Harry Orchard - The Confessions and Autobiography of Harry Orchard

Dean of St. Michaels Cathedral, Boise, Idaho

I N the month of June, 1906, I first met the author of this autobiography. About six months prior he had made his full confession of crime, which was again given on the witness-stand. He wrote the account of his life, by his own volition, during the last half of the year of 1906, telling me many times that his object was to present a warning to all who might read it against taking the first steps in a path of reckless living that so rapidly ends in ruin.

As I comprehend the transformation of Harry Orchard from reckless criminality to a penitent willing to tell the truth, I feel that the world should understand that his change of front was not in the order of religious conversion, then moral perception, leading to confession. No! it seems to me the order was first physical, second moral, and finally religious.

He was wretched behind stone walls, lonely as cut off from freedom and old associations; hence he fairly craved the sympathy which he got in the unburdening of his mind to McParland. He told me that at first he only told a little of the truth, and that several days passed before he divulged in full.

This confession, to my mind, evinces the first real, moral change in the man. He has told me that, though he had never in his life doubted the existence of a God, and positively believed in a future state, still he thought himself to be beyond forgiveness.

He sat from week to week brooding on his lost condition, convinced that a murderer could not be forgiven; and he had read the Bible which had been sent to him from the East, searching for light when I first met him.

He had attended the Sunday afternoon services at the penitentiary a few times, when he expressed a desire for me to visit him.

Almost immediately he came to the point on which he desired my expression of opinion, based on the words of Scripture: Was he, as a murderer, shut out from hope of Gods forgiveness?

I explained to him that neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament Scriptures was there a single word to preclude a penitent from an honest approach to God, whose forgiveness and pardon are full and free. I have only sorrow, not contempt, for those who make distinctions in the Ten Commandments.

I know that all unrighteousness is sin with God, and am sure that many persons need to readjust their notions who play fast and loose with commandments seven and eight, with the delusive idea that when God gave the ten laws he made murder worse than adultery and dishonesty. I believe in the love of a forgiving God, and as the Scripture defines God in this one word, Love, I firmly believe in that radical change as possible for Orchard as for the thief on the Cross of Calvary.

I would hardly go to Balzac for theology or doctrine, but I quote him in the following words: One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are forever changed.

I believe in conversion, no matter how it comes, nor to whom. I know it comes, sometimes quickly, at other times slowly, and that a man may be a devil today, and next week a man clothed, and in his right mind.

To me the New Testament is the worlds greatest classic, and the Central Figure stands there presenting to us the man dominated by the devil of his own lower self, a companion with hogs, sunken to the lowest level.

I WAS born in Northumberland County, Ontario, Canada, on the 18th of March, 1866. My real name is Albert E. Horsley. My father was born of English parents, and my mother of Irish. I was brought up on a farm and received a common-school education, but as my parents were poor, I had to work as soon as I was old enough. I never advanced farther than the third grade. I was one of a family of eight children, consisting of six daughters and two sons.

While we were poor and had to work for a living, we always had plenty and dressed respectably. The country was prosperous, and poverty was a thing almost unheard of in the country at that time. Most everybody worked there at that time, either for themselves or for someone else, as the chief industry there was farming; and the people were happy and contented. The cost of living there then was much less than it is today, and the people dressed and lived much plainer then than now.