Darrell Cooper (9:05)
God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist, but its reference is to something that transcends all things. Tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion. Who's America? Who is America? We started asking some version of those two questions when the Pilgrims landed in North America, probably. And we're still asking those questions. And the answers have changed over the years. Who does America belong to? Who is America? Who are the Americans? Back during the Civil War, people went to war against the federal government out of loyalty to their states. People in Virginia were Virginians first. Their loyalty to the United States was born out of that state's participation in the federal system. Their grandparents or great grandparents had lived in Virginia before there ever was a United States. And so when those two loyalties came into conflict and the two identities could no longer coexist, they held to the older one, the one that to them was closer to home. Later in the 20th century, the advent of post colonial liberation movements in the Third World, a lot of American citizens whose national origins were in the global south, the formerly colonized world, have often been encouraged to think of themselves as diaspora populations. You know, as Hispanics or Africans or Asians or Middle Easterners who just happen to be residing in the United States. But that national origin or that ethnic identity, you know, they're told from a certain standpoint, should be their primary mode of identification. Marxists never got much hold in the us but they would have had us understand ourselves in terms of class relations, right? A bunch of bourgeois exploiters. And then the real Americans, the workers, some groups, the Catholic immigrants, for example, Jews, Irish, Italian, Slavs, other Europeans over the years were castigated for not assimilating quickly enough, not assimilating into American society. Being hyphenated Americans they were called, even as their assimilation was resisted and sometimes blocked by important segments of American society. So who's America? The author Colin Woodward brought out an interesting formulation in his great little book American Nations. It's called subtitled the History of the eleven Regional Cultures in North America. I know you've heard me mention the book Albion's Seed before, about the four major British migrations into what became America. It's a fantastic book and this is actually a great supplement for that book and it's one for people who want a little bit easier and shorter read. So Woodward ignores state and national boundaries altogether and he gives us a gerrymandered map of the U.S. canada and Northern Mexico. The that tries to mark the cultural and economic zones created by patterns of settlement and migration of successive waves of new Americans over the years as they come in and break against geographic and rival cultural barriers and slosh around and bump up against each other, as the book's title says. Woodward identifies 11 of these regions and he gives them names like Yankeedom, which is probably pretty self explanatory, you would think, but yes, founded when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock, but then spreading to eventually encompass New England and the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. And then the Great Lakes region up into Michigan and Wisconsin and even on the other side of the Great Lakes, the Canadian shoreline Windsor around there he defines as Yankeedom for cultural and economic and historical reasons that he goes over encompassing northern Mexico, West Texas, the southern parts of the Southwest and Baja. And Southern California is the nation he calls El Norte, which he reminds us is the oldest of the American nations settled by the Spanish in the 16th century, in which today, even in the northern Mexican locales like Chihuahua, Sonora or Baja, has an economy that faces more toward America than it does toward Mexico City or anything south of it. He points to the Deep south, founded by English slavers who came from Barbados and brought with them a particularly harsh and despotic racial caste system. Talks about the Cavalier Tidewater region of the Virginia lowlands and Maryland, southern Delaware, northeastern North Carolina I guess would be in there. There's the Midlands, the Far west, the Left coast and the tiny and short lived little region of New Netherland he calls it. And there's New France up in Canada, over in the East. And then there's the region that I want to talk to you all about today. Woodward calls it Greater Appalachia. Greater Appalachia was founded in the early 18th century, by wave upon wave of rough bellicose settlers from the war ravaged borderlands of northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Lampooned by writers, journalists, filmmakers, and television producers as rednecks, hillbillies, crackers, and white trash. And today, you'd probably number them among the deplorables. These clannish Scots, Irish and north English frontiersmen spread across the highland south and on into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two thirds of Oklahoma, and the hill country of Texas. Clashing with Indians, Mexicans and Yankees as they migrated in the British isles. This culture had formed in a state of near constant war and upheaval, fostering a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. Intensely suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers alike, these American borderlanders despised yankee teachers, Tidewater lords, and deep south aristocrats. In the civil War, much of the region fought for the union, with secession movements in western Virginia creating West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. The borderlanders combative culture has provided a large portion of the nation's military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Douglas MacArthur to the enlisted fighting men in Afghanistan and Iraq. They also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and evangelical fundamentalism. You know, when the federal government sends out census takers to get a read on the demographics of the country every 10 years, one of the questions that they always ask is about our ethnicity or our national origin. And you can say Latino or you can say Mexican, you can say Scottish or British, African or Nigerian. Whatever you think applies from a broad range of options. Well, throughout the greater Appalachia region, settled by those Scots, Irish and English borderers who were then joined over the years by southern blacks, central and southern Europeans, and others, the vast majority of people in that region simply give their ethnicity as American. It's the only region in the country where that's the case today. I want to tell you a story about these Americans. In the summer of 1912, in the mountains of southern West Virginia, the Americans were near a state of revolution. Over the course of just a couple decades, they had had imposed on them a social. A cultural and political and economic transformation more total and more jarring, more rapid than any group had experienced in American history, With the possible exception of the native Americans at the time of the civil war, which at the time is within living memory for many of the residents here. Southern Appalachia was as isolated politically, culturally, and economically as Any place in the United States. I mean, these people were up in the mountains living their own lives by themselves and had been for a hundred years. There were parts of it that were not electrified until the 1960s. The terrain there, and I was there last year for a week, and it is gorgeous country out there. But I gotta tell you, the terrain, it's rough. It consists of rugged wooded hills interrupted by narrow valleys along numerous creeks and small rivers, which makes it totally unsuitable for large scale farming or cash crop export. The hillsides, they just jut straight out of the ground and they're so steep that they can't be cultivated and they really can't be used for much of anything other than hunting or depending on the hillside, maybe grazing a few livestock. What this land could support, though, was small, self sufficient family farms. And so slowly but surely, the people worked their way south through the hills, following old Indian trails. The first arrivals would come in and claim the river and creek beds where the tillable land was. And the new arrivals and the grown sons of those families would then move down to the next hollow for their plot. And that's how Appalachia was largely settled. You couldn't build towns there. There's no room to build them and no infrastructure to support them. In this story, we're going to be spending a lot of time in the Tug Valley, which cups a river fork called the Tug that serves as the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. Well, there were no roads into that valley until the 1900s, after Americans had been living there a good hundred years. The whole community had been up there for 100 years. There were no roads into that area. Trade outside the region virtually non existent, even trade from one valley to the next valley was extremely limited because it was just not a simple matter to get around these mountains, especially with cargo, before the roads and the railroads came. And unlike much of the eastern United States with the Ohio river, the Mississippi river, all these navigable rivers that made it easy to transport people and cargo and information over large swaths of land. There was none of that. You've got a bunch of very small and usually short rivers running through rugged mountains. If you wanted to get a message to someone in the Tug Valley, you had to hike in there and go tell them. Each one of these isolated little valleys had its own little community and its own little culture. Sometimes there were even differences in dialect. There was no division of labor. You know, it was a primitive economy in that sense. Every household was a self sufficient unit. Up until the day the coal and railroad companies showed up These people were still tanning their own leather to make their own shoes. You know, they were making their own thread and wax, making their own string and rope and cloth from flax and wool. They were still carving their own dishes and bowls from cucumber and poplar wood in the hills around them. This is a traditional community. And so outsiders, and I don't just mean people from New York and Philadelphia, but people from the growing towns to the east and north, right there in West Virginia or in the other direction in Kentucky, looked at them and saw desperately poor people living a primitive lifestyle, people desperately in need of, of the uplifting hand of the more educated and reform minded people in the cities. But what they couldn't see was that there was a real tight knit community life there of a kind that was fading and dying out in the rest of America by that point in our history. And the poverty even was, you know, sort of in the eye of the beholder. I mean, the people weren't rich, obviously by any measure, but they also didn't spend 14 hours a day working like people in the northern factory cities did. They didn't employ slaves. These people were isolated. They were impoverished from an income standpoint. They were living a primitive lifestyle, traditional lifestyle in many ways, but they were free. That's why they had come to America. These people more than anyone else, came from a part of England where they had just been run over in one direction or another by external authority for hundreds, really thousands of years. You can follow it all the way back to Julius Caesar. These people have been resisting control by outside authorities. And when they came over to America, they didn't linger in the cities on the coast. They didn't want to be around all that. They went straight out over into south central Pennsylvania and then down into Appalachia, and they found their home. They were free and they had everything they needed to live, and they had plenty of leisure time besides. In Altina Waller's great book on the culture of southern Appalachia in the aftermath of the Civil War, she writes, if the importance of land was an 18th century heritage, the Tug Valley social structure was much more egalitarian in practice than that of Tidewater Virginia. In the mountainous terrain, it was not possible to imitate the plantation system in its polarized society. And small farms dominated in 1850. And I just, just check this part out, okay? Just, just think about what this means as far as the type of society we're talking about and that in the relationship the people there have to one another. In 1850, more than 2/3 of pike and Logan counties. Those are the two Tug Valley counties straddling the West Virginia Kentucky line. More than 2/3 of pike and Logan county households owned their own farms. But even the 1/3 of households who reported no landholdings do not represent a pauper class. Many such households consisted of young families living on the larger farm of one or the other spouse's families. Such households were part of the parents domestic economy until such time as the children obtained their own land. Thus, most residents owned, or could soon expect to own self sufficient small farms of 30 to 35 cultivated acres and 300 acres of unimproved land, often mountainsides too steep for anything but hunting or perhaps cattle grazing. Whatever social differentiation existed, economic activity was virtually the same for everyone and poverty was almost unknown. All families participated in a domestic semi subsistence economy that included cultivating corn, wheat, oats, tobacco and vegetables. Men and women tended domestic animals such as cattle, swine, sheep, horses and sometimes oxen. Women engaged in home manufactures for family consumption, while men supplemented the family diet with the abundant wild game and fish. Differences between an average and a wealthy family were not in quality of life, but simply in quantity of land animals and production of home manufactures. The undiversified subsistence economy of Tug Valley residents extended up and down the social scale. It sustained a pre modern lifestyle of hard work alleviated by seasonal rhythms and individual flexibility, a lack of distinction between work and recreation, and a sense of predictability. This subsistence or semi subsistence economy, however, did not preclude economic and social interaction, interactions that fostered a strong sense of community. If trade beyond the mountains was almost non existent, barter and market exchanges within the Tug Valley community itself were extensive. Families were productive economic units whose tasks were shared with relatives, neighbors and friends. More frequently than not, hunting, fencing, planting, harvesting, horse trading and house building were all tasks shared by the men in the neighborhood. Women got together for canning, sewing and quilting. There's a Japanese proverb that goes negara maitata desa mauikara. And I know with 99% certainty that I just annihilated that. Sorry, but that's how it was spelled in English, so blame the author of the book I got it from. What it means is the capital has its order, the village its customs. You might say the capital has its laws, the village its customs. Well, that had very much applied to the Scots, Irish and the Borderlanders for well over a thousand years back in the British Isles. And it followed them that tendency to Appalachia when they migrated to North America. The mountaineers were Far, very far from the attention of state and federal government authorities and even local government, which they did have. County governments didn't supersede the natural and organic community hierarchy. It reflected it and reinforced it. The heads of the prominent and respected families in the area, in other words, the men who were already looked to as the leaders in the community, they would hold the government posts like sheriff or judge or what have you. A majority of the people in the late 1800s there were still illiterate and they had an oral culture's understanding of customary versus legal culture. They lived in a world where deals were made by handshakes with eye contact, where they were binding not because of the letter of some abstract law or contract, but because in a tight knit community, everybody knew everybody else's business. Everybody would have known what the agreement was in outline. And so in all but the most complicated or difficult cases, there tend to be a consensus over who was in the right or who was in the wrong. The respected men serving in local government positions exercise their authority, in other words, not as representatives of some distant system or power structure. So I don't know, not like the US Marshal in old west stories where he's the lone representative of United States law in these here parts. It wasn't like that. The leading men who occupied those local government posts, they exercised their authority as fellow members of the community. And their decisions weren't guided by legal technicalities because they weren't representing some. They weren't representing the laws and decisions of the state legislature or the U.S. congress. They were there to help lead and manage their community. So they didn't make their decisions by legal technicalities. They made them by common sense and local custom as they perceived it. Of course, modern people hear that. By that I even mean people from the more developed parts of the country back then heard it and they think, well, this is a government of men, not a government of laws. Why? How could objectivity and equality before the law ever exist in a place like that? And the answer is it couldn't. Objectivity was not the goal. And to outsiders it looked like anarchy and disorder. But it wasn't that. Like any community, there were rules and everybody knew what they were. If two men came in with a dispute, a he said, he said dispute, or something happened. And one of them, everybody in the community knows everybody else, okay? They all know each other very well and they know that this guy over here doesn't lie, is honest in his dealings, is generous and helpful in the community. And this other guy over here is kind of A ne'er do. Well, who's always causing problems. These guys end up in court and one of them says one thing, one of them says the other. It's not going to come down to a technicality in the law, right? They're going to look at these two people and everybody's going to kind of know what happened. Just like in a very, very small group of people, like your friends or family, when something happens, usually don't have to hear all the details. Given who's involved, you can probably get a pretty good idea. A defendant in a civil or criminal dispute was not coming in and arguing his case before some objective standard. He was arguing his case to the community in which he lived and on which he depended in a court presided over by a leading citizen. Everybody in the community agreed was a reasonable and a fair man. And so it was not anarchy, because decisions that were made through these means were almost always respected for the simple reason that anyone who tried to buck the system knew that they would be going against the whole community. And it very rarely happened. These were some of the very last people in America who were still living in a truly traditional way. It was self sufficient households organized into a community that governed itself by common agreement. It could have done just fine without any government at all, no question about that. The Civil War gave them the opportunity to prove that during the Civil War, civil society just completely broke down in southern West Virginia in many ways. When Union forces under future president James Garfield came in and started burning things down, arresting people. They burned down the courthouse. And so the courts, for example, didn't function throughout the Civil War in there. The local citizens were out in the forest fighting a guerrilla war against the Northern occupiers. When the war was over, those leading citizens in the county, you know, those natural leaders that everyone looked to without having to be told to. Most of those guys were now excluded from local government by the Northern Reconstruction regime because of their real or suspected sympathies for the Confederacy. So the Civil War ends and the whole traditional way that these people were used to governing themselves was completely thrown out and turned on its head. Those positions were all taken up now by people from the cities, people from other walks of life. They weren't the natural leaders in the community. At many, many times, residents of southern Appalachia after the war went to work immediately trying to put their communities back together along lines that they recognized. But even as they were getting started with the rebuilding project, there was another war coming their way. Like many wars, this one was first announced by the arrival of refugees driven before the invading force. See, long before any of the residents had any idea, land speculators from the big cities knew that railroads and mining companies, steel concerns and Wall street firms were gearing up to develop the coal resources in Appalachia. It's one of the richest coal regions in the. That meant that those impoverished mountaineers living up there on their small farms were sitting on land that was going to explode in value very soon. And so very quietly at first, out of towners started coming in, you know, waving hundred dollar bills like the song goes to try to get these families to sell out cheap because they didn't know any better. A few did, but not very many, not enough. And so clever men went to the county registrars to see which of those mountaineer families ancestors had failed maybe to cross every I and dot every T during the wild west period, three or four generations back, when the hills were settled, they checked to see who was fully current on their property taxes going back a hundred years. These people, these people had never really thought about government, okay, you know, the government had never much thought about them. Their ancestors settled these places 100, 120, 150 years ago, and they just lived out there in the wilderness, growing and fishing and hunting just enough food to feed themselves, taking care of themselves, not bothering anybody, not asking anything from anybody. There was very little cash money circulating in the area at all. And for the most part, the furthest thing from any of their minds was that they might owe tribute to some distant government. Pretty soon families started getting served with summons to come to court and prove that the land they lived on for generations was really theirs. Some rich guy or some corporation from a faraway city would have went and found someone with a discrepancy and said, well, they don't really own this land, so I'm putting a claim down on that land, I'll pay X amount to it for the county, to the county, etc. Those clever rich men from the big city who dragged these people into court once they got there obviously had massive advantages. Like for example, I don't know, they had lawyers or they were literate. They were dragging these mountain people into a world they didn't understand at all and they just took advantage of them hard. There were many recorded instances of outright fraud. Many have I, you know, in one case, an out of town businessman signed a contract in the presence of witnesses with a local farmer to purchase a piece of his land for such and such amount. Well, the farmer put his mark to the paper. He Was an illiterate farmer put his mark to the paper, and the businessman gave him his down payment, and they went on their way. The farmer expecting to settle up the rest of the payment soon. Well, when that wasn't forthcoming, the farmer went to the courthouse to go complain, and he brought his copy of the contract. It was only then that. That this illiterate farmer was made to understand that he had not signed a contract to sell part of his land for such and such an amount, but had in fact signed to sell all of it for the amount of the small down payment that he'd already gotten. The farmer just did not live in a world where a trick like that was really possible, because in his world, many people would have been privy to the engagement as they were. There were witnesses. And so when it went to court, the judge, who would have been the head of a prominent local family, would listen and voice the decision of the entire community, the common sense, ethical decision as they would understand it. When he said, well, this businessman, obviously what he did wasn't fair. You took advantage of this man's illiteracy in front of witnesses, no less. So, you know, I'm going to give you protection to get you out of the county safely, but I would not advise a return visit. That's how it would have been handled all of a sudden. That's just not how things were all of a sudden. We had gone very quickly from a customary culture to a legal culture. In the case of this farmer, it was he who soon enough received a court summons. When he went to court expecting to confront the man who was trying to steal his family's inheritance, The. The land they'd settled for several generations, that man wasn't even there. He lived out of state. It was just his lawyers there. Now, the farmer tried to plead his case in terms that made sense to him, in terms of fairness and common sense. You know, he made a moral and an ethical plea. He's trying to make the point that this just wasn't right. And the people in the courtroom may have even agreed with him. But. But the lawyers just kept saying, well, what does the contract say? What does the contract say? You say our client agreed to different terms verbally. But where's the proof for that? The writing on the page is pretty plain. And that is your mark, is it not? That farmer lost his family's land, and something like that happened to a lot, a lot of families. Pretty soon, even the people who could prove clean title and that they were documented to be up to date on their taxes Were finding that the neighborhood wasn't quite what it used to be. The neighbors to the left and the neighbors to the right had both been run off their land. On both plots of land to either side, you're starting to see a lot of people you don't recognize, A lot of people no one recognizes Coming around all the time. They start cutting down all the trees and using the lumber to lay railroad tracks and build buildings. They start importing strange machinery and punching holes into the mountainside. And then like a flash flood. I mean, that's the only metaphor I can think of that makes sense. Like a flash flood, they begin importing thousands and then tens of thousands of workers from big east coast cities, Many of them straight off the immigration boat, speaking any number of mutually indecipherable languages. This is in a sparsely populated community and they are just overwhelming them. A newspaper article from a century ago written by a visiting new Yorker, read. Miners came into the valley with a rush. Welsh coal diggers from the pits of kidwelly, Englishmen from Lancashire, Belgians from the coal basins of hainaut and Liege. These mingled with much larger numbers of Italians, Slavs, Austrians and poles. The hills of the state resounded to the languages of foreign lands. More than 30 nationalities are represented among the workmen in the mines today. American miners, however, outnumber the foreigners. They've come from the coal fields of ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania and other states. Negroes from the southern cotton fields have found employment in the mines and not the least the mountaineers of the state themselves. Well, now, these men came from all walks of life and they weren't screening them when they put him on the train and sent him down to dig coal. And so a lot of them were unattached men who had questionable backgrounds. And so now to that person who hasn't sold out his land and wants to stay, now he's starting to see a new element move into the neighborhood. One mine operator recalled that, quote, the thousands of men, soon tens of thousands who dug that first coal were a hard bitten lot. They drank and fought and gambled and whored with the forest stripped from the mountainsides. The game that the people and their ancestors had hunted for meat for so many years was no longer to be found in abundance. The rivers were all fished out by the countless new arrivals. The people had depended on hunting and fishing to supplement their diets. It was a necessary, not just important, a necessary aspect of their lives. And everybody knew that in the community. And that's why it had always been considered not just unwise but utterly immoral and antisocial for people to cut down their forest to sell as lumber. Like really it was looked at the way people might look at a drug dealer or a pimp. Today, if you were going around doing large scale timber operations, you cut down a tree here and a tree there to build a barn or whatever you gotta do. But everybody understood that we need these forests here to support the herds of game, the squirrels, the rabbits, everything else that we all need to live. Make matters worse, in what forests remained, government agents were all of a sudden out there on the prowl for poachers, a term that in the past meant to these people that you were trespassing to hunt someone else's land without their permission, but which now had acquired the novel meaning of hunting outside the limited parameters defined by the state or federal government. Now, I'm all for conservation and conservation laws, but again, these, these people, this was, this was. They couldn't eat without it. This was how they lived. The hills were also all of a sudden crawling with revenue agents who were coming in and busting the local people for making and trading their own liquor without paying the liquor taxes. The people were just doing what they had always done, what their ancestors had always done. Putting aside a little plot to grow some grain and cobbling together a makeshift home distillery. These people couldn't exactly go to BevMo and whip out their VISA card, you know, if they wanted liquor, they made it themselves. It's just the only way to do it. They drank it themselves or they shared it with friends and family, or on market days or community gatherings, they might sell or trade some of it to other people. And nobody cared because nobody cared what these people were doing by themselves up in their hills. But now, all of a sudden, very important people with a lot of resources looked at those hills and saw dollar signs. And so they cared very much what the people who lived there were up to. So the place was just not what it had been even five or 10 years earlier. And pretty soon that farmer who had the clean title and was all up to date on his taxes, he just decides there's nothing left for him to do except sell his land and try to move somewhere else. Many of them headed to other parts of Appalachia to family or to find a new place to settle. But they were already pretty far south on the path of settlement. There wasn't a whole lot of extra room left to move into. Where they did move, they brought with them warnings, you know, about this invasion that was heading their way. Many of Them had nowhere to go. They. They either left the state entirely or they did the only thing there was to do. And so, as the same New York newspaper editorial read, watching the mines creep nearer and nearer to their cabins, residents have looked with foreboding at first. And then, realizing the futility of any efforts to stand aside, they've shouldered picks and entered the mouths of the black tunnels. One of the men who followed that path was named Frank Keeney. Frank Keeney's family had hunted and farmed the hills of Clay County, West Virginia for a hundred years when they got word that mining and lumber companies had claimed ownership of their land. They lost their land and some of the family was able to find farmland some distance away and went there to set up until the corporations came for them as well. Others went to work for the timber companies that had taken their land from them because they didn't know what else to do. Some of them, Frank Keaney's parents, moved down to Kanawha county to a place called Cabin Creek, and they became coal miners there. This is the story of, I would say, a lot of people, you know, just about everybody up in those hills. That's their story. In the late 18 and early 1900s in Kanawha County, Frank Keeney was born there. All this happened two years before he was born. And so two years after his family gets to Kanawha, he's