BOOKS: WILD WESTERN

J. ANTHONY LUKAS' NEW HISTORY DIGS TOO DEEP

Explosive attacks on the powers that be didn't start with the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. In December 1905, in Caldwell, Idaho, a sagebrush railroad town near Boise, a bomb attached to a garden gate killed the state's former Governor, Frank Steunenberg. Blame for the murder was quickly pinned on traveling "sheep dealer" Harry Orchard, who confessed to being a paid assassin for the Western Federation of Miners, one of the era's most powerful labor unions. The union's highest officials were indicted, and the young Clarence Darrow hired to defend them. The result was a kind of class war in miniature disguised...

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