At first, the powerful young magnate seemed to tolerate the union. As Boyer and Morais wrote, working with Siney, the union leader who believed that the fortunes of labor and of capital were inextricably linked, Gowen even went so far as to recognize the union and signed in July 1870 the first written contract between mine owners and a labor union in the history of the United States.

Among other things, the contract tied miners' pay to the price of coal, with the caveat that the miners would face no further pay cuts if the price of coal fell below $3 a ton. "The miners were betting on a rise in coal prices, and therefore of wages, but they lost their bet."

With the end of the war and the Depression of 1873, coal prices plummeted. With new immigrants entering the coalfield and Irish miners who had failed to escape the draft returning in huge numbers, there was an oversupply of strong backs, and pressure mounted on the mine owners to further reduce pay. That pressure was strongest on the smaller mine owners, men who lacked the vast foreign capital Gowen had amassed, and as the years went on, Gowen capitalized on their troubles, buying up the smaller companies, according to Wayne. He also added a little extra pressure of his own, hiking the price he charged to ship coal, a move that put several small mine operations in an almost untenable position. "All the independent mine owners had to make that up somewhere, so where the hell do you make that up from?"

The shortfall came from the pockets of the already impoverished miners, but in many cases even that failed to staunch the fiscal bleeding of the small mine companies. But Gowen was there to pick up the pieces. "Gowen waited, and he ended up buying these places for like 10 cents on the dollar," Wayne said.

Though Gowen was amassing an empire for the Philadelphia and Reading Company, his investments were not yet showing a profit, and, according to Wayne and several historians, the company's English and Scottish stockholders were starting to get antsy. "They said, 'Where's the return on our investment?'"

There was little question that Gowen needed to further reduce wages in the mines, to slash them below the contractually mandated $3 a ton minimum. But there were obstacles. The union, which he had managed to bring under his sway to some degree was one impediment, but with his personal relationship with Siney, the union leader, Gowen could at least hope that he could find away around that obstacle.

More problematic for Gowen were the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

As Boyer and Morais put it, it was the AOH, and its leaders, men like Kehoe and Campbell, Doyle and Kelly, "who were standing in his way."

"It was they who opposed Siney when he talked of a reasonable attitude and arbitration instead of strikes, and it was they who advocated strike rather than suffer a cut below the contract's minimum wage," the historians wrote.

Judge Cyrus L. Pershing, portrait

What's more, these men, or some of them, were slowly gathering power and prestige outside of the coalfields. Although some historians dispute it, there was at the time a sense that the Irish vote in general, and in particular, the support of men like Kehoe and Campbell working through the AOH, were at least partly responsible for the election of then Governor John F. Hartranft. True or not, such talk made the AOH leaders a bane to the powerful political and financial officials in the region, who almost to a man had supported the anti-labor, anti-immigrant judge from far off Cambria County, Cyrus L. Pershing. Pershing, of course, would later figure prominently in the Molly Maguire saga.

With their strength among the union rank and file beyond dispute and their political connections fast becoming a subject of some concern, Kehoe and Campbell, both of whom had left the mines and gone into the liquor business, as well as the other AOH leaders, had made some powerful enemies.

In fact, many historians now believe that Gowen had come to see them as the biggest problem he faced in his bid to consolidate his control of coalfields and to calm his jittery overseas investors. "If Gowen could get rid of (the leaders of the AOH) and the progressives they led in the miners union, he could have clear sailing," Boyer and Morais wrote.

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