We are perfectly willing to believe that Orchard signed a confession badly implicating Messrs. Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. The EXISTENCE of such a confession is not the issue at stake, but rather whether the confession is TRUE or FALSE. To determine these facts, the following data should be taken into consideration:
Harry Orchard, the alleged author of the famous confession, as far as we know, was employed as a spy during the Cripple Creek strike by Detectives Scott and Sterling of Florence & Cripple Creek Railroad derailing fame.
In his confession. Orchard implicated Adams in the Bteunenberg assassination, which gave the prosecution a chance to arrest Adams and bring him to Boise
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City, Idaho. When Adams was brought to the penitentiary, he was placed in the same cell with Orchard. And here the plot of the Agency becomes noticeable.
As a matter of fact and truth, Adams did not participate in the Steunenberg tragedy, and had no intention on earth of confessing to anyone that he did. It was also far from his mind to implicate others in a crime of which he knew nothing. Yet Harry Orchard, Manager McParland, Governor Gooding of Idaho, and the warden of the Idaho State Penitentiary did their best to induce him to make a false confession, and thus become a perjurer and murderer. As Adams refused to become a scoundrel, notwithstanding that the Governor of Idaho threatened to turn him over to a Colorado mob if he remained obdurate, the above guardians of the public morality and safety took a step unparalleled save in the annals of the Dark Ages. They incarcerated Adams' wife and children in the penitentiary, and held them there the same as convicted felons, in order that for the sake of his family Adams might agree to become the hangman of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone.