Making Sense of the Molly Maguires

Most historians link the labor related unrest to a decision Gowen made in 1874. As Kevin Kenny, writing in the book "Making Sense of the Molly Maguires" puts it, with the depression of 1874 underway, and as many as a third of the regions workers unemployed, Gowen began stockpiling coal. In December arbitrarily cut the miners wages to 54 percent of what they had been in 1869 in violation of the contract he had signed with the WBA. The move ignited what would later come to be known as "The Long Strike."

For six months, the workers, with virtually no safety net, remained off the job. It was a disaster, and when it ended in June of 1975, so too did the Workman's Benevolent Association.

The vacuum left in the wake of the union's collapsed produced a new spasm of violence. Miners, who no longer had Siney and his associates to counsel patience, marched by the thousands. They shut down collieries and faced off against the Coal and Iron Police, the private police force Gowen had built, which was, in effect, the only law in the coalfields.

The miners, most of them Catholic, were further isolated when Archbishop James Woods of Philadelphia, a man who had converted from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism and who had more in common with his friend Gowen than with the poor Irish miners, banned all secret societies, including the AOH, and threatened its members with excommunication. As Gowen himself would later put it, "when these assassins, through their counsel, speak of being Catholics, I desire to say to you that they have been denounced by their Church and excommunicated by their prelates, and that I have the direct personal authority of Archbishop Wood himself to say that he denounces them all and that he was fully cognizant of and approved of the means I took to bring them to justice."

Sketch of the murder of Sanger & Uren at Raven Run

Within three months of the end of The Long Strike, violence again ripped through the region. Six people were killed, most of them mine bosses or their allies, Kenny writes. Among them were Thomas Saner and William Uren, who were shot and killed, allegedly by miners at Raven Run in Schuylkill County. There was also the murder of Benjamin Yost. That's a tale that figures prominently in Moffett's account of the Molly Maguires.

The way Moffett tells it:

sketch of James "Powder Keg" Kerrigan

"Early in July, 1875, while McKenna was still in Shenandoah, acting as a body-master, a shocking murder was committed by Molly Maguires at the town of Tamaqua, situated on the Little Schuylkill, some twenty miles to the east. The victim was Franklin B. Yost, a policeman, and a man who had served honorably in the civil war, and a most peaceful and worthy citizen. Hurrying to the scene of the crime, McKenna addressed himself to James "Powder Keg" [Kerrigan] the body-master of that patch. The way in which [Kerrigan] earned his sobriquet of 'Powder Keg' well illustrates his character. Some years before, while working in a mine at Beckville, he had come into the slope one cold morning when the men were crowding around a huge salamander heaped with burning coals. He carried on his shoulder a keg of powder, and, seeing that there was no place for him at the fire, he leaned over the circle formed by his comfortable comrades, and, placing the keg of powder on the red-hot coals, remarked coolly:

"'As long as you boys won't move, I'll have to make a place for myself.'

"The men scattered in terror right and left, whereupon (Kerrigan) coolly lifted the keg of powder off the salamander, sat down upon it, lit his pipe, and began smoking.

"McKenna was not long in learning that 'Powder Keg' himself was the man at whose instigation the murder had been committed. (Kerrigan) explained to him that they had killed the wrong man, his grievance having been not against Yost, but against another policeman, Bernard McCarron, who had aroused "Powder Keg's" enmity years before by frequently arresting him for disorderly conduct. (Kerrigan) nursed the memory of this treatment, and when he had became a body-master at once proceeded to arrange for the killing of McCarron. Having applied to Alexander Campbell, the body-master of Landsford, Carbon County, as was customary, for two men to do a "clean job," he brought the men to a retired spot on McCarron's beat. Later in the night, when a policeman passed by, the two men shot him, according to orders, and then started for their homes. But on that night McCarron had exchanged beats with Yost, who accordingly came to a violent death, although neither the Mollys nor anyone else in the region had any but kind feelings toward him. (Kerrigan) showed McKenna the revolver, a weapon of thirty-two caliber, with which the policeman had been killed, and explained that it had been borrowed from a Molly named Roarity by the two men, Hugh McGehan and James Doyle, who with others had done the murder. McGehan was the man who-fired the fatal shot. McKenna secured the names of every man concerned in the crime, and ultimately, on his evidence, it was punished by the hanging, in Pottsville, of Hugh McGehan, Thomas Duffy, James Roarity, James Carl, and James Doyle."

n fact, says Wayne, there may have been less to Powder Keg Kerrigan's story than Moffett's tale would lead one to believe.

According to Wayne, there were actually two trials for the murder of Yost. During the first, Powder Keg Kerrigan's own wife had testified, "I don't know how anybody can believe my husband. Everybody knows he's a drunk and liar."

She went on to state to the jury, in Wayne's words, that Kerrigan "used to come home at night, 'cause Policeman Yost used to do a tattoo on his burley pate and he'd say, 'Someday I'm gonna kill that Welsh sonovabitch.' And she said that one day he comes home he was dancing around the kitchen table waving a pistol over his head, and he said, "I did it, I killed that Welsh sonovabitch."

It just so happened that not long after that testimony, one of the jurors took ill, Wayne said. The trial was cancelled, a new jury was empanelled, and mysteriously, Kerrigan's wife was no longer on the witness list.

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