For three hours and a half in a courtroom at Boise, Ohio,...

For three hours and a half in a courtroom at Boise, Ohio, Harry Orchard assembled in the witness chair at the Haywood trial and recounted a record of offenses, slaughter, and murder†¦ the like of which no individual in the overcrowded courtroom had ever thought of. Not in the entire scope of Bloody Gulch literature will there be exposed anything that approaches an equivalent to the atrocious narrative so motionlessly, coolly, and composedly voiced by this audacious, disimpassioned man-slaughterer. For on his very first day of the trial, Orchard narrated the specifics of his wrongdoings without hesitation. Just last year, 1906, he with another fellow had implanted an explosive in the Vindicator Mine at Cripple Creek, Colorado, that†¦show more content†¦Only once or twice was there a dramatic touch. It was a repulsive, sickening, nauseating story, but he conveyed it as meekly as the simplest chronicle of the utmost common episode of the most ordinary reality. He was neit her an egotist nor an adulator. He neither bragged of his horrendous offenses nor sobbed in fake regret and shame. It was just a simple narration of individual practice, and as it went on, hour after hour, with voluminous detail, specific and intense here, half disremembered and ambiguous there. Slowly it conveyed to the spectators the belief that it all happened – it was the truth. Falsehoods are not prepared as convoluted and intricate as that tale. Fiction so full of incident, so mixed of purpose and cross-purpose, so permeated with the play of human passion, does not spring offhand from the most marvelous fertile invention. Touching continually points on which there can be controversy, Orchard described undertakings whose purpose until to-day had been unknown, whose motive had lingered as clandestine. And as he continued to recount his story, the half-stifled gathering in the populated courtroom was so silent that his soft speech infiltrated to the farthermost area. As I looked around the trial room, I noticed that to Haywood, the story was of