born. And by the time he was a boy, he could climb to the top of the highest mountain and look around. And all he would lay his eyes on were coal mines as far as the eye could see. In the earlier quote from Altina Waller's book, she mentioned that at the time of the Civil War, virtually everybody in these southern counties lived on a self sufficient farm that either they or their family owned. Just like that. I mean, just like that. The blink of an eye. The length of one boy's short childhood, that number was down from virtually everybody to single digits. The companies owned everything. They owned all the land. They owned the roads that came in and out and moved around within the land. They began importing workers, but there was nowhere for them to live. And so the companies built houses and they owned all the houses and they took the rent out of the miners paychecks. The workers and their families needed food and they needed supplies for daily life. There wasn't any market infrastructure for that. So the company built and stocked up a store and deducted what the miners owed to it from their paychecks. The company didn't provide anything to the miners for work they didn't provide boots. They didn't provide helmets. They didn't provide picks or shovels or any other tools or supplies that the miners needed to actually mine the coal. The miners had to buy all of that themselves from the company store just to work in the mines. They had to pay the company to sharpen their tools. The miners even had to buy the explosives that they used to break apart the earth from the company store of the company that they were digging coal for. Well, since many of the miners were destitute immigrants or former black sharecroppers or just penniless locals, they had to go into debt to the company store just to get started on their first day as a miner. And the company made sure that many of them never, ever got back to. Even the law said that children had to go to school. And so the company built the school and hired the teachers. The company controlled the curriculum to prepare the miners children for their own graduation into the life of a miner. School only went up to eighth grade in most places. There was no high school because after that, the boys were expected to be up on the mountain working as trapper boys, opening and closing the mine's air vents or in some other capacity to prepare them for that life. The company owned the church and hired the minister. His sermons were monitored and were expected to reinforce company policy. Many of the ministers provided regular reports on what the miners were saying and thinking. In fact, company teachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, preachers, all the company employees who were not miners, they formed a separate class above the miners. They were company people. The miners were a liquid labor force that could come and go, and every single one of them was replaceable. And so the company men, the teachers, doctors, etc. Were all expected, as part of their job description, to act as company spies and report on the words and the activities of the miners. Well, so many workers coming in from all walks of life, speaking any number of languages, most of them young, single men. You know, that's a. That's a environment asking for a little bit of disorderliness. And so someone had to keep order. And so the company paid the police force. They bought the police force either by hiring and arming sheriff's deputies or by bringing in private mercenaries that they called mine guards. The mine guards came from the Baldwin Felt detective agency, which sounds like some kind of Sherlock Holmes outfit. It ain't that. Like the Pinkerton Detective agency and other less notorious ones from the 19th and 20th century, Baldwin felt was more like a domestic version of Blackwater. The private military company we put to use in Afghanistan and Iraq. And their primary purpose, from the steel mills of Pennsylvania to the factories of Chicago, in the minds of West Virginia and Colorado and Montana and all the rest of the country, their purpose was to make sure that no one mentioned the words labor union in the same sentence in 1892 Pinkertons. And if you don't know about them, you will before this series is over. As an American, you should spit whenever you say that name. In 1892, Pinkerton's opened fire on a crowd of people during the Homestead strike at Andrew Carnegie Steel Mill. Killed and wounded more than a dozen people. The journalist I was just quoting, he toured many of these company towns and he provided a maybe surface level outsiders account, but it's an insightful one that bears insight into the effects that this kind of life can have on the people who live it. Quote Less than 20 years ago, parts of those v just again, I just want to drive that home again. I'm sorry to interrupt, but this all happened less than 20 years. Just imagine the level of transformation we're talking about here. Less than 20 years ago, parts of those vast stretches of low mountains that cover so much of West Virginia slumbered in solitude. The traveler rode horseback up the stony beds of mountain streams and sought shelter at night in a lonely settler's hut on the slope of an inhospitable mountain. Bears lumbered through the wilderness and wildcats howled at night. No railroad had yet penetrated the region. People lived in small groups here and there in the valleys. Life on the whole was simple and devoted chiefly to agriculture. The earth reposed peacefully today, in traversing this region, you pass coal mining village after coal mining village as you ride up the valley of the Guyandot river or through McDowell, Mingo, and other counties where the hills stood in untouched quietness two decades ago. Evidences of the transformation are on every hand. The houses of those who work in the mines are never out of sight. Large mouths gape blackly at you from the hillsides. Gaunt tipples, head houses and other buildings stare at you from the slopes of the mountain. Railroads send their sightings in many directions. Long lines of squat mine cars run along their narrow gauge tracks and disappear around the curves of the hills. The earth is scraped and ugly. The blackness of coal is over everything, and mounds of fine coal stand about. Peacefulness and quiet have departed, and let us see what kind of civilization has resulted. The typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at all. The place where the town stands is the point at which A seam has been opened, buildings have been erected and machinery has been installed. The dwellings that cluster about the tipple or straggle along the bed of the creek are not occupied by self dependent citizens of a community which gives many opportunities for employment and presents a variety of facets to the world at large. Large, they're occupied solely by the men who work in the mines. The town is the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry. If the mines should disappear, it too would cease to exist. It is not even called a town in the language of the locality. It is called a camp. No one owns his own house. He cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a store, operates a garage, or sells groceries or haberdashery to his fellow townsmen. No one amuses them in a movie theater. There is no main street of small independent businesses owned by different people and making up that mosaic of commercial life that is typical of villages everywhere. There is little if any participation in common group activities. No body of elected councilmen ever passes on repairs for roads. No group of people ever gets together and decides that the old schoolhouse is too ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repainting. No family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights among his neighbors. It is not accurate to say that no one does these things. The coal company does them all. It owns all the houses and rents them to the miner. Even in the more enlightened company towns, the company owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, the school and the church. The company employs the physicians and collects a small monthly sum from each miner to help pay him. The company owns all the land and everything upon it. It therefore controls the life and activities of the little community. It is responsible for the sanitation. The company's ownership sometimes extends to the roads so that it can control ingress and egress. In some counties, the company is the employer of the deputy sheriffs and is therefore responsible for police supervision. In Logan county, the mine operators paid out $61,000 last year in salaries for deputy sheriffs. Miners in West Virginia are not paid as workers elsewhere are paid. They do not receive in cash all that they have earned. On their semi monthly paydays they are given statements showing how much they owe the company and how much the company owes them. Among the items charged against them in this account is the indebtedness incurred at the company store. Other items are rent for their houses, lighting, heating, doctor's services, use of a hospital, and even the sharpening of tools and the use of a company wash house in which to clean up after a day's work. The law of West Virginia prohibits companies from issuing scrip in payment of wages, specifying that if such scrip is issued, it shall be held to be a promise to pay the sum specified therein in lawful money. But the law is never enforced, and the companies generally issue the scrip. I'll read one last paragraph here from this. This is from Winthrop D. Lane about 100 years ago in the New York publication called Survey Quote. This is an important part. That's why I broke here. What began as a means of taking care of the emergent needs of workers became a settled condition everywhere. Today, 400,000 men, women and children in West Virginia are living this subservient existence. They are caught up in a civilization within a civilization, an alien order embedded in a democracy. So since the company houses were property, the workers had no right to privacy. They had no right to personal space. It wasn't their personal or private space. They didn't even have tenants rights. You know, look at the kind of thing you would think of. Normally, if you were paying rent on a house, you would get certain rights that go at that house. None of that applied. The company decided which visitors you were allowed to have. Homes could be searched and were searched at any time. They could wake you up in the middle of the night, march your family out and go tear your place up if they wanted to, without warning, the way corrections officers would do a cell inspection. Among the items that were most commonly searched for were any books and pamphlets that were considered contrary to the company's interests. Because the company decided what books and what newspapers and other media was allowed on its proper. Very often the only newspapers allowed were the ones that the coal mine operators themselves had set up. Anybody found with unauthorized reading material was just fired on the spot. If he had a family, he and his family were given notice to get out of their company house and get out of town. Anybody who was fired was also blacklisted. Because the coal companies worked together to keep track of people that they considered troublemakers. And so a fired worker couldn't just move over to the next mountain or the next coal field. He would find that he was not welcome anywhere. And so this destitute worker, with no money because he's not paid in cash, he's paid in company scrip for a company store that he's no longer allowed to use, would take his meager belongings. You just have to leave the region all together with his family. I mean, literally leave the whole region. Ownership of the company store and any saloons or other facilities the miners used would give the company a way to reduce the miners pay, kind of through the back door. They didn't want to cut their wages maybe and start a big fight. So they would just raise prices on the supplies that they sold the miners that they needed to actually go up and mine. They would raise the prices on food or other supplies that they needed at home. Sometimes when the night when the miners would successfully negotiate a pay raise, the coal companies would argue and fight about it and act like they were trying to put it off. And then they would give them a little compromise pay raise, and then they would just raise prices in the company store accordingly to make up for it. Company mine guards would patrol voting stations during elections, intimidating workers to make sure they voted the way the company wanted or just not vote at all. And sometimes workers were just handed out ballots from the company that had already been filled out for them. Anybody, anybody who was heard promoting political candidates or policies that were not favored by the company was just immediately fired and evicted from the town. And so in this way, the coal companies, with control of this whole population of miners like they had, were able to fill up the sheriff's offices, fill up the county courts and other offices, even a lot of the state government with its own hired men. When a miner was hurt or killed on the job, the question of whether the mine operator was responsible went before adjudicators who were chosen and paid by the company. When accusations of abuse were made against the mine guards or other company officials, those reports had to be made to sheriffs who were elected and very often just simply paid by the company. They were heard by judges who were approved and elected by the company. I mean that quite literally. The historian David Allen Corbin writes, the Logan County Coal Operators association formed its police bulwark from a local source. It simply hired the county sheriff, Don Chaffin, and his deputies. The treasurer of the Logan County Coal Operators association testified that the association had paid Chaffin $2,725 a month to work for it. As an Aside, that is $40,000 a month. Today, Sheriff Chaffin only had an official salary from the department of several hundred dollars a month. I think it was like 365amonth is what he made. And when he was already in his mid-30s, he already reported over a million dollars in assets. So it gives you an idea of the scope of this. The deputy sheriffs, like the county sheriff, were paid by personal checks from the coal operators. In one year, the association paid out $61,517 to these deputies for protection against the union. The anti union activities of the Logan county sheriffs and his deputies became a national disgrace and part of the region's folklore. Two deputies were stationed at each railroad depot and on each train to prevent union organizers from entering Logan County. All strangers, upon coming into the county, were searched and forced to identify themselves. When the clerk for the West Virginia Department of Mines, Toby Heizer, arrived in Logan, he was accosted by several deputies and ordered to identify himself. He refused to do so, and the deputies dragged him off the train, beat him and forced him to leave the county. A newspaper reporter from Washington, D.C. after a visit to Logan County. Everywhere one goes down in this county, he hears the name of Don Chaffin, high sheriff of Logan County. One can see that he has struck terror into the hearts of the people in the union fields. Although a state officer, they do not trust him. Every kind of crime is charged against him and his deputies. He is the king of the kingdom of Logan. He reigns supreme by virtue of a state machine blocked by the power of the operators. The American Civil Liberties Union declared that Logan county had become a national scandal. And a U.S. senate investigating committee denounced the Logan deputy sheriff system as vicious and un American. They said it was contrary to the genius and spirit of our institutions. A United Mine Workers of America official told the US Senate committee. I would just love to see this committee go down to Logan county without anybody knowing who they were. And Senator Burton K. Wheeler responded, they'd probably throw the Senate committee in jail, end quote. So that's what's going on, okay? That's what's going on. The companies run everything. Everyone works for the company, including the government. And most of the company employees who weren't minors were expected