Narrator: As miners and guards dug in, Keeney sent for Mary Harris Jones, a colorful, 80-year-old, Irish labor organizer known as "Mother" Jones.

"Mother Jones, her very name expresses the spirit of revolution. Her striking personality embodies all its principles." —Eugene Debs

Narrator: After losing her husband and four children to a fever epidemic in Memphis, Mary Harris had opened a dress maker's shop in Chicago, where she lost everything in the Great Fire of 1871. She joined the United Mine Workers as an organizer. Normally quiet and shy, in public, she became profane and dramatic. "I am not a humanitarian," she declared, "I'm a hell-raiser."

Jones arrived in Cabin Creek on a warm Sunday morning in June. She was greeted by a line of machine guns manned by mine guards. "If you fire one shot here today," she warned them, "we will not leave any of your gang alive."

Ken Hechler: "Mother Jones had an expression: 'There's no peace in West Virginia because there's no justice in West Virginia.' She was a fearless lady. The people who manned the machine guns and didn't hesitate to shoot down male strikers would never kill Mother Jones, and she knew they wouldn't."

“When the time comes in the history of this struggle that a mine owner or Baldwin guards will intimidate me, I want to die in that hour.” —"Mother" Jones