Somewhere around a dozen people were killed during the Homestead Strike of 1892, which is probably the best known labor dispute in Western Pennsylvania.

More than twice that number died in Pittsburgh during the lesser known Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

The bloody events in Pittsburgh were part of a nationwide labor uprising directed in large part against railroads, which were among the country's most powerful corporations.

After National Guard units from Philadelphia were driven out of Pittsburgh on July 22, 1877, Pennsylvania Railroad property became the target of strikers, rioters and looters who briefly took control of several neighborhoods in the city.

"From Seventh Avenue along the railroad track nearly to Thirty-Second Street, a distance of about two miles, the destruction of property is complete, nothing remaining but indestructible material," the Commercial Gazette reported on July 24. "Passing along this long line of the fire, the scene presented a most desolate one, indeed, calculated to vividly impress the beholder with the terrible results of the brief reign of the mob."

Near Grant Street and what is now Seventh Avenue, a three-story freight office was gutted while an adjoining freight depot and Adams Express building were in ashes.

"Of the huge grain elevator, a conspicuous feature of the junction of Grant, Liberty and Washington streets, only the lofty smoke stack and fragments of the foundation walls remain, and nearly opposite, across the tracks, the Panhandle locomotive house stands roofless and windowless. The Union depot is a ragged mass of ruins. ... Near it a few freight cars and one locomotive remain intact, but thence eastwardly to the outer depot and for the three squares beyond nothing remains of the hundreds of freight and passenger cars but the wheels and other iron work."

While the loss of life had been great -- at least 20 strikers and bystanders and a half dozen soldiers -- the Gazette sought to end rumors of even higher casualties during the weekend of shooting and arson.

One report said that 15 Philadelphia militiamen had burned to death in the railroad roundhouse where they were under attack by rioters during the night of July 21-22.

"It was utterly devoid of truth," the Gazette reported. "Gen. [Robert M.] Brinton said that when he left the roundhouse he took every man with him. It is pretty well understood, though the General did not say so, that some of his men deserted."

The next day's paper had an update on missing militiamen: "On Saturday evening, after the firing which so inflamed the people, quite a number of [the soldiers] boarded the first passenger train that went East, and when the conductor put them off, they begged and [pleaded] for permission to remain.

"They escaped detection when the train was searched by the rioters at Twenty-Eighth Street by taking off their coats and sitting in their shirt sleeves. Among the deserters was an officer, who said that if he ever got to Philadelphia alive, he would never again be caught in such a scrape."

When it wasn't shooting down rumors in other publications, the Gazette was not above offering its own thinly sourced story.

Gen. A.L. Pearson had commanded Pittsburgh militia units that had been replaced by what were believed to be more reliable Philadelphia troops. While it was those out-of-town soldiers who had fired on strikers and bystanders, it was Pearson's home that became a weekend target of the rioters.

"Mrs. Gen. Pearson was so terrified by the threats of the mob on Saturday and Sunday nights against her husband that her hair is said to have turned white. ... They also brought a coffin to her, it is said, and swore they intended to kill her husband and place him in it."

While the Gazette described most of the victims in a line or two, a few received more attention.

"Lieut. Dorsey Ash, of the Keystone Battery and a teller for the First National Bank of Philadelphia, is still ... in a very dangerous condition," the Gazette reported on July 24. "He is badly wounded in the left leg and knee, and is so low that the surgeons hesitate about amputating the limb for fear that the operation will kill him,"

The next day's paper contained bad news; Lieut. Ash had died that afternoon. "His wife and father arrived just in time to see him breathe his last, getting there about five minutes before his decease ... his death is one of the saddest events connected with this saddest of all sad periods in the history of Pittsburgh."