Involves a West Virginia mountaineer family, father, mother, five sons and daughter. Their complicated rise from abject poverty to become multi-millionaires through their efforts in the coal-mining industry. From a small outcrop of coal on their unproductive farm, they eventually own thirty production mines and become the largest coal corporation in the world, controlling the coal industry in West Virginia for over sixty years. Poverty stricken but ambitious, in the year 1850, Matt Mattison secretly kills Abe, a Jewish itinerant peddler, who visits his home periodically, using Abe's money to...

Involves a West Virginia mountaineer family, father, mother, five sons and daughter. Their complicated rise from abject poverty to become multi-millionaires through their efforts in the coal-mining industry. From a small outcrop of coal on their unproductive farm, they eventually own thirty production mines and become the largest coal corporation in the world, controlling the coal industry in West Virginia for over sixty years. Poverty stricken but ambitious, in the year 1850, Matt Mattison secretly kills Abe, a Jewish itinerant peddler, who visits his home periodically, using Abe's money to...