HENRY CLAY was beside himself. Why weren’t the miners shooting back?

The Hotchkiss he gave them should be raking Vulcan King’s decks by now. Instead, militiamen were standing in the open, cheering each shot. And the company police and Pinkertons were clapping one another on the back like it was a baseball game.

A grinning Coal and Iron cop slapped Clay’s shoulder. “We’re winning.”

But Clay’s plan was to start a war—a shooting war on both sides—and keep it going, not win it. He grabbed an officer’s field glasses, ignoring his protests, and focused on the Hotchkiss. The cannon was there, shielded by coal bags at the foot of the tipple, but no one was manning it. And when he looked more closely, he saw the tube was perched at an odd angle. Something had happened to it, and that something was very likely named Isaac Bell.

“Give that back or I’ll have you up on charges,” shouted the officer. Clay, disguised in a private’s uniform, pushed through the cheering fools and headed for the main deck where the furnaces fired the boilers. His disguise included a khaki knapsack—a U.S. Army–issue Merriam Pack with an external frame supported by a belt. In it, he carried what at first glance appeared to be jagged chunks of coal but were actually dynamite sticks with detonators and one-inch fuses bundled in chamois leather dyed with lampblack.

Vulcan King was a ten-boiler boat, and firemen were scrambling from one to the next, shoveling coal into wide-open furnaces. Someone saw Clay’s uniform and shouted, “How’s it going up there?”

“We’re winning!” said Clay, and when the fireman turned to scoop more coal, Clay lobbed one of his bombs into the furnace and ran as fast as he could to the back of the boat.

•   •   •

THE MONONGAHELA crosscurrent that Captain Jennings had hoped for caught the Vulcan King’s Cincinnati pilot unawares. Generated by the Amalgamated point of land deflecting extraordinarily high water, the current grabbed the steamboat’s stern and overwhelmed her thrashing paddles. Before her pilot could recover, the black boat’s bow was crowding the bank. Her hull thrust across the channel directly in the path of White Lady, which Isaac Bell had churning Full Ahead to ram.

Vulcan King’s cannon boomed.

It sounded immensely louder this time, thought Bell. Did they have a second cannon? Or had they finally unleashed the Gatling? But even as a wild shell soared over the barges and exploded in a kitchen tent, he saw it was the last shot the steamboat would ever fire at the strikers’ camp.

“Her boiler burst,” Captain Jennings shouted.

The steamboat’s chimneys leaned forward, tumbled off her hurricane deck, and crashed on her bow. Timbers followed. Glass and planking rained down. From her wheelhouse forward, her upper works were demolished.

“The murdering devils’ boiler burst!”