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The image of a tyrannical King Coal whose power extended far beyond the coal camps was starting to form in the public mind. By encompassing nearly every lump of anthracite in the nation, the cartel reached into the hearth-fires of millions of Americans. In 1875, when Gowen and the coal operators cut wages and the miners went on strike in response, the public sympathized with the miners. Newspapers that normally condemned all strikes now denounced the coal cartel that "with one hand reaches for the pockets of the consumers, and with the other for the throats of the laborers." The strike, lasting five long months, was marked by vio lence on both sides. Striking miners were beaten and killed, as were strikebreakers and mine bosses. Miners derailed trains, sabotaged machinery, and burned down mine buildings. The newly combined coal operators held firm, though, and ultimately the hungry miners straggled back to work at the lower wages, their union essentially destroyed. The miners blamed Gowen, and for years they did not speak his name without a curse.

It wasn't long before the Pennsylvania legislature began to investigate Gowen's monopolistic strategies. Appearing in person before the investigating committee, Gowen persuasively argued that large mining companies were in the public interest because only they could make the needed investments. Then he quite effectively changed the subject: He read out a long list of threats, beatings, fires, and shootings committed by "a class of agitators" among the anthracite miners. When he was through, the focus of the legislature and the public (for Gowen published his arguments) had shifted from the Reading's growing power to the region's growing wave of organized crime.

Gowen's list of crimes had been compiled by Allan Pinkerton's private detective agency, which Gowen had secretly hired two years earlier to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. Pinkerton had sent an Irish Catholic spy into the region, and after he had gathered evidence of their crimes, and perhaps provoked additional ones, the trap was sprung. In September 1875, scores of suspected Mollies were rounded up by the Coal and Iron Police, a private security force which was controlled by Gowen and was the main law enforcement agency in the region.

The following spring, a spectacular and high-profile murder trial of five of the suspects opened in anthracite country. Not only did Gowen's secret agent testify against the suspects, who had been arrested by Gowen's private police, but the prosecution team was led by none other than Gowen himself, the former district attorney now acting as special prosecutor for the state. It would be hard to find another proceeding in American history where a single corporation, indeed a single man, had so blatantly taken over the powers of the sovereign.

Gowen, ever flamboyant, appeared in the courtroom dressed in formal evening clothes. Before an electrified audience, he presented a case not just against the five suspects but against all the Molly Maguires, and, by strong implication, against the miners' now-defunct union. At issue was not.just the murder with which the suspects were charged but a whole array of crimes. Following Gowen's line of reasoning, the press soon blamed the Molly Maguires for all the labor violence by miners during the long strike of 1875. After a series of trials, twenty accused Mollies were hanged, and twenty-six more imprisoned. For bringing down the Mollies, Gowen-so recently the subject of public scorn and suspicion-was lauded in the press for "accomplishing one of the greatest works for public good that has been achieved in this country in this generation."

Two conflicting lines of folklore have emerged around the Molly Maguires, one branding them brutal criminals, the other hailing them as martyrs in the battle against King Coal and corporate tyranny. Modern historians generally agree that the legend of the Mollies was greatly magnified by Gowen's oratory and by the press, and that the wave of crime against coal producers in the area, particularly after the long strike of 1875, was the predictable result of the miners' desperation rather than the work of a structured secret society. Clearly, the miners' union, far from being dominated by the Mollies, had helped prevent violence by the miners while it existed. In the public's mind, though, organized anthracite miners were now seen as terrorists, and support for miners' attempts to unionize withered away. The specter of the Molly Maguires so completely undermined subsequent attempts to unionize that no union would succeed in organizing the anthracite miners until the United Mine Workers did so at the end of the century.

More (#1) from Coal: A Human History:

One problem with the shiny, wood-burning engines proved hard to ignore: They spewed out a continuous shower of sparks and cinders wherever they went, "a storm of fiery snow," as Charles Dickens called it when he visited the United States. It was a beautiful display at night, but it had a predictable downside. Wood-burning trains commonly set nearby fields and forests ablaze; some said the trains burned more wood outside the firebox than inside.

The worst problems were on the train itself, since many early passenger cars were roofless, and all were made of wood. For example, the inaugural trip of the Mohawk Valley line in New York in 1831 (just a year after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester line) was marred when red-hot cinders rained down upon passengers who, just moments before, had felt privileged to be experiencing this exciting new mode of travel. Those who had brought umbrellas opened them, but tossed them overboard after the first mile once their covers had burned away. According to one witness, "a general melee [then] took place among the deck-passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station."

Sparks on another train reportedly consumed $6o,ooo worth of freshly minted dollar bills that were on board, singeing many passengers in the process; according to one complaint, some of the women, who wore voluminous and flammable dresses, were left "almost denuded." Over a thousand patents were granted for devices that attempted to stop these trains from igniting their surroundings, their cargo, and their passengers; but the real cure would come later in the century, when coal replaced wood as the fuel of choice. In the meantime, some of the more safety conscious railways had their passengers travel with buckets of sand in their laps to pour on each other when they caught fire.