Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  In the mid-1860s the Kehoe family moved to Mahanoy City, where John’s father, Joseph, was elected constable and later magistrate. In 1867, while still working as a miner, John Kehoe married Mary Ann O’Donnell, who had immigrated with her family from Donegal. Three years later he took his wife and children to Shenandoah and, while continuing to work as a gangway miner at the Plank Ridge Colliery, opened a tavern. Not long thereafter he sold up and moved to Girardville, where he opened another tavern, Hibernian House, which became highly successful—having as many as sixteen paying boarders at a time—allowing Kehoe to give up mining once and for all and still provide for his five children.

  Intelligent, driven, and uncommonly successful for an Irish immigrant miner—he reportedly purchased Hibernian House for the large sum of $3,500—Kehoe soon became a leader of the Irish community in Girardville, where he was twice elected high constable, was the bodymaster for the local lodge of the AOH, and in 1874 was elected the AOH’s Schuylkill County delegate. Thus, this was no small-time, provincial publican whom McParlan met when he pretended to wander into Hibernian House but a smooth, shrewd, and perceptive operator who was every bit the intellectual equal of the wily detective.

  Little is known of the first meeting between McParlan and Kehoe, because, although Pinkerton gave an account of it, his record of the incident was suspiciously similar to what occurred several days later in McDermot’s—a Mahanoy City saloon—according to the earliest existing set of McParlan’s reports.38 It is likely that, for literary effect, Pinkerton simply transferred the events at McDermot’s to an otherwise uneventful meeting with Kehoe. In fact, there appears to have been no reason for McParlan to remain in Girardville, as shortly thereafter he got on a train heading to Shenandoah, hoping to meet Lawler. After overhearing in the smoking carriage that Lawler had gone to Pottsville, he continued to Mahanoy City. There he found a large number of “true bred Molly Maguires.”39

  On January 3, 1874, McParlan walked into McDermot’s, hopeful that his friendship with Dormer would mean he was not immediately set upon, as strangers often were. He wasn’t, but his lack of knowledge about the AOH once again almost caused trouble. One of the men in the tavern gave him a sign: placing his right forefinger to his right ear. McParlan smiled and slowly shook his head, saying only that he “had seen the day.” When asked what that meant, he enigmatically responded that he “knew as much as the doctor.” Surprised that that seemed to do the trick—despite some curious looks—he “entertained the crowd with anecdotes & songs . . . interspersed with a few fights.”40

  Several days of bad weather convinced McParlan that Mahanoy City was “a God-forsaken place—the most miserable so far visited.”41 So he moved on to Tamaqua, where he discovered that Daniel Kelly’s real name was Manus Cull and that he had simultaneously been cited on nine arrest warrants. McParlan also went to Columbia House, a tavern he would later make his base in the town. Heading five miles east to Storm Hill—now a section of Lansford—he visited a tavern run by Alexander Campbell, whom he was told was “a ‘Boss’ in the MMs of that vicinity.”42

  McParlan returned to Pottsville, and spent much of his time drinking at Sheridan House and hoping to hear something more concrete than barroom bragging. But he still needed an entrée to the AOH for his investigation to move ahead. Finally, on January 21, Dormer introduced him to Lawler, who was down from Shenandoah. Lawler was in his forties and usually known as Muff due to his passion for breeding and training fighting gamecocks (or “muffs”), which he matched in his basement against those of other men. He was “above medium height, heavily but not clumsily built . . . with black hair and heavy side whiskers of the same color, the chin being shaven,”43 all below a bald crown. Like Dormer and Kehoe, he ran a tavern, but he also still worked occasionally as a contractor in the mines, and he offered to help McParlan get a job there. That was, in reality, the last thing McParlan wanted, but he realized that Lawler was also his best route into the AOH, so on January 30 he said good-bye to his Pottsville friends and headed to Shenandoah, little knowing it would be his home for more than two years.

  CHAPTER 4

  ON THE INSIDE

  McParlan would have been quite happy if Lawler sponsored him for membership in the AOH but never found him a job. But within twenty-four hours it had worked the other way around, and he had been offered a position loading wagons inside the mine at the Davies Colliery, which was owned by the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company.1 Due to unexpected cutbacks, the original start date was then pushed back almost two weeks, during which time McParlan learned much about the hard lives of the miners.

