To fully grasp the significance of the myth of the Molly Maguires, it is essential to understand the promising but poisoned land that gave rise to it. In the middle of the 19th century, and in fact, well into the 20th, the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania produced the lifeblood of the Industrial Age. These humpback hills and steep gorges were home to the largest deposit of valuable hard coal in the western hemisphere at a time when the black diamond sometimes seemed nearly as precious to the burgeoning American economy as diamonds themselves.

It was coal that fueled the railroads and the factories that helped the Northern states vanquish the rebellious South during the American Civil War, and it was coal that helped fuel the railroads as they rattled west to fulfill the American Dream of Manifest Destiny.

It was no surprise then, that these coalfields lured men with dreams of riches, men who, often with the backing of foreign investors from places such as England and Scotland, bought up chunks of rocky, mountainous land, too hard by half to be good for anything else, and set themselves up as emerging coal barons. Even today, you can still catch a glimpse of the immense wealth these men pried from the coalfields in those days. One need only drive through the now-declining towns and cities that were built on coal wealth. Drive through Wilkes-Barre or Hazelton in present-day Luzerne County, or Pottsville in Schuylkill County, or any of a dozen towns in between, and you'll still find row upon row of extravagant mansions, places built with coal and railroad money.

Drive a short distance outside of these towns, however, and you can find traces of the coal-patch villages built with cheap lumber and cheaper labor by coal barons for their workers. There was no wealth in these places. Seldom did they seem to catch more than a wisp of daylight, shadowed as they were by towering colm dumps, colossal heaps of shale and stone and useless coal set on fire and smoldering for years, sometimes for decades, poisoning the air with the acrid stench of burning sulphur and choking the streams with rancid and toxic seepage. Inside the ramshackle houses, miners, men who got up before the sun to plunge deep into the pits and returned home after dark, men who, it was said, could go years without ever seeing the light of day, struggled to raise their families. They earned less than $12 a week and often they were paid for their long hours of backbreaking work in scrip: company-issued paper money, worthless outside the coalfields.

They were mostly immigrants. Some were Welsh, men who had grown up in the mines of their native land and who shared a religious and cultural heritage with the mine bosses, and who could at least hope that someday they could work their way out of the pits to becoming a docking boss or a petty manager. Others, however, had no such hope. There were Polish and Lithuanian miners, Catholics who, because of the petty prejudice of the time, could never hope to achieve parity with their Welsh neighbors.

The largest group of laborers by far in the 19th century Pennsylvania coalfields was Irish immigrants. Hated and reviled by the Welsh, Scot and Anglo-Saxon "betters," and perhaps hating them back with equal zest, the Irish, fleeing famine and peonage in Erin during the Great Hunger of 1848-49, arrived in patch towns by the tens of thousands. At a time when America was riven by ethnic tension, when anti-immigrant groups like the Know-Nothings held sway in both politics and business, the Irish were considered almost subhuman. Elsewhere, it was common to see signs on businesses reading, "Help Wanted, Irish Need Not Apply." But in the coalfields, mine owners and bosses realized that the great wave of Irish immigration provide an almost endless supply of cheap labor, and at times it seemed as if Irish men, many of them farmers who had lost their land at home to English landlords or their lackeys, streamed into the mines as fast as they streamed off the boats in Philadelphia and New York.

It was a win-win arrangement for the mine owners. With their meager earnings, the miners bought food from the company story, paid the coal baron rent for their rundown homes, and even had to pay the barons for the picks and shovels they used to dig the coal. As one mine boss is quoted as saying at the time, "the miner's occupationis little better than semi-slavery."

And it wasn't just the men who worked. Children, too, were pressed into service, forced into hulking corrugated steel monsters that loomed over every coal patch, a menacing-looking building called a breaker, where armies of children, some as young as seven, worked hours on end to sort the chunks of coal the men had dug for between $1 and $3 a week. In Schuylkill County alone, according to one 1955 history, it was estimated that of 22,000 miners working at the latter half of the 19th century, nearly a quarter or more than 5,000 of them, were boys under the age of 16. It was said at the time that a man began his life in the breaker and ended it there, when, because of age, or disease -- like black lung, or a maiming injury, which was almost as common -- he was no longer fit enough to dig coal from the ground.

While the mine owners lived in opulence and splendor, the miners, it seemed, lived entirely by his leave.

Often, they didn't live at all.

It's hard to imagine now, but in the days before federal oversight, before child labor laws and safety guidelines became the norm, miners died with numbing regularity. Back in those days, it was hard to find a single family in the coalfields who hadn't mourned the loss of at least one male relative in the mines.

Most of the time, the deaths came in ones or twos or threes, and hardly merited a shrug from the mine owners or the world outside the coalfields.

There were exceptions, of course.

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