Labor revolts, missing witnesses, assassination. This Idaho statue carries a dark history

On Boise’s Capitol Boulevard, where the road forks at Cecil D. Andrus Park near the Idaho Capitol, there are two statues. Both monuments honor murdered American politicians.

One is immediately recognizable: Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. The other monument, which faces the Capitol’s south entrance along Jefferson Street, honors Frank Steunenberg, the fourth governor of Idaho, who served from 1897 to 1901.

In previous pages of the Idaho Statesman, Steunenberg’s statue has been referred to as “the most visible and most ignored piece of public art in Idaho.” It’s been hailed by one columnist for representing a governor who “gave his life for law and order” and critiqued by another who argued that Idahoans would be more “embarrassed” by the events that led to Steunenberg’s killing if it weren’t for his memorial.

So what’s the story behind this often ignored and sometimes contentious monument?

Assassination connected to labor unrest

Steunenberg was killed Dec. 30, 1905, when he opened the gate to his Caldwell home, triggering a bomb that had been rigged there.

The day after the murder, a front-page story in The New York Times quickly connected the incident to “members of the famous inner circle of the Coeur d’Alene dynamiters,” referring to explosive labor union revolts in North Idaho during the last decade of the 19th century.

From 1892 to 1899 in the Coeur d’Alene mining region, violence between union workers, who protested reduced wages, and mine owners resulted in eight deaths. The conflict culminated during Steunenberg’s gubernatorial tenure, when miners seized a train in Burke, a mining town near Wallace, that would carry dynamite to a concentrator owned by the Bunker Hill Mining Co.

After the mutinous miners — referred to as “Coeur d’Alenes” at the time — destroyed the facility, Steunenberg tasked his state auditor Bartlett Sinclair with quelling the conflict “by any means necessary,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian J. Anthony Lukas wrote in his 1997 book, “Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America.” President William McKinley sent U.S. Army troops, primarily African American soldiers stationed throughout the West, to assist.

Sinclair assumed that the whole town of Burke had something to do with the train hijacking and rounded up every man there, including miners, bartenders, a doctor, a teacher and even the postmaster, Lukas wrote. The prisoners from Burke and other nearby towns targeted during the roundup were held in inhumane conditions, some for months, and three died, according to Lukas.

“For decades to come, the very phrase Coeur d’Alenes evoked a stirring morality play whose lessons depended on where one took one’s stand: behind the afflicted mine owners or with the aggrieved mine workers,” Lukas wrote.

‘Trial of the Century’

Miners felt betrayed by Steunenberg, a Democrat, who they had supported for governor, Boise attorney John Greenfeld wrote in a 2006 article about the trial of the governor’s alleged assassins.

“Under these circumstances, it is difficult to argue with the governor’s decision to call in regular federal troops, but his actions had such a hard edge to them that they turned this governor into a pariah for mine workers,” Greenfeld wrote.

Harry Orchard, an itinerant miner, confessed to Steunenberg’s murder. But he claimed to be a hit man, hired by famed labor organizer William “Big Bill” Haywood and two other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners.

What followed became known as “the trial of the century” for its dramatic twists and lurid coverage by the national media. William Borah, then a U.S. senator-elect, and James Hawley, who would later serve as Idaho governor, prosecuted Haywood. Nationally renowned trial attorney Clarence Darrow led the defense.

Witnesses who would have implicated the labor leaders went missing or recanted an earlier confession. Haywood’s attorneys accused the Pinkertons — a union-busting security agency — of sabotaging labor organizations.

Ultimately, Borah and Hawley couldn’t produce a witness to corroborate Orchard’s story, and the labor leaders were acquitted or had their charges dropped. Historians are divided over whether the labor leaders ordered the murder.

Orchard, whose real name was Albert Horsley, served a life sentence in the Old Idaho State Penitentiary.

Steunenberg supporters raise funds for memorial

In 1906, the year before the sensational trial of Steunenberg’s alleged assassins, supporters of the slain governor started raising funds for a memorial.

Committees in every county were organized to raise money for a life-size bronze statue, to be crafted by a “high-class artist,” the Statesman reported at the time.

“In the history of the state, I can recall no other character as nearly worthy of perpetual preservation,” Sinclair wrote to the newspaper in 1913.

Four years later, Idaho lawmakers agreed to set aside $15,000 for the memorial, but the Legislature didn’t make the funds available until a decade later when Salt Lake City sculptor Gilbert Riswold accepted the job.

Riswold molded Steunenberg’s likeness from clay, then sent it to a Los Angeles foundry for bronze casting. The sculptor in 1927 told the Statesman that he initially found Stuenenberg to be an ordinary-looking man whose character was difficult to artistically express.

After an “intensive study,” Riswold said, he found “the strength of the man” in his “utter lack of egotism, his simplicity and ruggedness.”

“Finally I came to love him for the very subtleties he lacked, and for his fine manliness,” Riswold told the Statesman. “He had a powerful physique, yet with his firmness went a great tenderness. He was a man of equanimity. He could keep his head when those around him were running wild. He was in truth a typical westerner.”

The Steunenberg memorial was unveiled, to great fanfare, in December 1927.