William O'Toole, an ex-gunfighter and now ex-worker for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, was fed up with the way the railroad workers were being underpaid and mistreated by the company. Something had to be done, and he was the man to see that it got done. O'Toole began, in early July of 1877, to rally the workers into a strike, to force the heads of the B & O Railroad to give them fair pay for the work they'd been doing for years.
Benjamin Pike, hired by the B & O Railroad to head off an impending worker's strike, couldn't believe his luck when he received a telegram from former Confederate Major Randall McMasters. McMaster, simply known as 'Major' after the war, had also heard whispered rumors of an upcoming strike and saw it as a way to make some good money.
Both O'Toole, along with trusted men hired to guard him, and Major McMasters, with his own hand-picked band of Regulators and a Pinkerton detective hired to stay in the shadows and guard him, boarded the 401, one of the locomotives owned by B & O, and headed out for Pittsburgh from Martinsburg, West Virginia. Each man had an agenda. One to bring the B & O Railroad to its knees, the other to stop an impending bloody war.