Industrial America depends on coal, which is why Gilded Age industrialists owned large mining operations in the hills of western Pennsylvania — in what had been ​​Monongahela homeland until early plagues of European diseases decimated their culture. Eastern European immigrants were lured to the exploitative work of extracting bituminous coal. The year of 1891 begins with a mine explosion that kills over 100 miners. The mining union organizes strikes that begin on this day that year, to protest dangerous working conditions and sliding scale wages based on coal’s market price.

The strike will last 48 days, when law enforcement shoots at 1000 marching miners, killing 9 and wounding many more. The officers are acquitted, but, over the decades, the power of unions grows.