to be involved with keeping the minors under control. Again, company teachers, preachers, doctors, store clerks, saloon keepers, all those type of employees, they were all expected to act as company spies. The company owned and ran the post office and all the miners. Incoming and outcoming mail was monitored. Anyone heard complaining about any of this was fired and evicted and blacklisted and sometimes beaten. All of this was done, of course, according to the companies, to protect the miners from the predations of those radicals at the United Mine Workers Union. It had already gotten its claws into the coal fields of Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states. It was even making inroads into the northern parts of West Virginia. But the operators were determined that the union would never, under any circumstances, be allowed to infect their coal fields in southern West Virginia. Give you idea, some idea of the scope of this thing. You know, everybody can kind of understand when you go to work each day, you know, you're at the store, the office, or wherever it is that you work, that the company runs the show, it's their property, it's their rules. But in West Virginia alone, the operating coal fields were larger than the states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Delaware combined. And 94% of the miners there lived this way that I'm describing, in company towns. So that's an area the size of three states in which the laws and constitution of the United States and the state of West Virginia were not the day to day practical ruling authority in which, as Winthrop Blaine wrote, represented a civilization within a civilization, an alien order embedded in a democracy. It was an industrial dictatorship, like really a dictatorial government the size of three states in West Virginia alone, just planted right here in the middle of America. The president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel gompers, wrote in 1913, A powerful and subtle conspiracy between organized capital and the governmental agents of the state of West Virginia gives indications of the existence of an invisible government that steals from the workers the liberty they are told they have. The U.S. congressman visiting the coal fields from Wisconsin said, one cannot imagine the power of the mining companies. It elects senators and judges. It owns both the Republican and Democratic parties in a state. All laws are made to suit the mine owners. All the judges are elected through their influence, even up to the judges of the state supreme court. Maybe the thing that gets me more than just about anything in this whole story, this whole sequence of events, for some reason, the one that just gets me the most is that most of these coal operations that exerted so much social and political and economic control over the lives of the people in West Virginia were owned by people who had never set foot in the state, would never set foot in the state. Some were owned by men in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, or other cities closer to home, little towns. But most were not. Most were owned by out of state interests, big out of state corporate interests. J.P. morgan's U.S. steel Company owned or operated 150,000 acres in West Virginia. The Norfolk and Western Railway conglomerate ran. The Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company owned just about all of it. At the time of purchase in 1902, I think it was about 300,000 acres. Those are just two as many. More like that. Giant, distant corporations owning a chunk of a US state the size of Rhode Island, Delaware and Massachusetts and Running them as dictatorships and police states. Really it comes to very much resemble, actually very much resemble the economic relationship between the core and the periphery under colonialism, under traditional colonialism, West Virginia had essentially been reduced to an economic colony of Wall street and other out of state financiers and corporations. It really, really does resemble that system. Under colonialism, the colonies had two primary economic roles. They were to provide cheap labor to extract natural resources that would then be shipped back to the mother country. And then the mother country would use those natural resources to manufacture the higher value added finished products for which the colony then served as a market. That was its secondary function. In that system, the colonies would be forbidden or prevented from using the resources that they extract to create higher end finished products themselves. They performed the low end work of resource extraction so that the imperial corps could profit from the manufacturing part. Actual ownership of all the resources remains with the core, the people in the place where the resources are extracted, they might receive wages but not profits. It's a system that prevents the colonized territories from ever truly developing economically. It's actually designed to prevent that. Because a colony is not perceived by the core as a society, it's perceived as an operation. As one of the quotes said, it's an appendage to an industrial operation. And so things like economic development, these things just don't play a role. It's not a society. The fact that children are born and families live their whole lives there for multiple generations, that's all incidental. The miners were viewed as a liquid commodity, fungible labor, easily replaceable, faceless people just could be swapped out with the next batch of clueless immigrants that just arrived, desperate and hungry, from central or Eastern Europe. More than one person over the years has expressed in one way or another bewilderment or outrage that industrial civilization at the time ran on coal. Coal heated virtually all the homes and businesses around the country. It powered the country's railroads and its power grids through coal fired power plants. Even the US Navy ran on coal. And so if you were an alien from Mars who was coming and hovering over the planet Earth and looking down and seeing a whole civilization that runs on this one precious resource, you could be forgiven for thinking that the people who lived where those resources were and dug it out of the ground were probably some of the richest people on the planet. But in fact, they were poor as dirt and living under. I mean, what is honestly what approach slave like conditions? In many ways it's taken on different guises over the years. From direct conquest and enslavement of the natives, like in the early days of New World colonization to the more familiar style mastered by the Dutch and the British and against which the American colonies fought a violent rebellion. You know, all of this core periphery stuff I'm talking, it's all in the declaration of Independ, all the way up to the more modern post World War II version where, you know, I don't know, the CIA overthrows a populist leader in Africa and replaces him with a dictator who gives good terms to ExxonMobil and then uses the money from that to kill his challengers and stuff his Swiss bank account. You know, modern colonialism. Well, nowadays we usually think colonialism and we think of the traditional terms of European imperialists colonizing less developed countries in the global south. But in very large countries, there's a reason that a country like the Netherlands or a country like England did that. Because they didn't have a lot of land, they wanted to open new markets or develop more resources, they had to go do it somewhere else. But in very large countries like the United States, like Russia, like China, you often see similar dynamics, I mean really similar dynamics that emerge within the borders of the country itself if internal colonialism, internally colonized populations. And so again, to repeat this point one more time, because I really want to drill it in there. The hills of southern West Virginia over the course of about 20 years were transformed by outside financial interests from a society of self sufficient yeoman farmers into an economic colony wholly owned by faraway corporations. It all happened more quickly than the people affected by it could react. Before they were able to wrap their heads around what was happening, it had already happened. The communities that used to exist there were completely shattered by the transformation. It wasn't an easy task to rebuild any kind of community under conditions where people spoke a dozen or more languages and where the coal companies were suspicious of any collective activity on the part of their miners. The power of the operators depended on, on their ability to negotiate as a monolith with miners who could only negotiate as individuals. Every individual miner is immediately replaceable. You'd be the best coal miner in the whole wide world and they could replace you with a guy who's just learning the job and the whole operation is not going to be affected 1%. And so no matter who you are, Mr. Minerman, if you don't like the working conditions or you don't like the pay, or you don't like the attitude of the mine guards or the rules in the company town, no problem there are thousands of other people who can be plugged into your slot. The only way that the miners could ever hope to meet on something like equal terms is really meet with the men who ran these companies as fellow human beings was to do it together. Because a miner is easily replaceable, but the miners are not replaceable. United Mine Workers of America, our branch of the International union, was founded in Ohio in 1890 and right away began making inroads into coal fields in the Midwest. During the business depression of 1894, operators pretty much everywhere started cutting the pay of their miners without warning or negotiation. And so the UMW called for a nationwide strike. It's their first major strike that they had called for. There were a lot of British and German miners up in the Midwest, and these men understood the goals and purpose of a labor union. And so the midwestern coal miners walked off the job. But the coal fields of southern West Virginia places only very recently developed and built up. You know, there were some of the last ones to be built up. They were worked by locals or recently arrived central and southern Europeans and south Southern blacks who had no union experience whatsoever. And so they didn't walk out and they kept working. And so as all those mines up in the Midwest, in the northern areas shut down, the ones in southern West Virginia kept going. And as a result, business from those striking midwestern coal fields was taken up by the non union West Virginia mining operations did a lot of damage to those midwestern coal companies and it completely failed to get the UMW anything that they had wanted. And eventually the operators up there just came to him and said, look, we're, we're going to all go bankrupt here if you keep this up, because there's this other region down here that just taking all the business. And so the UMW just had to call it off. Well, after operators continued to cut wages, three years later, the UMW called another strike, this time 1897. And this time they were better prepared and met with unprecedented success in coal fields everywhere in the country. Tens of thousands of union and non union miners walked off the job en masse everywhere in the country, that is, except for southern West Virginia. And so labor organizers from all over the United States pour into West Virginia to get these miners there organized, Explain to them what a union is and what it's for and why they need one. And just to get them organized. Samuel Gompers, the head of the afl, he came in and he said the success of this strike depends. This is a nationwide strike. He said it depends on one factor that the miners of West Virginia will suspend operations. Gompers was joined by a whole bunch of well known labor activists at the time. Eugene Debs was there. A whole bunch of people. But the coal companies in West Virginia were very well prepared. Company police and mine guards rode the trains and patrolled the train stations. They turned back any labor organizer that tried to enter into those southern counties. Not just onto their property, by the way, but into the counties, period. The organizers who got through anyway and were discovered, were thrown in jail. They were fined. Very often they were beaten. Sometimes they were shot at by company guards or police. John Mitchell, who was vice president of the United Mineworkers of America at the time, he was chased and shot at by company guards. Had to flee for his life by swimming across a mountain stream. The operators went to their pet judges and got rubber stamped injunctions against the labor organizations ordering them to cease all efforts to organize the miners of West Virginia. The state very quickly became a focal point of the whole nationwide labor movement. The AFL, the Knights of labor, the UMWA, 28 other national and international unions sent representatives to convene a council in Wheeling, west regime, Virginia to try to coordinate and publicize their efforts. Mass meetings were held all over the country by workers to express indignation at the court's interference with the constitutional rights of the organizers and miners in West Virginia. Still, southern West Virginia was impenetrable to the union. One organizer reported that he'd managed to establish a local at a mine in McDowell county, but that it soon dissolved because the miners there were unwilling to participate for fear of being fired, evicted and blacklisted. David Allen Corbin in his great study, it's called Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. The West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922 by David Allen Corbin. Great book. He writes, the miners knew their operators. When local unions were formed and miners took offices in the locals, the coal companies reacted swiftly and harshly. The truth is, an organizer wrote that as fast as men organize, the companies are discharging them and turning them out of their houses. The coal companies also reacted against the organizers. When they became successful. Most of the organizers were threatened, some of them were beaten, and nearly all of them had their efforts halted by injunctions or were jailed, often on charges such as holding meetings on Sunday and thereby violating the Sabbath, end quote. Well, despite all that, the strike overall was still a huge success. Membership in the UMWA increased tenfold and the union dues from that refilled the union's empty treasury and gave him a sense of confidence going Forward into the future. Because for the first time, miner solidarity had been put on display in large sections of the country. And so the operators associations up in Ohio and Illinois, Indiana and western Pennsylvania, great big giant coal field called the central field up there finally broke with precedent and agreed to sit down and negotiate with United Mine Workers regarding wages and working conditions. The result was the central competitive field agreement which made the unionization of the Midwestern coal fields official recognized the UMWA as the miners instrument for collective bargaining. The wage increases and other accommodations were really secondary to getting their union recognized. Without a union, wage increases and other accommodations can always be rolled back. Tomorrow you need a union. Now critically, those Midwestern coal companies that made this agreement, they extracted a very important promise from the United Mine Workers of America. They told them that the concessions they were making in the agreement were going to drive up their operating costs and would allow the non union fields to the south in West Virginia to undercut and outcompete them like they had before. And so as part of the agreement, the United Mine Workers committed themselves to unionizing southern West Virginia, come hell or high water. The coal companies there though, were not going to observe any limits to prevent that from happening. As far as the coal companies of southern West Virginia were concerned, a unionized workforce was a threat to their very existence. The coal fields in West Virginia were further away from the major coal consuming regions on the Eastern seaboard or the Great Lakes or even the Mississippi Valley. West Virginia didn't really consume a lot of coal. So it all had to be sold out of state for