written - were "here for the money." Like so many in the West at that time, these brothers believed their prospects for enriching themselves were limitless, that the future opened wide before them. And yet the governor suffered premonitions that he and his neighbors weren't fully in control of their own destiny, that something malign threatened their well-being. Now, as he followed the plume of his frozen breath, his boots crunching eight inches of freshly fallen snow, he turned through his garden gate and a bomb attached to the gatepost blew him "into eternity.". Authorities threw a dragnet around the town, and soon the state placed the investigation in the hands of America's most renowned detective, James McParland of the Pinkerton Agency. Now sixty-two, McParland hankered after one more coup to top off his glittering career. Before long, he extracted an astonishing confession from an itinerant "sheep dealer" named Harry Orchard, who admitted setting the bomb that killed the governor and said the murder had been commissioned by "Big Bill" Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in retaliation for the harsh tactics that Steunenberg had used to put down a miners' "insurrection" in northern Idaho six years before. In the summer of 1907 Haywood went on trial for his life in Boise, defended by Clarence Darrow, the country's most famous defense attorney, and prosecuted by William Borah, a golden-throated orator just elected Idaho's junior senator. For three months they did combat with lofty rhetoric and sly espionage. Big Trouble is both a narrative of a sensational