Eleven daily newspapers -- eight in English, three in German -- competed for Pittsburgh readers in 1876.

Times were tough. Business activity had been slow since the Panic of 1873. Many employers, including Western Pennsylvania mine operators, had responded with pay cuts and layoffs.

Three years later some workers were demanding raises. When the Youghiogheny Coal Co. declined to increase wages, miners struck on June 26. They were seeking a 10-cent increase in pay -- from 50 cents to 60 cents -- for each ton of coal mined. The amount of the raise was equal to about $2 in modern currency.

Youghiogheny Coal executives claimed that outsiders were behind the violence and intimidation that accompanied the strike. They blamed the Molly Maguires, a secret organization of Irish hard-coal miners. The group's influence, they said, had spread from northeast to southwest Pennsylvania.

Linking the strikers to the Molly Maguires, some of whom were on trial for murder that summer, would have given the mine owners a big public relations victory. A modern equivalent might be for a school board to connect striking teachers to al-Qaida.

On Aug. 4, The Pittsburgh Evening Leader offered an exclusive, if hastily assembled, investigative report on who might be behind labor troubles in the Youghiogheny Valley.

After 21 company-owned houses were torched, "a Leader reporter was yesterday detailed to visit the scene and investigate ... whether the depredators really belonged to the 'Mollies,' or consisted only of a handful of dissatisfied miners."

The burned homes were in the village of Shaner Station, a coal-patch town in Westmoreland County's Sewickley Township. "[T]here was nothing left, but the bricks of the chimneys, the tenements ... having been completely destroyed by the torch of the incendiary," the Leader's anonymous reporter wrote.

The strikers were receiving financial support from Pittsburgh-area miners who remained on the job, the newspaper reported. "[T]he ring-leaders of the striking miners not only refuse to work themselves, but will not allow others to work, and men who desire to go in at the operators' price are deterred from doing so by THREATS AND PERSONAL VIOLENCE."

The newspaper described once incident. "The house of one miner who evinced a disposition to yield was saturated inside with oil, evidently with an incendiary intention, but was fortunately discovered in time to frustrate the object."

"FEAR AND DREAD has settled upon the entire vicinity and law abiding citizens are particularly careful of what they say regarding the strikers."

The reporter wrote that he personally "experienced a striking illustration of this." He described how several men were "lounging" nearby while he interviewed a Shaner Station resident "who does not desire his name published."

"I suppose we are at liberty to speak freely?" the reporter asked.

" 'No,' said he, quickly, with a significant glance at the loungers, and the LEADER man at once perceived that a judicious amount of prudence would be healthy."

While the reporter found evidence of intimidation, was there proof of "genuine Mollie Maguires" inciting the strikers?

Coal company executives were willing to go on the record. Matthew Osborne, the superintendent at Shaner Station, "stated that, in his opinion, there was no doubt but that the gang who had been operating of late belonged to the Mollies ..."

Company President Thomas Moore told the newspaper he was "fully convinced that the outrages were committed by members of the society known as MOLLY MAGUIRES ..."

The company houses had been burned after Moore had evicted several families of striking miners.

"The three families I ejected refuse to move from the premises and are now encamped in front of the houses with a white and black MOLLIE MAGUIRE FLAG flying over their goods," he told the newspaper.

While not down playing the seriousness of the threats and intimidation, a resident of nearby Buena Vista, in Elizabeth Township, scoffed at reports of links between the Mollies and the local strikers. The man, identified only by his last name, Patterson, pointed to long-standing ethnic animosities as a barrier to cooperation.

The Molly Maguires "were composed mostly of Irishmen, whilst the miners along the 'Yough' were mostly Scotch, Welsh and English," he explained. "[T]he parties who were committing the outrages belonged to an organization, [but] he did not think it was identical with that known as the Mollie Maguires."