"Hard coal" mining had come to dominate…

"Hard coal" mining had come to dominate northeastern Pennsylvania, a region already afforested twice over to feed America's insatiable appetite for energy, during the mid nineteenth century,

Powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields by the 1870s.

Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas willing to work for less than the prevailing local wages paid to American-born employees, luring them with "promises of fortune-making".

Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replace English-speaking miners and are frequently unable to read safety instructions.

Twenty-two thousand coal miners work in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.

Fifty-five hundred of these are children between the ages of seven and sixteen years, who earn between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal.

Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, are assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal is crushed into a manageable size.

Thus, many of the elderly miners finish their mining days as they had begun in their youth.

Wages are low, working conditions ware atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries number in the hundreds each year.

On September 6, 1869, a fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County, had taken the lives of one hundred and ten coal miners.

The families blame the coal company for failing to finance a secondary exit for the mine.

As the bodies of the miners are brought up from the Avondale Mine disaster, John Siney, head of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA), climbs onto a wagon to speak to the thousands of miners who had arrived from surrounding communities: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.“ (Labor's Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of Amer; 3rd edition (June 1979), pp. 45.)

He had asked the miners to join the union, and thousands of them had done so that day.

Some miners faced additional burdens of prejudice and persecution.

Some twenty thousand Irish workers have arrived in Schuylkill County over the past twety-five years.

It is a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district.