one hundred men. For a time the violence subsided. After the Civil War boom the price of coal dropped sharply. At the end of 1870 miners' wages were reduced twenty-five percent. The miners went out on strike in January,1871. By February, some mine owners had been forced to settle on miners' terms. At this point the workers ran into Franklin B.Gowen, the man who would eventually destroy the Molly Maguires. Gowen was the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. He weakened the union by deliberately stirring up trouble between different ethnic groups, setting the Irish against the English and the English against the Welsh.When some owners settled with their workers during the 1871 strike, Gowen raised the price of shipping coal, which made it impossible for these owners to operate at a profit. Many violent acts took place during the strike. Gowen saw the chance to link the Molly Maguires to the union, blaming it for acts of violence which were committed by the Mollies, although there was little connection between the two. After one of Gowen's collieries was burned down on February 13,1872, he contacted the Pinkerton Detective Agency to see if it would be possible to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. The Pinkertons were frequently employed by management to break strikes or to spy on workers. They came up with James McParlan,a 29 year-old Irishman who had come from Ireland in 1867. He was a ladies' man who also excelled at dancing, drinking, gambling, and fighting. McParlan went to work on the Mollies in October,1873. Using the alias James McKenna, he disguised himself as a successful counterfeiter with plenty of money to spend, fleeing from a murder charge in Buffalo. On April 14, he was inducted into the Mollies, took the oath, paid a three-dollar initiation fee, and was given the secret sign and password. Eventually he rose to the position of secretary in the Mollies. For a couple of years McParlan collected informa...
