Early in the month of October, 1873, I was in Philadelphia, and one day received a note from Mr. F. B. Gowen, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, saying that he desired to see me at his place of business. I immediately responded to the invitation, accompanied by Superintendent Franklin, and met the gentleman in his private apartment, in the Company’s elegant building on Fourth Street. “I have sent for you, Mr. Pinkerton,” said the President of the two great Pennsylvania corporations, after we had exchanged greetings, “upon business of importance.” I made known my willingness to hear what it was. “The coal regions are infested by a most desperate class of men, banded together for the worst purposes—called, by some, the Buckshots, by others the Mollie Maguires—and they are making sad havoc with the country. It is a secret organization, has its meetings in hidden and out-of the-way places, and its members, I have been convinced ever since my residence in Pottsville and my connection with the criminal courts as District Attorney in the county of Schuylkill, are guilty of a majority of all the murders and other deeds of outrage which, for many years, have been committed in the neighborhood. I wish you to investigate this mysterious order, find out its interior workings, expose its evil transactions, and see if the just laws of the State cannot again be made effective in bringing criminals to justice. At present, whenever an assassination is consummated, and, as a consequence, a trial is instituted, a convenient _alibi_ steps forward and secures for the prisoner his freedom. Municipal laws are thus incapable of execution; sheriffs of counties are powerless, and the usual run of detectives are of as little value as the open, uniformed police of the different cities. All of these have been tested, and all have failed. Now, if you cannot disperse the murderous crew, or give us grounds upon which to base prosecutions, then I shall believe that it never will be effected.” I considered the proposition for a moment, turning over in my mind the magnitude of the labor to be performed. “Let me think of it a little,” I answered; “and, in the meantime, tell me more about the Mollie Maguires.”