the most part. Whereas the coal fields in Ohio and Pennsylvania, they sold a lot of coal to their own states very short distance away. Which meant that the transportation costs for them were a lot lower. So the built in costs in West Virginia were going to be higher. And the only lever that they had to keep themselves competitive was wages. Like the cost of extracting the coal was the labor to do it was the only other major cost besides transportation. And since their transport costs were higher, there was just a constant downward pressure on the wages of West Virginia miners. A lot of corner cutting, a lot of things that became more advanced in the northern mines as far as safety and things like that that didn't make it to the southern mines in West Virginia because they cost money. And so as a result, the West Virginia mines were the most dangerous in the country. The West Virginia mine operators, they actually, they were really paranoid. They actually saw the United Mine Workers of America as a tool that was being used against them. Like in A conspiracy. They really believed that this was happening to like by the Midwestern coal companies to try to cripple their operations and steal their business. That's what they thought. So they were determined to keep the union out at all costs. As far as the union was concerned, southern West Virginian mines had to be unionized or else they would always and forever make it mathematically untenable for other mines around the country to accept the union to irreconcilable positions. The UMWA had not made headway into southern West Virginia so far. And part of that was because of the efforts of the coal mine operators. But a big part of it had to do with the fact that they had so far consistently failed to understand or really address the concerns of the West Virginia miners, which were different from people in other parts of the country. Whether it was because the immigrant, black and local miners were kind of accustomed to being poor and were isolated from the temptations of civilization, maybe it was that, or maybe it was because a portion of the miners saw the job as a part time supplement to a mixed lifestyle that included hunting and fishing and small scale gardening. Whatever the reason was, the miners in southern Appalachia were simply not that concerned about how much they were being paid. Not that they didn't care at all. It just was not a priority. Negotiating higher wages was how the union sold itself to miners everywhere else. It's how it tried to sell itself to the West Virginians. But for the most part they were not receptive. It took the UMWA a long time to figure out that the highest priority in West Virginia, the central issue for the miners of West Virginia was the oppressive conditions of, of the company town and especially, especially the abuses of the private security forces hired by the companies. That's what they wanted help with. The UMWA didn't really get this at first and so it hindered their organizing efforts. But they were soon to learn the hard way just what the miners of southern West Virginia had been dealing with. Corbyn writes, quote, the coal operators were determined to prevent the UMWA from, from again invading the state, believing, as did Justin Collins, that if the coal operator undertakes to fight the union, he will have to fight force with force. More and more operators form police barricades against these invaders by hiring mercenaries from the Baldwin Felt's detective agency. By 1910, Baldwin Felt's guards could be found in nearly every company town in southern West Virginia. The principal work of these guards, according to the head of the agency, Tom Felt, was to protect the operators against organized Labor. In protecting the Cole establishment from union agitators, the Baldwin Felt's guards were effective and brutal. Whereas in earlier years during quiet periods, national organizers moved relatively unmolested around the state, by 1907 they were surrounded and harassed by Baldwin Felt's guards. From the time they boarded a train in Cincinnati headed for West Virginia. The arrival of UMWA organizers often meant headlines for local labor newspapers. The February 10, 1910 issue of the Labor Argus read, horrible butchery of representatives of United Mine Workers by brutal and bloodthirsty guards in the New river field. The September 8, 1910 edition of the Paper Guards brutally assault Union men. Two members of the International Executive Board of United Mineworkers of America beaten up by coal company thugs. The United Mineworkers Journal stigmatized West Virginia as the Black Belt, clarifying, we do not mean that they employ nothing but colored men, but that it is a region where it is not safe for an organizer to let his business be known. By 1912, Umwa officials openly admitted that they no longer encouraged organizers to enter the state of West Virginia because of the danger posed by the Baldwin Felts guards. The vigilance of the Baldwin Felts guards against union agitators carried over into the everyday internal affairs of the company town. If a miner showed too much independence or became inquisitive or complained he was suspected of being a union agitator and might be beaten and driven out of town. The guards forcibly prohibited the assembly of more than three miners at night, a practice they called bunching for fear that one of the miners might be an organizer preaching unionism. Describing the guards activities, a miner recollected, they rode horses and wouldn't let anyone they didn't like walk on the railroad tracks. Worse, though, you couldn't go into the office and tell about mistakes or complain about the store. The guards would just kick you off the porch. These guards gained a national reputation for their beating, maiming and murdering of union miners and organizers. In fact, Edward Levinson, in his book I Break Strikes, a general study of industrial spy and strikebreaking agencies throughout the United States, awarded the Baldwin Felts agency the blue ribbon for wanton cold blooded murders. Miners throughout the country reported that they were appalled by the activities of the Baldwin Felts guards in West Virginia, and they made it known that they would not permit themselves to be subjugated in such a manner. Indeed, in the speech that precipitated the massacre by miners of 19 mine guards at Heron, Illinois, a miner had declared, we must show the world that this ain't West Virginia. The southern West Virginia miners hated the Baldwin felts guards more than did any other group of miners. During one strike, when the miners finally unleashed their wrath against these guards, a miner told a journalist, I never had to kill a man and hope never to be compelled to kill one. But I would kill a dozen of these guards as I would kill a dozen rats if they should attempt to lord it over us as they've been accustomed to do. End quote. Story gets me worked up. Guys, take a breath here and settle down a little bit, all right? So it took until 1912 for the coal miners of southern West Virginia to finally rise up. In the end, it was the very measures the coal companies took to prevent that from happening that ended up ensuring that it did happen. The West Virginia miners had shown little interest in striking for higher wages or better working conditions, very little interest in the union. But the paranoid operators used subversion and brute force just to make sure. And that was what drove the miners to rebellion. It began at a place called Paint Creek in Kanawha County. Miners there at Paint Creek had been some of the few in southern West Virginia who had managed to negotiate a collective agreement with their operators. But on March 31, 1912, that contract expired and negotiations between the miners and the Kanawha Coal Operators association began. The miners were asking for a pay raise of 2 and a half cents per ton of coal dug. Miners, by and large, were not paid by the hour. They were paid according to how much coal they delivered. And the miners also demanded recognition of their union, of their right to bargain collectively. But the operators refused. They said they couldn't remain profitable if they accommodated that two and a half cent pay raise. So the miners compromised. They said, okay, fine, we'll accept another contract on the existing pay scale. Just accept our union. And still the operators refused. And so the miners cleaned up their work areas and walked off the job on April 19, 1912. Well, soon the more skittish operators, worried about maintaining their downstream relationships, hurried back to the table and agreed to concessions. And their mines were opened up again by early May. That was in much Econowa county. But the operators at Paint Creek refused to compromise and instead imported 300 Baldwin felts mine guards to watch over their property and be their enforcers. The guards, well, they did what they knew how to do. From Corbin, the Baldwin felts guards built iron and concrete forts that they equipped with machine guns throughout the strike districts, then evicted striking miners from their company houses, destroying $40,000 worth of miners furniture in the process. The guards then began to intimidate the strikers in their tent colonies at Holly Grove and Eskdale, the guards often prevented the strikers from leaving their tent colonies and prohibited them use of company owned bridges, forcing the strikers and their families at gunpoint to wade through waist high streams. They also stopped the strikers and their families from using the passenger trains into Charleston. The son of a miner who attempted to do so is kicked in the face and warned, get off you damn son of a bitch or I will shoot your brains out. He was then literally thrown off the train. The mine guards also began to kill the striking miners, both individually. For example, a black miner chasing his stray cow. And collectively. On June 5, the guards launched a surprise attack on one of the tent colonies, wounding several people. Thereafter, according to a local union leader, every day or two, they would sneak into the hills and sprinkle the canvas tent cities with showers of leaden pellets, caring not if their bullets hit men, women or children. End quote. About two years after this strike, mine guards from Baldwin Felts and the Colorado National Guard, which was being manned and funded by a Rockefeller mining company, indiscriminately attacked a miner's tent city in Ludlow, Colorado and sprayed it with machine gun fire and then burned it down with people hiding in little pits under the tents from the gunfire, they got burned to death. 20 people, 12 children and two women. Some men were massacred in one night. The full story of the Ludlow massacre is in the prologue to this podcast series. The guards were very callous in carrying out the evictions most of the time. It would surprise families in the morning, march them out of their homes at gunpoint if necessary, and one or two would guard the family while the rest of them carried the family's furniture and their other belongings outside and dumped it by the creek. They forced their way into the home of Charlie and Ed Fish and found Ed's wife, Willie Fish, holding a sick newborn. They marched her and her newborn outside, deposited the crib along with the rest of the furniture on a wagon out there. They told Willie's sister in law that they used to hate doing this kind of work, but chuckled and said they'd gotten used to it. On Wednesday, May 29, 1912, for the first time, the miners struck back. That morning, a group of mine guards had poured themselves some coffee and they were walking by the company store to get some breakfast when shots rang out from the nearby hillside started peppering around them. So they rushed back to their barracks and shots start coming down from another hillside. The guards grabbed their rifles as shots are hitting the wall of their bunkhouse, start returning fire. Guards in another larger bunkhouse nearby rushed out with weapons and began firing at puffs of smoke on the hillsides. The attack was wild and poorly planned and nobody on either side was hit. But the psychological impact was. Was large. The mine guards were shaken by the fact that the miners had actually come at them. And so a swivel mounted Gatling gun was stationed in front of the company store, covering the whole hillside with its field of fire. Next to the machine gun was a giant searchlight which would sweep the trees in the cabins from dusk till dawn. Early the next morning, a guard patrol spotted a group of miners making their way through the woods. Took off after them. Gunfire going in both directions. It was a group of Italians and one of the miners was shot and killed. And the black miner who was just out looking for his cow, was also hit. The leader of this group of guards who was chasing them up into the hills was a man named Ernest Gaozhou. He was one of the most notorious of all the guards. This is a guy who was a known murderer before he was ever hired to Baldwin Felts. He was known by all the Paint Creek miners as one of the meanest bullies employed by the company. His posse's tearing through the hills, kicking in the doors of cabins, looking for miners, any minors they can find, really. And they come up on the home of Ed and Charlie Fish, who had not been involved in the shooting. Ed was sick in bed. Only their wives were there. And so Ed's wife, Willie Fish, it's a girl who's just about 18 years old. She remembered what happened. Quote, they came through my yard jabbering in Italian, But I couldn't understand half of what they said. I was telling them to go on and scatter as quick as I got them out. I turned my chickens out. I had about two or 300 chickens and put them in the yard so they would scratch out as much of the tracks as they could. The guards came and asked, how long you been out here? I've been out here about an hour feeding my chickens. They said, have you seen anybody? I said, I haven't seen a soul. I'd look him right in the eye and lie like a sailor. Then the guards came to the cabin of Tony and Janina Savilla, another Italian family. Tony was away out of state looking for another job. And so Gianina and the children were the only ones there. She remembered what happened. I heard this shooting and I went to the door to see what was the matter. I saw the guards coming down the hill. Those guards were going into the other neighbor houses there, and they began to pick up the men they could find in the houses. They came to our house and they opened the door and then they came in and looked under the bed. And on the bed was my baby and it was asleep. And I told the guards to let the baby alone. They struck me and I fell down and they kicked me in the stomach and they hit me with their fists. Here she's pointing to where they hit her. And then they knocked me down again. When the guards left, Janina Sevilla was on her knees, weeping and praying that the five month old baby in her belly was okay. Six of the Italian miners were rounded up and marched out of the hills at gunpoint. One of them, named Frank Russi, was released after a few days and made his way home to take care of his sick and pregnant wife. And then 10 days later, mine guards broke down his door. He wasn't around. They found the wife there alone, pregnant and sick. And so she runs to the home of a nearby friend whose husband was the mine foreman, while the guards cleaned out her house and dumped everything they had out on the. Out in the dirt. And then a few days after that, the friend's husband, the one that took her in, the mine foreman was fired from his job because his wife had held. Rusi's wife having adopted this strategy of cruel, really cruel brutality against the miners, you know, there was nothing businesslike about it. These Baldwin felts guys that they would hire, you know, sure some of them would be former cops, and maybe those guys would be the leaders that everybody else had to follow. But a lot of their ranks were just manned up by thugs from the cities. Guys, you, I mean, Ernest Gaozhou was a known murderer, and they're hiring him and giving him a gun and saying, go up there and throw these people out of their homes. Go do this, go do that. These are hard men, and they had to be hard men because they're going up there to go against coal miners, to throw them out of their houses and chase them away from the mine. The coal miners are tough people, and so the guys who got sent