The 1892 strike at Carnegie’s biggest steel-producing mill near Pittsburgh killed several workers and Pinkerton detectives and set the labor movement in America back 40 years.  Four young men from different backgrounds in the Midwest meet at a train depot to hire on for pay as Pinkertons and play their different parts in this historical event. 

SYNOPSIS:

Young ADAM LONGSPETH awakens to the horrific nighttime crash of a passenger train as it sped over an iron bridge spanning the Ashtabula River in Northeastern Ohio in 1876. Rushing down the hill to the disaster, he sees men and women screaming, trapped by the slow-burning coal fires in the rubble. Scarred by this vision, he grows up to be a man suspicious of life and can’t seem to find his place. Coming out of a brothel in the rough port town of his youth, he helps out a young Dutch immigrant from a railroad detective; they join up as Pinkertons and leave town the next morning from the depot where hundreds of men (drifters, immigrants, derelicts, and troublemakers) have hired on for the pay of a Pinkerton detective.

The take the train to the shoreline of the Monongahela River where two barges have been secured to bring the men secretly into the mills where Carnegie’s second-in-command, the fierce Henry Frick, is trying to break the union strike.

The steelworkers, however, are waiting and prepared. A fierce battle by the river takes place and several are killed on both sides. Finally surrendering, the defeated Pinkertons are humiliated in a a gauntlet of furious men and women who spit at them, beat them with clubs and fists, and hold them prisoner. The nation awakens to the tragedy and sides are drawn between the mill owner and the men whom make his wealth. All four young men are deeply affected by the events of those three days in Pittsburgh. One of ADAM’s descendants visits Homestead on the day the last mill closes in the seventies.