Mary Harris was born in Cork, Ireland in 1837, and her family fled to Toronto during the famine. She moved to Memphis in 1860, married George Jones, an iron molder and proud union man, and they had four children together. After moving to Chicago and working as a seamstress, she lost everything in the 1871 fire. An obscure working-class immigrant and poor widow, she joined the growing movement for worker rights by the 1890s, transformed herself into Mother Jones, became a symbol of resistance, and helped shape a new style of unionism. She organized for the United Mine Workers and the Socialist Party, and no one more successfully moved workingmen and women to fight for better wages and conditions. She was praised by Upton Sinclair as having "the fire of indignation" and being "the walking wrath of God," and Meridel LeSueur saw her as the true mother of workers, "the emboldened and blazing defender of all her sons and daughters." Mother Jones was especially beloved among the half-million men who mined coal in states like Illinois, and in struggles there and in Colorado and West Virginia, they fought bloody wars that changed the course of history. She encouraged solidarity to overcome divisions based on race and immigrant status. Before she died, she asked to be buried with her "brave boys" slain in the 1898 Virden Massacre, and she is buried in Mount Olive's Union Miners Cemetery in the heart of Illinois Coal Country.