up there against them had to be tough people, but they weren't always the most savory bunch. And there was really a cruel streak to how the operators in southern West Virginia handled these things. And so the company then set about replacing the miners, started bringing in trainloads of scab labor from other parts of the country. And this. The miners were not prepared to tolerate, because that was the one way that they could truly defeat their strike. Now, these poor replacement workers, most of these guys had no idea what they were walking into. They were walking into something that was becoming a war zone. Very quickly, story of Lawrence O'Brien, who was a replacement worker brought in from New York City. His story provides an illustrative example. Lawrence O'Brien's this guy who lives in New York City. He's a skilled machinist. O'Brien gets laid off from his job, and he's out looking for work, and he sees an ad. They're looking for machinists and boilermakers and other skilled workers to get on a train and go down to West Virginia to work on motors and other gear at the mines. And so he signs up on the spot, along with several of his Irish buddies, a whole bunch of Italian and Polish immigrants who literally just got off the boat. I mean, they are still trailing their luggage behind them from their trip. They came straight from the docks, and they don't even have time to go home for a change of clothing. He calls his wife, tells her that he's found a good job. It's in West Virginia, but they pay $5 a day. He has to leave right now, and he'll write for his suitcase when he gets there. And so he's on the train, 200 other guys. Right away, he notices the guards, and he thinks, huh, that's interesting. No food was served, and so when they change trains in Washington, he tries to go into the station to buy a sandwich, but the guards won't let him leave. When they get to the Paint Creek, area guards take out their rifles, start patrolling the cars, and they tell everyone, order everyone to pull down the blinds on their windows. So O'Brien's starting to worry. Maybe he made a little mistake here. The train stops at different mining camps along the way, and each time deposits a few workers in the hands of some guards who march them off. When O'Brien and his friends get to their destination, they're told that by the mine superintendent that they're going to be digging coal first thing in the morning. Again, all these guys are machinists and other skilled workers. So they're like, huh? What? What? No, no, sir. We're machinists, not miners. We were hired to come down and do machinist work. And they're told, we don't need machinists. You're going to go into the mines. And they decide they have no choice. None of them have any money, and so they're at least going to go work in the mines long enough to pay for their trip home. O'Brien works there a full month and then he goes in to collect his wages for digging coal from morning till night, six days a week for a month, and they give him just over $3. He's supposed to be making $5 a day, but they said that's all he was owed. After they took out the cost of his trip down there and his supplies and his rent and every other expense, O'Brien got off easy. Many others who were lied to about the jobs that waited for them down in West Virginia were kept under guard and not allowed to leave. They owed the company money for the train ride down there and the food they'd been fed, and so at the very least, they were going to have to work that off and they were not allowed to leave. Two men who had come in with O'Brien from New York. They escaped on foot and appeared after a long journey in Charleston, the capital of the state, saying that they had been told by guards that they would be shot if they tried to leave. Three other workers signed a letter to the state labor commission stating that at least 150 men were being held by guards captive at Caford and forced to work. They'd been working for three weeks without pay, and the company said they still owed money and wouldn't get back to even for several more weeks at least. So they were being held and forced to work. Okanawha County, West Virginia, was a powder keg, and all it needed was a spark. And that spark rolled in on the morning train on the 9th of June, 1912. Her name was Mary Harris Jones, better known by her affectionate nickname, Mother Jones, 75 or 80 years old at the time, thereabouts, no one was ever quite sure exactly what year she was born. Mother Jones was all of 5ft tall at the very most, and cut the figure of your great grandmother and, well, she lit powder kegs for a living. She wore a full length black dress, this little old lady with a black shawl and a little white bonnet lace around her neck. Her eyes sat behind rimless glasses and ringlets of white hair surrounded her little old face. Just every inch the grandmother. But she moved well. She had limitless energy, even into her 80s. Everybody says that her voice was loud and strong and it still carried that Irish lilt she learned in the country of her birth. Her grandfather had been hanged by the British for Irish revolutionary activity, so this was in her blood. Her father took the family to Canada and then to the United States during the great potato famine when she was a girl. And in America, she'd married a union man, a union worker, and they were living a typical family life down in Memphis, Tennessee, until, during a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she watched her husband and all four of her children, three girls and a boy, all under five years old, die within one week of each other. And so this woman alone, she moves herself to Chicago and opens a dress shop, tries to start rebuilding her heart and her life. But a short time later, the great Chicago fire of 1871 burns down most of the city, including her shop. And then something happened. We can leave it to legend to say exactly what it was, but something happened. Because after the great fire, this woman, who had no one and had nothing, she began to speak out on behalf of laboring men and women in America. By the time of the trouble in Kanawha County, Mother Jones had been at the forefront of the American labor movement for many years. She was recognized all over the country. She helped, as lon Savage writes, organized copper miner unions in Michigan and streetcar strikes in New York. She organized chemical workers in New Jersey as well as women bottlers in Milwaukee, breweries and shirtwaist makers in Philadelphia. She spoke to Finnish iron ore miners and Polish steel workers at Gary. She led an army of little children from Philadelphia to New York and on to Teddy Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay to protest child labor. She walked the halls of congress and conferred with presidents and millionaires. But coal miners were her boys. No one could match her in bringing America's attention to the horrors of the coal digger's life. She gazed down into the black hole of Ludlow, where miners wives and children were burned to death. She'd stood before gunmen and dared them to shoot. She led miners wives carrying mops and beating tin pans like cymbals through Pennsylvania's mountains to dramatize their husband's grievances. Colorado coal operators feared her so much, they held her under military confinement for weeks without charge or hearing, end quote. In an interview, she was quoted saying, I am simply a social revolutionist. I believe in the collective ownership of the means of wealth. At this time, the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The man who owns the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker who produces the wealth takes what he can get. I do not believe in socialism by a party name. It has been the rule of the centuries to sound a name until it acquires a magic power. Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner than we think. Evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live. And the worker will have gained his own. This change will come as the result of education. My work, my life work has been to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer and does suffer, and to stir up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightly theirs. When force is used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the things which are his, he has the right to meet force with force. He has the right to strike for what is his due. And he has no right to be satisfied with less. The people want to do right, but they've been hoodwinked for ages. But now they're awakening. Oh, yes, they're awakening. And the day of their enfranchisement is near at hand. End quote. Mother Jones had been there. She'd been through it. On her first ever visit to West Virginia during the 1897 organizing drive, John Mitchell, the leader of the UNW at the time, when he got there, he found her in jail. She was eventually released and straight from the jail she walked right back up into the hills and into the hollows, knocking on the doors of miners cabins, finding them there, finding them here, even going down into the mines to speak to them if she had to. And she just walked the hills, talking to these men about their situation. Another time she was giving a speech to West Virginia miners when shots rang out. Everybody scatters for cover, and so she hops on the back of her friend who carries her across a creek off into the wilderness. She had tended miners wounds after gunfights with guards. Once when she was arrested for calling on minors to strike, she sent the courtroom into a tizzy and berated the judge as a company scab while he lectured her that her behavior was entirely unworthy of a good woman. Her previous trips to West Virginia had really radicalized her against the coal operators. On a visit in 1907, she visited a miners camp, going to each ramshackle cabin to speak with the families as she always did, and she describes it in her autobiography. I sent two boys across a little gully to a log cabin to get a cup of tea for me. The miner came out and beckoned to me to come over. I went, and as I entered the door, my eyes rested on a straw mattress on which rested a beautiful young girl. She looked at me with the most gentle eyes I had ever saw in a Human being. The wind came in through the cracks of the floor and would raise the bedclothes a little. I said to the father, what is wrong with your girl? Consumption, said he, I couldn't earn enough in the mines, and she went to work in a boarding house. They worked her so hard she took sick Consumption. Around a fireplace sat a group of dirty children, ragged and neglected looking. He gave us tea and bread. A great crowd came up the mountainside that afternoon. The superintendent sent one of his lackeys, a colored fellow. When the miners told me who he was and that he was sent there as a spy, I said to him, see here, young man, don't you know that the immortal Lincoln, a white man, gave you freedom from slavery? Why do you now betray your white brothers who are fighting for industrial freedom? Mother, said he, I can't make myself scarce. But you know something? My hearing and my eyesight ain't so good today. That afternoon up there on the mountainside, we organized a strong union. The next day, the man who gave me food, his name was Mike Harrington, went to the mines to go to work. But he was told to go to the office and get his pay. No man could work in the mines, the superintendent said, who entertained agitators in his home. Mike said to him, I didn't entertain her. She paid me for the tea and bread. It makes no difference, said he. You had Mother Jones in your house, and that is enough. He went home, and when he opened the door, his sick daughter said, father, have you lost your job? She started to sob. That brought on a coughing fit from which she fell back onto the pillow, exhausted. That little girl died shortly thereafter. That afternoon he was ordered to leave his house as it was owned by the company. They buried the little girl and moved to an old barn. Mike was later made an organizer for the United Mine Workers. And he made one of the most faithful workers I've ever seen. She describes another visit in 1903. I went to Stanford Mountain, where the men were on strike. The court had issued an injunction forbidding the strikers from going near the mines. A group of miners walked along the public road nowhere near the mines. The next morning they held a meeting in front of their own hall, which they themselves had built. And a United States Deputy marshal came into the meeting with warrants for 30 members for violating the injunction. The men said, we did not break any law. We did not go near the mines, and you know it. We were on the public road. Well, said the deputy, we're going to arrest you anyway. They defied him to Arrest them. Insisting they had not violated the law. They gave him 25 minutes to leave the town. They sent for his brother, who was a company doctor and told him to take him out. That night I went to hold a meeting with them. They told me what had happened. I said, boys, it would have been better if you had surrendered. Especially as you had the truth on your side and you had not been near the mines. After the meeting, I went to the nearby Camp Montgomery. There was a little hotel and the railway station. Before leaving, the boys who came to the edge of the town with me said, will you be coming back soon, Mother? I had no idea how soon it would be. The next morning I went to the station to get an early train. And the agent says to me, did you hear what trouble they had up in Stamford Mountain last night? I think you're mistaken, young man. I answered for I just came down from there myself last night. Well, he said, they've had some trouble there all the same. Anyone hurt? Yes. I was taking railway messages and couldn't get all the details. Some shooting. I said, take back my ticket. I must go up there. I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came nearer the miners homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner's shack, the clay red with blood. I pushed the door open. On a mattress wet with blood lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets. In five other shacks, men lay dead. In one of them, a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse. The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept. Shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company. The coroner went. The men were buried on the mountainside. And nothing was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives. Well, it doesn't take but a few experiences like that to set anybody on the warpath. And Mother Jones had more than a few of those experiences. She was the patron saint of miners across the country. But Mother Jones was no mascot. She had been organizing machinists in Butte, Montana, when she saw a note in the local newspaper about the trouble in West Virginia. So she decided on the spot to cut her work short and caught the train east to Appalachia. When she pulled in that June morning, even in the capital there in Charleston, the Tension was thick in the air. Taxi drivers approached to give her a lift to town, but she turned them down. She said she's perfectly capable of walking a mile or two to the business district. And so she does. She gets there, goes to a hotel, washes herself up, eats some breakfast again. This is the morning that she arrived. And just after washing up and eating breakfast, no rest for the wary, she's back on the move again to the train station to take a smaller train up to Kanawha County. While on the train, she meets the union's district president, who hadn't expected to see her. So he invites her with him to a mass meeting. And so that's where they went. They get off the train at Paint Creek Junction, and she looks around and the first thing she notices are gunmen everywhere. Everything was still, she remembered, and no one would know the bloody war that was raging in those silent hills except for the sight of those guns and the strange terrified look on everyone's faces. So she got on another train from the junction, a smaller, even smaller one, and took yet up into the hollow, running parallel with a creek and a busted up road. She's passing by the dilapidated homes of miners with their little gardens off to the side. She was passing through areas entirely devoted to mining, so that the landscape looked like Mordor. Finally, they arrive to their destination, and