From 1862 to 1879, the anthracite coal mining communities of eastern Pennsylvania endured a violent socioeconomic conflict associated with the Molly Maguires era. In Carbon, Columbia, Luzerne, Northumberland, and Schuylkill counties, tensions pitted mining labor against management, justice against criminal conspiracy, and Irish American Catholics against English Protestants, Welsh people, and Germans, while secret societies such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Free Masons also figured in the struggle. History has portrayed the men called the Molly Maguires either as Irish-American martyrs or as criminals in a labor conflict, but the period brought suffering, sacrifice, and death to mining communities as thousands of immigrants sought better lives and thousands died in and around the coal mines, while scores of others were killed amid prejudice, violence, and retributive justice. The chronology of the era includes Irish migration after famine in Ireland, anti-Catholic violence, Civil War draft resistance, labor organizing through the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, economic recessions, murders of mine officials and workers, the Long Strike of 1875, James McParland's infiltration of the Ancient Order of Hibernians for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a series of arrests and trials, and the executions of twenty men in 1877 through 1879. In the epilogue, Franklin Gowen later lost control of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and took his own life in 1889, informants James Kerrigan and Daniel Kelly disappeared from the region, and McParland continued with the Pinkerton agency. Over the full span of the conflict, scores of men and women lost their lives, some by gunfire and others by hanging.