The Knights of Labor and Gould's Union Pacific had reached an agreement that included the principle that "no man should be discharged without due notice and investigation.
Martin Irons, who first became a member of the Knights of Labor in 1884 was instrumental in forming District Assembly 101, which was composed of workers employed by Jay Gould’s southwestern railroads.
Irons believed, and fought for a broad and comprehensive union for labor on the premise that it would counterbalance the power of aggregated and incorporated wealth.
Gould was cast as a sinister, power-mad figure who intentionally and methodically lured DA 101 leaders into a confrontation that would allow him to destroy the Knights on his railroads.
Increasing acts of sabotage, though, bordered on lawlessness: assaulting and disabling moving trains, threatening notes and visits to working engineers, arson fires in yards, and a crowd of 600 Knights and sympathizers in DeSoto, Missouri marching on the roundhouse to drain the locomotives' boilers.
[4] A favorite tactic of the rail workers was to let steam locomotives go cold, forcing the railroad to spend up to six hours slowly reheating the engines for use.
On April 3, a Tarrant County deputy named Richard Townsend was shot and killed in a confrontation between officers and a crowd of about 500 in Ft. Worth, Texas.
[5] On April 9, in East St. Louis, Illinois, where about eighty switchmen had gone out on a sympathy strike against the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, violence broke out when a crowd of strikers met with eight deputies guarding a freight train.
The governor of Kansas refused after local officials reported no incidents of violence, despite claims by railway executives that mobs had seized control of trains and that rail yards were burning.
On April 26 sabotage caused the derailment of a freight train near Wyandotte, Kansas, where two non-striking crewmembers were buried in wreckage and in the mud of the Kaw River.
[7] And on April 8 a striker named John Gibbons was fatally shot by a "non-union switchman and private watchman" in St. Louis.