For two years, James McParland, a.k.a. James McKenna remained undercover in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Earning $12 a week from the Pinkerton agency, as well as what he pocketed as a miner, he had managed to win the confidence of many of the miners, including several AOH leaders, including Frank McAndrew, local leader or "body master" of the Hibernians in Shenandoah.

Sketch of detectives & Molly Maguires

But despite his best efforts, and despite his contention that he had not only penetrated the secret organization but that he could categorically prove that it had thousands of members, McKenna was not yet able to prove a link between Kehoe and Campbell and the others and the violence in the coalfields.

It's not that there was none. There had been the 1862 stoning death of Langdon in Carbon County, for which Kehoe would pay the ultimate price, and the murder in 1863 of mine boss George Smith, also at Audenreid in Carbon County. In 1854, David Muir, a mine superintendent had been killed in Foster Township in Schuylkill County, and a year later, mine superintendent David Muir was murdered near Pottsville. William Little Hales, a mine foreman, died the next year in Cass Township in Schuylkill County, and in Alex Rae was later killed, allegedly by miner-terrorists in Centralia, a town that 90 years later would be plowed to the ground after an underground mine fire erupted which burns to this day.

The following year, 1870, two more mine bosses died violently, one in Schuylkill County and the other in Carbon. In all, during the years that Gowen claimed that the Mollys were at work, 16 men were murdered. All but two of them had been local officials, mine owners or operators or foremen. The other two were miners. It is, perhaps nothing more than a quirk of history, but as Wayne points out, the majority of those men who died, supposedly at the hands of miners, worked for smaller coal companies, the same companies that Gowen was trying to acquire.

In 1875, however, violence which had been at a low simmer since the birth of the union again seemed to be on the increase.

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