word gets around that Mother Jones has come to help the miners. And so the people start to stream in, start to assemble. One of them was the friend who had carried her across the creek on his back those years ago. He told her he wasn't able to carry her anymore since the Baldwin Felt's guards had thrown him off a train and injured his back. About half of the miners were Europeans, Italians, Poles, Hungarians mostly. Another 25% were black men who had come up from the south to get out of the fruitless toil of the sharecropper. And then the other 25% were men from right there in West Virginia. And so she went around and worked the crowd, shook their hands, speaking to them as individuals or small groups and listening to their tales of abuse at the hands of the Baldwin Felts guards. When all the people were assembled who were going to come, she starts talking, she starts exhorting the miners. She knows exactly how to rile these men up. She would challenge them, she would condemn them and make fun of them for failing to have not already fought back. The whole thing would be laced with her trademark profanities. The miners love that. She went for a full 90 minutes and the crowd Was wrapped the entire time, laughing when she wanted him to laugh, cheering or jeering as she conducted him, crying or shouting with rage, like on cue. A news account of the event later reported that she put all the other speakers, most of whom were half her age, in the shade. So she settles into her hotel back in Charleston, settles in for the long haul, and shuttles back and forth to miners camps in Kanawha County. All summer long, she made speeches on a daily basis, and mass meetings sprung up anywhere that she was rumored to be headed. Jenny Savage Ayers writes, her voice rocked people with its power, its clarity, its command, its hint of Irish brogue and feminine charm. Poet Carl Sandburg called it a singing voice. It was low and pleasant, umwa leader John Brophy once said, with great carrying power. When she got excited, the intensity of it became something you could almost feel physically. Well, come July 4th, she speaks to a crowd at a Beckley courthouse and tells the people there to stop thinking in terms of political parties, stop thinking in terms of elections, and start thinking in terms of labor and capital. Later in the month, she spoke to striking miners on the coal river. And we're not exactly sure what she said there, but it was enough that the Charleston newspaper reported that it had provoked a great deal of enthusiasm as well as unrest in the neighborhood. The very next day, a group of those miners armed themselves and assembled on coal company land to protest the use of scab labor. Most, if not all, of them, had seen Mother Jones the day before, and they were fired up, she says, for I had told them their jobs were their bread and butter and that they should fight for that at any and all times, for the comfort of their wives and their babies depended on it. The deputy sheriff went up there to disperse the miners, but when he got there, he found that the miners numbered at least 150. And he was by himself. And so they approached him and said that, sheriff, we're gonna disarm you now. And so he starts to raise his gun at them, and from somewhere in the crowd, he was shot five times. Not killed, though. Well, the county sheriff puts in an emergency call to the governor's office. He says that things are now growing beyond the ability of local law enforcement to control. Law enforcement's being attacked. The governor must send the national guard immediately. And so soon, a company of soldiers and a machine gun squad who were supposed to be leaving for training in Pennsylvania turned around, canceled those plans. They're going to Boone County, West Virginia. Mother Jones was blamed for that violence. She didn't deny responsibility I not only advised the miners to buy rifles but personally raised the money which paid for them. If the state of West Virginia allows the coal companies to hire and arm such thugs as the Baldwin Felts detectives for the purpose of shooting down the miners, then I would not be fit to live under the flag of this country if I let my boys go empty handed. Winchester and Springfield rifles and stacks of ammunition were flowing into Paint Creek and the rest of Kanawha county headed for both the miners and the Baldwin Felts Guards. People were gearing up for war. Miners who had more than one gun gave one to miners who didn't have one. The miners weren't being permitted to bring or transport guns so they had to be smuggled. Even miners wives got in on the act. Willie Fish, the miners wife who covered the tracks of the fleeing Italians by releasing her chickens into the yard. She smuggled guns and ammunition for the miners under her tea gowns and her big linen coat. I said I'd get them off the hill. They said how? And I said, you just have somebody meet me at Banner and I'll get the guns off. And I slipped one down my dress on this side. I had one gun on either side of me and I had a pocket full of shells. I could hardly walk and I'd go right down past the store. They didn't think about me carrying anything like that. I'd go up to Banner a little piece and then a man would pop out of the bushes and I'd give him a countersign. The miners were all using call and response passwords to identify each other. I'd give him a gun and a handful of shells and he would take back to the bushes. Then I'd go a little further and another man would pop out of the bushes. Usually I carried two at a time. Sometimes I'd take bags of shells instead of guns and I carried all the guns off the hill. Rumors were circulating that miners from other areas were making their way to Paint Creek to join the strike. One evening in late July, two Baldwin Felts guards from Fayette county were coming through the area called Holly Grove on their way up to Paint Creek Junction. They're riding one of these old two seater pedal powered bicycles that rode on railroad tracks. You don't really see those anymore. Well the guards names were Bill Phelp and Robert Stringer. And as they made their way through Holly Grove all of a sudden shots broke out and Robert Stringer went down shot in the head. The other one, Bill Fout, pulls his revolver and starts shooting back but he was hit in the back, in the arm, and he goes flying off the railroad bike down an embankment. He tore his shirt and tied up his injured arm and then shed his blood soaked coat and ran away. Managed to get away through the woods to a hospital a few miles out. When Foulip and Stringer don't arrive as expected, the other mine guards who are waiting for him become concerned. So the murderous guard that I mentioned earlier, Ernest Gaujeu and two others, arm themselves and head in the direction of Holly Grove. And when they get there, they find Stringer's body. They figured Foulp was likely dead as well, and there were probably hostiles all around, so they didn't linger. They went back to get reinforcements. And then the next morning, Gaugio leads a posse back there. When they get there, they find two young teenage girls who were kind of edging up some distance away from Stringer's corpse. They'd just never seen a dead body before, and their curiosity got the best of them. When the girls see the guards, they try to retreat across a bridge, but the guards catch up with them and put guns in their faces. They're ordered to get off the bridge and go wade through the creek. And so they do that, and the guards are pointing guns at them and directing curses at them the whole time. The guards then burst into the tents and the homes of the sleeping miners, sticking guns in people's faces. They round up 22 men, abuse them, make them get close and stare at the corpse. The miners in the hills around saw these captive men being led away, and so they start to take potshots at the guards from the trees. So the guards put their captives, the miners between them in the direction of the gunfire to use them as hostages and human shields as they made their escape. They got Stringer's body and then headed back to Mucklow from where they'd come. But when they got to Mucklow, the four guards that they left there were already engaged in their own gun battle with miners in the hills. One of those four had managed to get the Gatling gun, and he was using it to strafe the hillsides. But the miners managed to mitigate its effects somewhat, at least by aiming at the ammunition belt, feeding bullets into the gun and severing it. Guards from a nearby station heard the gunfire. They rushed to the scene. On their way, they ran up on a group of miners who had been firing down into the camp, and they all spun on each other and one of the men with the guards was killed. It's becoming a full scale battle. Well finally Gaozhou returns with his posse and those 22 captured men. And the prisoners are forced to sit down in front of the Gatling gun to act as human shields as the automatic sprays over their heads into the hills. Battle went on for about an hour. Thousands and thousands of rounds fired, several people killed. After it was over, the guards continued to abuse the prisoners. One of the things about the miners in all these stories actually on the guard side as well, it was true, but certainly more so with the miners. It seemed to have been a point of principle not to ever admit that number of their own who were hit or killed. They didn't want to give the guards a satisfaction. And so very often the number of casualties is a bit fuzzy and the estimates can vary widely. But reports here were that between eight and 12 men were killed and about 20 were wounded that morning. The night before, telephone wires had been cut by miners throughout the area. They'd also intercepted and wrecked a freight train hauling for the coal company at Mucklow. They sabotaged a tipple which if you're not familiar with with mining equipment. A tipple is a ubiquitous site at mining operations in quarries. If you've ever seen a miner or quarry driven by one or something, and there's a big structure with a long ramp descending from it, that's the tipple. Coal cars would deliver coal from the mountainside down to the tipple. It would be dumped into the tipple and then directed down the ramp into the full size freight cars waiting on the main railroad. That's how they got it out. So every mine had one and without the tipple no mine could operate. And so they became frequent targets of the striking miners. The miners were verging on full scale rebellion. That night the first National Guardsmen arrived and began patrolling the hills. Before long, three more companies of soldiers were ordered to Paint Creek with another battalion on the way. So with the soldiers in town, both the miners and the guards step back and take a breath. Things quiet down a bit and people even express expressed optimism that maybe the worst was over. There was still tension thick in the air. You could cut it with a knife. The next day Mother Jones went up to Holly Grove, the site of Stringer and Phelps shootings and spoke to a mass meeting there. Someone had found fouls bloody coat that he had left behind when he fled and brought it back to Holly Grove. And Mother Jones in top form is waving it over her head and shouting this is the first time I ever saw a goddamn mine guard's coat decorated to suit me. The crowd goes insane. They cut that bloody coat up into small scraps and pin pieces of it onto their lapels as souvenirs. Rumors of more ore miners were making their way into Paint Creek continued to circulate. Many of these miners who were coming in headed to the capital, Charleston, to rendezvous before heading down there. So Mother Jones went to that city. And word went out across the coal fields that Mother Jones would be addressing a mass meeting on the levee in Charleston. Ginny Ayers describes the the Elk Ridge Band came marching smartly down Capitol street, played a march in front of the state capitol, then moved out toward the river. People smiled and followed. A few blocks away, miners from Kelly's Creek and Boomer Branch, Longacre Ward, Smithers, and a dozen other camps along the northern side of the Kanawha poured off a train at the Kanawha and Michigan Depot and marched down Capitol street toward the river. On the river's south bank, miners swarmed off the morning Local from Paint and Cabin creeks and streamed across the bridge into the music and the excitement down at the river itself. At the foot of the levee, the stern, wheeled valley bell steamed into dock. Its gangway came down, and miners filed out onto the cobblestones. In overalls and muslin, battered hats and suspenders, the miners roamed through town, talking and calling, peering into store windows, admiring the buildings, biding their time. At noon they gathered on the levee. They had come to hear Mother Jones. At 1:00, Walter Deal, union organizer, mounted a dray wagon near the top of the sloping levee and tried to speak. Few paid attention. Then Mother Jones appeared at the top of the levee and began moving toward the wagon. Dressed as always in black silk that reached to the ground, white lace at the neck, the silver curls of her hair tucked neatly into place, she made her way through the crowd, exchanging quips. If you would just use your brains instead of your mouths, she said to someone. But you do not, a miner responded kindly. Take your time, Mother. Don't you give me any advice, she snapped back. I will attend to you. I will stay with you. I believe you are right, someone called. With her customary agility, she climbed into the back of the dray wagon and looked out over more than a thousand faces stretching down the levee to the river. Behind her, beneath the city's towering new office building, hundreds of townspeople moving through the business district surged forward to look and listen. The crowd hushed. Her voice, strong but sympathetic, boomed out over the levee. In the river Every movement made in civilization has had an underlying purpose. You have reached the century in human civilization when the charge of human slavery must forever disappear. And that was all it took. The miners erupted into loud, prolonged applause, cheering, yelling, telling the world they loved her. The feeling was mutual, and she responded to them. You, my friends, in my estimation, have stood this insult too long. You have borne the master's venom, his oppression. You have allowed him to oppress you. She was warming up when we said, a little more bread. He set out to get the human bloodhounds to murder you. Your governor has stood for it. He went off to Chicago and left two Gatling guns with the bloodhounds to blow your brains out. The crowd was electrified. A voice shouted, that is what he has done, Mother. Yes, that is what he has done. But what did you elect him for? Another voice, that is the question. Then you elected a sheriff. That began to shake like a poodle. Dog denied of the trouble on Paint Creek. And she was off again. The crowd was in her hands as she swayed her hearers, apparently, as the wind sways the grass, as one witness said. Charleston citizens, many of whom had heard of Mother Jones but not actually heard her speak, stood around the edge of the crowd. Sometimes a buggy or automobile stopped while the passengers listened. From his position in the crowd, stenographer S.P. richmond, hired by the coal operator, scribbled down her words verbatim with Greg shorthand. This industrial warfare is on, she resumed after another round of applause. It can't be stopped. It can't be put back. It is breaking out all over the nation. The whole machine of capitalism realizes for the first time in history that there is an intellectual awakening of the dog below. And he is barking, have you been barking on Paint Creek? And from there she turned her wrath against the Baldwin felts guards. When a corporation which is bleeding you to death would go and hire human bloodhounds to abuse your wife, your child, it is time. Every man in the state should rise. Mother Jones was where she wanted to be, doing what she did best. Her boys were there, adoring, cheering, laughing, responding. She drew them out, started them cheering, quieted them, softened them, enraged them, and then drew them out again. I am 80 years old. I have passed the 80th milestone in human history, and I will be 80 more, for I've got a contract with God almighty to stay with you until your chains are broken. They cheered