  Many of the mine workers lived in shabby homes in the overcrowded and poorly built hamlets, called patches, where most of the houses were owned by the companies.2 The dwellings usually had one room downstairs, two above, and no cellars. Living conditions were crude, even primitive, with unfilled cracks in the walls; no sanitary facilities; scant, tatty furniture and only occasional carpets; and cooking and heating sometimes based on a stove but just as often simply on open coal grates. The front door led directly onto a dirt road, with no porch front or back, but perhaps a small vegetable garden attached. The houses were covered inside and out with coal dust and other pollutants of the mining process, ultimately damaging the lungs, eyes, and nasal passages of every family member, including those children too young to have yet gone to pick slate out of the breakers—and they frequently started there when only seven or eight years old.

  The miners not only had to pay unreasonable rents for their squalid accommodations, but often faced extortionate measures requiring them to use the company store, where prices were 10 to 50 percent higher than in independent shops. The mining operation Joseph Walton & Company, for example, announced that: “from this time henceforth we shall take particular notice who deals at the store and who does not. And as the time is near at hand when we shall reduce the number of our men, just such men as have no account at the store will be dropped, and those who have shown the sense to deal justly will be retained.”3

  Once in the store, they were overcharged for work and dress clothes, shoes, soap, candles, picks, shovels, blasting powder, lamps, sugar, coffee, potatoes, rice, pork, flour, tobacco, and many more items. After these costs were deducted from a miner’s wages, he might find that he had no money for anything else and had to use credit to buy his drinks—and most miners drank hard to make the monotony and sufferings of life disappear. Then, if he lost his job, his house was immediately repossessed, and he had absolutely nothing in reserve to fall back on.

  McParlan discovered all this while visiting taverns and joining the locals at cockfights—a favored blood sport, as it had been in Ireland—dogfights, which were the scene of heavy betting and heavier drinking, and street fights, which spilled over from the former two kinds of entertainment, as well as footraces, card games, and bars. In anticipation of such “fun,” men regularly carried billy clubs, knives, and even revolvers to anywhere crowds might form. One of the most violent such men was Ed Lawler, the nephew of McParlan’s friend. Young Lawler was “a very hard case,” McParlan wrote, and “seems to be much feared by every one—is reported to have shot and maimed some 4 or 5 men although he is only 21 years old—carries steel knuckles all the time. . . . He said he would as soon shoot some of the boys as he would a dog.”4

  Having decided that this “locality is full of MMs” and that he was “on the right track though it will take some time yet,”5 McParlan did his best to build his relationship with Muff Lawler by helping the tavern keeper train his gamecocks for the ring. The first step involved clipping the spurs off the poor creatures, then fitting steel gaffs, or artificial spurs, in their place. The men daily went through a repetitive process to build the cocks’ endurance and encourage their aggression.6 The success in the matches—viewed by upward of two hundred people—against a set of cocks from Girardville helped earn McParlan an invitation to move in with Lawler, his wife, their six c
hildren, and Mrs. Lawler’s brother. Despite having to share a bed with the brother, McParlan quickly accepted, little dreaming of the problems it would cause when preparing his reports. Previously he had been able to write them each night in the seclusion of his room; now it became dangerous, because writing regularly might make his bedmate suspicious. Often he stayed up until everyone had left the bar and Lawler turned in. Then, writing by candlelight in the kitchen, he recorded the day’s events before sneaking to a post office in a nearby town, so as not to be recognized. Alternatively, having learned the schedule of the mail train, he threw a report on its floor when it was at a standstill, knowing it would be delivered despite the unusual posting technique.7

  McParlan also had other difficulties to overcome. He could not leave postage stamps in his luggage, lest it was searched, and he could not take them with him into a wet mine. So he cut a small cavity in the lining of the boots he left on the surface and hid them there. Ink proved a problem as well, because it froze in Lawler’s house. McParlan was reduced to making his own from water and chimney soot. Then one day Lawler asked him to write a letter for him, and thereafter he allowed McParlan to make ink with the laundry blueing.8

  Finally, on Thursday, February 12, McParlan went to work in the mine, loading coal into wagons. Not only did he feel queasy due to the length of time he had to stay in the dark, claustrophobic environment, it was also “the hardest work he ever did—his hands at the end of the day being well blistered.”9 And he received a stiff lesson about the realities of coal mining.

