railroads, Gowen found opportunity to wage legal war against his old enemies, the Standard Oil and Pennsylvania Railroad, before the then new Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Early in 1889, he found himself in the odd position of representing an old friend, Eckley B. Coxe, in a suit before the ICC against, essentially, the same coal monopoly that Gowen himself had forged more than a decade before. Shortly before his death, many of Gowen's friends and associates noticed a change in his overall mood. They remarked upon his more somber demeanor and noted that for a trip home to Philadelphia, he had boarded the wrong train. Gowen wrote to his insurance agent on December 9, 1889, to ask if he could cash in his $90,000 life insurance policy. Three days later, after he had arrived in Washington, D.C., to argue a case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, Gowen purchased a revolver at a hardware store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Death Franklin B. Gowen died of a gunshot wound to the head on December 13, 1889, at Wormley's Hotel in Washington, DC. There still remains some controversy as to whether his death was suicide or homicide. Some have speculated that he was murdered by Molly Maguires in retaliation. However, the Gowen family hired Captain Robert Linden of the Pinkerton Agency to investigate. Linden had been the senior Pinkerton involved in the Reading Co. and thus considered qualified to determine if there were any connection of that sort. Linden ruled out a Molly connection very quickly. The owner of Wolford's Hardware Store on Pennsylvania Avenue came forward to identify Gowen as the man who had bought a pistol the day before. Conspiracy theories about assassins and impersonations were put aside when the Gowen family reported that he had been "acting queerly for some time and that there was a strain of hereditary insanity in his family." Simply put, [Gowen] turn[ed] the company from one of economic conservatism to daring adventurism. Every aspect of the [Reading Co.]'s existence was to be enervated and agitated and sometimes turned topsy-turvy during the Gowen years of the 1870s and 1880s. The few scraps of letters and memoranda Gowen that shed some light on this seem to indicate that he was impatient, even bored, when details of real railroading practices came to his attention. It was corporate power and financial finagling that interested this complex man. . . .