s.

This was resisted. Trouble first began on the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad, where the men not only struck against the reduction, but
prevented other men from taking their places, and stopped by force the
running of trains. The militia of West Virginia was inadequate to cope
with the situation, and the governor of that state called on the
President for troops, which were sent with a beneficial effect. But the
trouble spread to Maryland, and a conflict in Baltimore between the
militia and rioters in sympathy with the strikers resulted in a number
of killed and wounded. The next day, Saturday, July 21, a riot in
Pittsburg caused the most profound sensation in the country since the
draft riots of the Civil War. The men on the Pennsylvania and the
Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago railroads, had struck, and all freight
traffic was arrested. On this day six hundred and fifty men of the first
division of the Pennsylvania national guard at Philadelphia arrived in
Pittsburg, and, in the attempt to clear the Twenty-eighth Street
crossing, they replied to the missiles thrown at them by the mob with
volleys of musketry, killing instantly sixteen of the rioters and
wounding many.

Here was cause for exasperation, and a furious mob, composed of
strikers, idle factory hands, and miners, tramps, communists, and
outcasts, began its work of vengeance and plunder. Possessed of
firearms, through breaking into a number of gun shops, they attacked the
Philadelphia soldiers, who had withdrawn to the railroad roundhouse, and
a fierce battle ensued. Unable to dislodge the soldiers by assault, the
rioters attempted to roast them out by setting fire to cars of coke
saturated with petroleum and pushing these down the track against the
roundhouse. This eventually forced the soldiers to leave the building,
but, though pursued by the rioters, they made a good retreat across the
Allegheny River. The mob, completely beyond control, began the
destruction of railroad property. The torch was applied to two
roundhouses, to railroad sheds, shops and offices, cars and locomotives.
Barrels of spirits, taken from the freight cars, and opened and drunk,
made demons of the men, and the work of plunder and destruction of goods
in transit went on with renewed fury.

That Saturday night Pittsburg witnessed a reign of terror. On Sunday the
rioting and pillage were continued, and in the afternoon the Union Depot
and Railroad Hotel and an elevator near by were b