  Two techniques were commonly used to extract anthracite in Schuylkill County. Where the coal lay in relatively horizontal or gently descending seams not far below the surface, “breast and pillar” operations were employed. Gangways ten to fifteen yards wide and between a few hundred and a few thousand yards long ran along the sides of the coal bed, and breasts, or chambers twelve to thirty yards wide, were driven into the coal, separated by pillars ten to twenty-five yards wide, which were left standing to support the overlying strata. The depth of the breasts was determined by their inclination, because that controlled how far wagons could proceed in.10

  In areas where much of the coal lay in sharply descending seams, the method of choice was usually chute mining. A gangway was driven down to the bottom of the seam, from where a chute braced with timber rose to the coal face. Narrow manways allowed the miners to reach the face and air to circulate. When the angle of the chute was around thirty degrees, the coal blasted or cut off slid down to the gangway under the force of gravity. If the chute was not this steep, the coal was pushed down by hand. If the chute was steeper, platforms were built to hold the coal at locations from where it could be released by the laborers below, who either directed it into waiting cars or shoveled it in—the latter being McParlan’s job. The cars were then pushed by hand or hauled by mules or engine power to the shaft.11

  McParlan’s position was in the middle of the mining hierarchy. At the top of the workingmen—below mine bosses, bosses of the breakers (where the coal was broken into useful sizes and the slate and other impurities removed from it), engineers, and mechanics—were skilled miners, who established the supports for safety, drilled or blasted the coal from the face, were in charge of the underground operation, and determined the length of their own working day. The belowground, or first-class, laborers were next in the social pecking order and pay scale but far enough below the miners to cause dissatisfaction. As one Welsh miner wrote that same winter:

  Look again at the unfairness of the system to the laborer who has to fill from six to seven cars a day with coal and he gets but one third of the wages of the miner. . . . The miner and laborer go to work at seven o’clock in the morning and probably the miner will cut enough coal by ten or twelve o’clock. Then he will go out leaving the poor laborer up to his waist in water and he will have to pile the lumps and fill three or four cars with coal after the gentleman has left. . . . Between five and six, the laborer, poor thing arrives home wet as a fish.12

  The aboveground, or second-class, laborers were next in the hierarchy. At the bottom were the young boys, three quarters of whom were pickers and sorters, separating slate from coal in the breakers, while the other quarter tended to be in charge of the mules and ventilation underground.13

  As McParlan discovered, these divisions mirrored the region’s ethnic tensions. Many of the Welsh, Scots, English, and some Germans were miners, whereas most of the Irish were laborers. Although this reflected the fact that many Welsh and English were more experienced—having worked in the anthracite fields of South Wales—it left some Irish feeling maltreated. This was most apparent in immigrants from Donegal and other northern Irish regions, who not only tended to be the least skilled, but—due to regional connections—the most likely to become Molly Maguires. Such feelings of discrimination played out in factional conflict between the Irish and Welsh, which included beatings, street fights, and murders.14

  Other hardships of life in the mines were brought home to McParlan only five days after he began, when he “got his hands jammed by a fall of coal and was seriously injured.”15 It was a comparatively small price to pay when confronting the daily hazards of injury and death deep in the earth, where the miners continually breathed in coal dust, powder smoke, “chokedamp” (carbon monoxide), and other gases; were overwhelmed by the deafening noise of blasting, shoveling, and hauling of anthracite; and had an underground fatality rate as high as 7.8 percent during a career due to ceiling collapses, “firedamp” (methane) explosions, and accidents when being hoisted up the shaft to the surface.16

