WILD WESTERN

By Walter Kirn

Explosive attacks on the powers that be didn't start with the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. In December 1905, in Caldwell, Idaho, a sagebrush railroad town near Boise, a bomb attached to a garden gate killed the state's former Governor, Frank Steunenberg. Blame for the murder was quickly pinned on traveling "sheep dealer" Harry Orchard, who confessed to being a paid assassin for the Western Federation of Miners, one of the era's most powerful labor unions. The union's highest officials were indicted, and the young Clarence Darrow hired to defend them. The result was a kind of class war in miniature disguised as a frontier murder trial, pitting robber-baron capitalists against card-carrying Socialists.

Big Trouble (Simon & Schuster; 875 pages; $32.50), by the late J. Anthony Lukas, strives to do more than just re-create the trial; it tries to hoist a whole world onto its shoulders--people, landscapes, buildings, ideas and all. Lukas, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Common Ground, his study of school desegregation in Boston, committed suicide last spring, reportedly in despair over the new book. He was a devastating critic of his own work, and Big Trouble shows the strains of this perfectionism. Branching off from the story of the trial and the theme of American class struggle are scores of substories and subthemes, most of which have branches of their own. Describing the murder investigation, for instance, Lukas launches into a detailed history of police work in both the U.S. and Britain. The book is a vast, spreading delta of information, most of it interesting and well researched, but without a strong current to move it forward.

For readers willing to push themselves along, however, Big Trouble has substantial rewards. Whether the subject is hard-rock mining, turn-of-the-century radical politics, Darrow's literary aspirations, or the rise of the American grand hotel, Lukas' digressions are richer and denser than some other writers' entire books. He footnotes his footnotes, which ruins the tale's momentum but makes for some informative side trips. Who knew that the Elks, the fraternal organization, was started by New York actors who worked all week and needed a Sunday wateringhole? Or that Darrow chose struggling writers for law partners, including the poet Edgar Lee Masters, whose classic Spoon River Anthology, Lukas asserts, borrowed from Darrow's own first novel, Farmington?

The heart of the book is the trial, a judicial three-ring circus featuring jury tampering, espionage, soaring oratory and federal meddling, all set against a background of corruption that makes the contemporary political scene seem virginal by comparison. The liveliest section describes the kidnapping of "Big Bill" Haywood and other union leaders by Pinkerton detective James McParland. Unable to extradite his prey legally from their Colorado headquarters, McParland abducted them, bundled them onto a train and ordered the tracks cleared all the way to Idaho. Such episodes of swashbuckling adventure bring out the crack reporter in Lukas as well as the showman, suggesting that what he relished about his story wasn't its intricate political subtleties but its moments of Wild West theatricality.

--By Walter Kirn