The next important outrage of this character was the murder of William H. Littlehales, superintendent of the Glen Carbon Coal Mining Company, March 15, 1869. He was killed on the highway in Cass Township, Schuylkill County, while enroute to his home in Pottsville.
Then occurred the murders of F. W. S. Langdon, George K. Smith and Graham Powell, each of whom was a mining official.
But the crowning act of the Mollie Maguires, up to the time James McParlan was engaged by Mr. Allen Pinkerton to investigate the workings of this nefarious organization, and the one reaching the culmination of many previous and similar events, was the murder of Morgan Powell.
This event exasperated the good people of the anthracite region to the pitch where endurance ceases to be a virtue, and where only desperate methods to put a stop to these crimes can be put in operation.
This unprovoked murder occurred December 2, 1871. Morgan Powell was assistant superintendent of the Lehigh and Wilkes Barre Coal and Iron Company, at Summit Hill, Carbon County.
The murder was committed about seven o’clock in the evening, on the main street of the little town, not more than twenty feet from the store of Henry Williamson, which place Powell had but a few minutes earlier left to go to the office of Mr. Zehner, the general superintendent of the company.
It seems that one of three men, who had been seen by different parties waiting near the store, approached Mr. Powell from the rear, close beside a gate leading into the stables, and fired a pistol shot into the left breast of the victim. The assassin reached over the shoulder of Powell to accomplish his deadly purpose.
The bullet passed through Powell’s body, lodged in the back near the spinal column, producing immediate paralysis of the lower limbs, and resulting in death two days afterward.
The wounded man was carried back to the store by some of his friends and his son, Charles Powell, the latter then but fourteen years of age, and there remained all night. The next day he was removed to the residence of Morgan Price, where he died the following day.
Hardly had the smoke from the murderer’s pistol mingled with the clear air of that star-lit winter evening, when the assassins were discovered rapidly making their way from the scene of their savage deed toward the top of Plant No. 1.