Historically, firearm mechanisms have often been used to initiate explosive devices, and I’ve blogged about plenty over recent years. Most recently this device here from 1582 shows a very early and very simple example.
I’ve come across a few more devices from the early 20th Century that apparently used a similar technique, perhaps perpetrated by Harry Orchard (aka Albert Horsley, aka Tom Hogan) as part of the Colorado labor wars in 1903-1905. I’ve blogged about some of Orchard’s stranger command IED switches before but I didn’t mention then the use of a command pull to pistol trigger. Orchard was certainly comfortable making, placing, and laying command pull switches and perhaps he saw a pistol trigger as a more reliable system than pulling a cork from a bottle of acid!
Orchard’s case is complex – he worked, apparently, for both sides of a violent labor dispute and there are many accusations of “false flag” attacks. As to whether he committed the crime I’m about to mention, and why, I can’t be certain, but in one sense, for our purposes it doesn’t matter because we are interested in the mechanism and not the motivation or perpertrator.
On 5th June 1904, about 60 strike-breaking miners were on the platform of the Independence Railway Depot in Colorado. They were waiting for a train to take them home in a nearby town. The miner’s union had been in a long and violent dispute with the mine owners. The perpertrator had planted explosives under the platform, to be initiated by a loaded and cocked pistol placed immediately next to it. A 200ft (some reports suggest 400ft) wire had been tied to the trigger and led away to a firing point at a safe distance. The wire was pulled, the device exploded and 13 miners were killed and 9 injured, perhaps one of whom died subsequently.
There are conflicting reports about the nature of the explosive itself – some saying blackpowder, some dynamite.
It also seems likely that a similar device may have been used to cause an explosion in the Vindicator Mine, probably by Orchard, in 1906, albeit that may have been set to act as a booby trap /victim operated switch.
