Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was a legendary union organizer and strike leader. Born in Ireland in 1830, she migrated to the United States at the age of eight, and died in 1930. During her long life, she taught school, worked as a seamstress, survived a yellow fever epidemic that killed her husband and their four children, and watched her house and business burn in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She was present at many of the most famous American strikes, exhorting workers in coal strikes in Colorado, Illinois, and West Virginia, steel strikes in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and cotton mill strikes in Alabama. She was present at the convention that founded the radical Industrial Workers of the World. She said, "If I pray I will have to wait until I am dead to get anything; but when I swear I get things here."