  Despite losing the nails on his fingers, within a week McParlan was back at work. There he learned that, although he was surrounded by discrimination, not all Molly Maguire activity was based on national or religious considerations. When a Molly was killed in Centralia, a patch four miles west of Girardville, Lawler said that the members of the Chain Gang who killed him would suffer in return. The Chain Gang (also known as the Sheet Irons) mainly comprised Irish immigrants who been hired as skilled miners due to their experience in the coal mines of County Kilkenny. Their economic and social position made them more natural allies of the Welsh than of other Irish, and therefore a rival faction to the Molly Maguires.17

  As he again settled into his subterranean job, McParlan continued to pay attention to men he identified as Molly Maguires. One was Frank McAndrew, who was employed at the same colliery and with whom McParlan quickly became fast friends. A twenty-six-year-old immigrant from Ireland, McAndrew was a good-looking man with blue eyes, straight teeth, wavy auburn hair that was kept nicely cut, and a sandy-colored mustache. He was more presentable than the average miner, married, and the father of a young child.18

  Early in March, McParlan and others were released from the mine, but eight days later he and McAndrew were hired at the West Shenandoah Colliery, where McParlan “turned the shutes and headings.” That ended about a week later when “the operative met with a slight accident . . . a piece of coal fell against his ankle and bruised it so that he is unable to wear his mining boots.”19 Once again McParlan was out of work, but this time he would not try to find more.

  When Mrs. Lawler became ill, in order not to inconvenience the family, McParlan instead took a room at the home of Fenton Cooney on Coal Street, where he was often on his own but shared at times with Michael Doyle, a member of the Shenandoah branch of the AOH. Discovering that McParlan would write a letter for him if asked, Cooney thereafter allowed him to use the kitchen, where the ink would not freeze, and he could write his reports safely.

  Not long after his second accident, McParlan’s schmoozing of Muff Lawler began to pay off. Lawler told him how the signs and passwords of the AOH were “manufactured in Dublin Ireland and sent here . . . by a man named Murphy who is steward on one of the steamship lines.”20 The next day, Lawler spilled even more, telling McParlan how “coffin notices” were sent to frighten men into changing their behavi
or or leaving the area. “A Welshman—who was a boss—discharged all the Irish under him,” Lawler said, and “a few days after that a letter was handed this boss—and upon asking the bearer where it came from was answered, ‘from Hell.’ The letter notified him to leave at a stated time—this he neglected doing & the consequence was that his house was entered by a party, his furniture all smashed & he beaten almost dead.”21

  These disclosures encouraged McParlan’s hope that he would get an invitation “into the ring,” that is, the Shenandoah lodge of the AOH.22 On April 14, his efforts were rewarded when he, Lawler, McAndrew, and three other miners met at Lawler’s house, where, after a conference, the others called him upstairs. There he took an oath administered by Lawler, paid a $3 initiation fee, and was given “the goods,” the recognition signs and passwords that were changed each quarter of a year. They all returned to the bar, where McParlan treated his new “brothers” to several rounds. Then, beginning the following morning, he and Lawler spent the day “baptizing his initiation in all the saloons of the place and meeting the congratulations of the gang.”23 He was one of them; he was on the inside; he was a Molly Maguire.

  • • •

  If McParlan thought that his initiation into the Shenandoah lodge of the AOH was a “final triumph,”24 he was soon disabused of the hope that his investigation was almost over. Five days later he attended his first lodge meeting to find that just seven other members were there, and that the most pressing business was finding nine dollars to send Barney Dolan, the county delegate to state and national conventions.25

  However, he now was in possession of “the goods” for that quarter, so he could at least ask subtle questions of those whom it would not have previously been safe to approach.26 To introduce himself to these men, he “put the tip of the little finger of the right hand to the corner of the right eye.” Their response was “to catch the lappel of the coat with the little finger and thumb of the right hand.” Similarly, if wanting to identify members of the AOH in a crowded tavern, he could use the “drinking toast,” which was “The Emperor of France & Don Carlos of Spain may they unite together.” The answer from a fellow member was: “And the Pope’s rights maintain.” Or, if outside in the dark and uncertain whom he was running into, he could say: “The nights are very dark” and be assured that it was a member of the AOH if the other man replied: “I hope they will soon mend.”