Michael Delaware 180 pages softcover
As the Michigan Central Railroad company became a juggernaut, the
nineteenth-century rail line also devolved into a bastion for crime as
morality was often set aside for profit. In 1850, a grand jury indicted
fifty men in Jackson County for conspiracy to commit arson after a
freight depot in Detroit was set ablaze. When two Grand Trunk
locomotives collided in Battle Creek in 1893 killing twenty-seven
people, a conductor and an engineer each accused the other, avoiding
conviction. A Mineral Ridge train robbery of $70,000 in payroll money
destined for miners on the Keweenaw Peninsula was exposed by a former
railroad worker involved in the heist, allowing him to escape
prosecution and sending four others to prison. 