again. With the crowd now fully in her control, she spoke of what many, including the coal operators, listened to the possibility of continuing violence. Her words Were deliberately. Don't get into conflict with the boys in the state militia, she urged them. And they answered, amen. Amen. Don't you let me hear that you have ever injured a single mine. These mines belong to you. But then she added, I am not going to say that you don't molest the operators. It is they who hire the dogs to shoot you. And when that applause died down, I'm not asking you to do it, but if he is going to oppress you, deal with him. I'm not going to take back any water because I'm here in the capitol. No backwater for me. No man lives on the face of God's earth that is oppressing my class. That I am afraid of. And the applause erupted again, but hints of violence sprinkled throughout. I will say, Mr. Operators, the day is going to come when you will say you wished you had never seen the face of a mine guard. We are law abiding citizens. We will destroy no property. We will take no life. But if a fellow comes to my home and outrages my wife, by the eternal, he will pay the penalty. I will send him to God in the repair shop. And again the miners surged forward, cheering and applauding as she went on. The man who doesn't do it hasn't a drop of revolutionary blood in his veins. End quote. When the major in charge of the state militia there in Charleston decided things had gone far enough, he sent word up to Mother Jones while she was speaking that she was under arrest. And so she wraps it up and finishes with, goodbye, boys, I'm under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up this fight. Don't surrender. And she was led off to jail for what was probably the 100th time in her life. After the event, one gun store in Charleston reported selling 300 guns that afternoon. Another sold 350. Another one just said it sold all the guns it had. And it put out a sign saying that they had more on order. The next day, the state governor picks up the newspaper and sees the headline, mother Jones stirs up miners and they purchase 750 rifles. Well, of course, she was out of jail soon. She always managed to get out of jail soon. And she heads right back up into the hills to keep on agitating. This time she was headed up to nearby Cabin Creek, a creek that ran parallel to Paint Creek. And a lot of the action that we're going to be talking about here takes place between the two. This place was known to be even more hostile to unionization than Paint Creek. She went up there at the invitation of a miner who worked up there named Frank Keeney. I mentioned Keeney a while ago. His family had been run off their land by speculators to make way for the railroads and coal mines when his father died. Kini began working in the mine when he was just 12 years old to support his mother and two sisters. Now he's 30 years old. And Frank Keaney, he's an impressive looking guy, but he's small and he's supposed to be soft spoken, but quick tempered and certainly not a man to be trifled with. His great grandson is actually a history professor out in West Virginia today. Last year, I was out there at an event when he was present, and an older man whose father had known Frank Keaney gave the introduction to our little event and to the great grandson. He. He looked to him and he said, one of the things he said was when he asked his dad what Frank Keeney was like, that his dad paused for a moment and then just said, when he spoke, people listened. And so that kind of that, that stuck with me a little bit because I think that does say a lot without saying very much at all. Frank Keaney had emerged as a leader among the miners because the union was perceived to be moving slowly, even reluctantly, as this conflict continued to spiral. One day, Frank Keeney walked into the union headquarters and demanded help from the UMW to arrange mass meetings in the strike district. But the union officials refused to send anybody. And so Frank Keeney reads him the riot act. And basically from that point on, took the reigns of the Paint Creek and soon the Cabin Creek strike himself. Wakini had been in Charleston trying to get some more union leaders to come up to Cabin Creek to help organize his miners. Couldn't get anybody to come. The national union had put down word that it was too dangerous. Their organizers were to avoid the area. And so when Keeney heard that Mother Jones was in town, he sought her out to see if she would come. I'll come up, she says. I've been thinking of invading that place for some time. And so she told Frank Keeney that she would be there Tuesday night and to spread the word that there was going to be a mass meeting. Mother Jones tells the rest herself, quote, the night before I was to speak at Cabin Creek, a fellow by the name of Ben Morris, a national board member with the union, came to me and said, mother, I understand you're going to Cabin Creek tomorrow. Do you think that is Wise? You? It's not wise, said I, but necessary. Well, if you go, I'll go. He said. No, I think it's better for me to go alone. You represent the national office. I don't. I'm not responsible to anyone. If anything happens and you were there, the operators might sue the union for damages. I go as a private citizen. All they can do is put me in jail, and I'm used to that. He left me and went directly to the governor and told him to send a company of the militia up to Cabin Creek as Mother Jones was going up there. Then he got the sheriff to give him a bodyguard and he sneaked up behind me. At any rate, I did not see him or the militia on the train, nor did I see them. When I got off that night we held a meeting. When I got up to speak, I saw the militia that the national organizer had had the governor send. That board member was there, too. He had made arrangements with the local chairman to introduce him. He began speaking to the men about being good and patient and to trust the justice of their cause. I rose. Stop that silly trash, I said. I motioned him to a chair. The men hollered, sit down. Sit down. He sat. Then I spoke. You men have come over the mountains 12, 16 miles. Your clothes are thin. Your shoes are out at the toes. Your wives and little ones are cold and hungry. You have been robbed and enslaved for years. And now Billy Sunday comes here to tell you to be good and patient and trust to justice. What silly trash to tell men whose goodness and patience is cried out to a deaf world. Someone screamed, organize us, Mother. They all began shouting, organize us. Organize us. March over to that dark church on the corner and I will give you the union obligation, said I. The men started marching in the dark. The spies could not identify them. You can't organize those men, said the board member, because you don't know the ritual. The ritual. Hell, I said, I'll make one up. Well, they have to pay $15 for their charter, he said. I'll get them their charter. Why, these poor wretches haven't 15 cents for a sandwich. All you care about is your salary. Regardless of the destiny of these men. On the steps of the darkened church, I organized those men. They raised their hands and took the obligation of the union. Go home from this meeting, said I. Say nothing about being a union man. Put on your overalls in the morning, take your dinner buckets and go to work in the mines and get the rest of the men out. And from that day, the miners of Cabin Creek and Paint Creek were in common rebellion. A week later, she's up at Cabin Creek again. She gives another speech. After she finishes, a miner approaches her. He had come with 40 others from the Red Warrior coal camp up the creek. And they were there to ask if she would help them organize a union local. And so she goes with him. Right then and there she climbs into a buggy that they had brought. And they started the three miles toward Red Warrior with the other 40 trailing behind on foot as they went. Other people came out and joined the march so that soon there are over a hundred people walking behind Mother Jones in this buggy. And as they come up on Leewood, suddenly they find themselves confronted on their path by at least 50 Baldwin Felts guards armed with rifles, pistols and shotguns blocking their way. AC Felt of the Felts family, of the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, one of the bosses, the big boss men, stood in the middle of his men behind a mounted machine gun with a belt of ammunition fed into it. They ordered Mother Jones to stop where she was. The guards moved and surrounded the people, moved into the crowd and began searching people for their guns. So Mother Jones jumps out of the buggy without assistance, ran up the tracks to where the machine gun was. She grabs the muzzle of the machine gun and looks back at her people, says nothing to the guards and just nods her head to tell her followers to get going past them. And so they start moving. And AC Felt, the Baldwin Felts commander, yells at her, Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat. Mother Jones uses the opportunity to launch into one of her most famous rants in front of one hundred and fifty witnesses. Sir, my class goes into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is my gun. My class melt the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel. They dig the coal that feeds the furnaces. My class is not fighting you. Not you. They are fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men who robbed them and deprived their children of childhood. It is the hard earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from. The commander said he didn't give a damn and he threatened to kill her and every one of those people before he would let him pass. And she looks him in the eye and says, Young man, I want to tell you that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you touch one of my white hairs, that creek will run with blood and yours will be the first to crimson it. He looks at her skeptically and says, well, how you gonna manage that and then she bluffs, she points up to the hills and says, up there in the mountains I have 500 miners. They were all marching armed to the meeting I'm going to address right now. If you start shooting, they will finish the game. And so AC Felt step back. And the men let her and her people pass. And people who were there spread that story far and wide. And Mother Jones legend just grew another few inches. This is an 85, 80, 85 year old woman. Tiny little thing. Looks like your great grandmother. Well, after she gets up there, she swears in the men of Red Warrior and she returns to Charleston, the capital, where she had just one day to prepare for what would become arguably her most famous speech. Jenny Savage airs Again. The excitement seemed beyond control. The violence, the presence of soldiers on the creek, Mother Jones speeches and the breaking of Cabin Creek, bringing a whole new dimension to the controversy, had stirred things to such an extent that the event generated stories all over the front pages of Charleston's two main newspapers. For two days, men from the closed mines at Paint and Cabin Creeks had begun arriving in Charleston the night before and next morning bought many rifles from the hardware stores and carried them around town, waiting for things to start. Miners from Boomer and other union mines across the river from Paint and Cabin Creeks arrived too, in such numbers that the mines there were closed for the day as well. Everything seemed to have been planned. Under a bright sun that sent temperatures into the 80s, Cabin Creek miners assembled at the levee, Paint Creek miners on Capitol street and the others on Kanawha Street. At one o'clock, two marching bands blasted out patriotic music to set the pace. Hundreds of miners paraded through town in bib overalls and corduroys, some carrying rifles. Old and young native mountaineers, former slaves and the children of slaves, Eastern Europeans and Italians, they marched to the beat, waving to friends. They carried huge banners stretching across the street, held on each side by marching miners with red letters proclaiming no Russia for us. To hell with the guard system. Mountaineers are always free out of the state with the Baldwin murderers. We are the Cabin Creek peons. Kick out the guards. The nation's workmen cannot be submerged without submerging the nation down with the human bloodhounds and more. A thousand strong, they poured into the capitol grounds where they were herded off to one side, well away from the entrance. The audience listened politely to the lead up speakers until the moment all Walter Deal called on Mother Jones. Everyone looked around, but she was not there. Then they spotted her. She stood triumphantly atop a Dry goods box directly in front of the steps to the Capitol entrance where no one could fail to see her as she knew they would. Miners stampeded across the grounds, surrounding her and filling the walkways and lawn, effectively blocking the entrance to the State Capitol. She smiled triumphantly from the improved vantage point, told the children to be quiet, and began what was to become her most famous speech. As stenographer Richmond leaned against a pillar and took down every word. This, my friends, marks in my estimation, the most remarkable move ever made in the state of West Virginia. It is a day that will mark history in the long ages to come. What is it? It is an uprising of the oppressed against the master class. Her voice thundered out across the Capitol square as around her the crowds cheered her words and the citizens on the streets stopped entranced behind her, well dressed state leaders and bureaucrats listened in the entrance to the Capitol while others crowded forward in the hallways to hear still farther. Inside the Capitol, the Governor listened unhappily as he carried on appointments in a heavily scheduled and trying day. At one point he emerged from his office, listened for a few minutes through the window to Mother Jones speech, then hurried back to his schedule. Acknowledging the Governor's plea that he did not have the power to remove the mine guards, she told her audience, you are asking the Governor of the state to do something he cannot do without betraying the class he belongs to. From time to time she turned around and spoke directly to the well dressed state officials who peered from the Capitol entrance or stood on the steps around her and they shifted their weight uneasily. Using powerful biblical imagery, she compared the miners to the Israelites that were called out of Egypt, saying God formed them into a union so they could escape from bondage. She reminded them of their social position, referring to the recent sinking of the Titanic where the wealthy saved themselves and while many of the lower class perished in this way, she built up to her pivotal laying down the gauntlet to the Governor and you fellows have stood it entirely too long. It is now time to put a stop to it. The crowd was fully in her hands as she breathed defiance. We will give the Governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out of Cabin Creek. Here on the steps of the Capitol of West Virginia. I say that if the Governor won't make them go, then we will make them go, a Charleston reporter wrote. One could not listen without being thrilled by the eloquence of the aged orator and the intense earnestness of her hearers. He wrote that the men were filled with the feeling of bitter injustice. Most of them were prepared to fight and give their lives fighting to end the guard system, which they hate. Mother Jones was the spark that lighted the smoldering fires of resentment into action. Another person who was there, a fantastic character who you'll hear more of in this series, named Ralph Chaplin, who was a socialist activist from the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. And he was there at the Paint Creek Cabin Creek strike throughout much of it, and he also spoke on the levee that day. Now, he's a very experienced socialist agitator. He speaks in front of meetings, into crowds all the time. He knows how to get people riled up. But he describes the scene in his autobiography, quote, I spoke at scores of socialist meetings in Huntington and nearby towns. The largest of these was Charleston. There must have been a couple of thousand people on the riverfront. When I spoke after Mother Jones at a mass meeting one Sunday, winter was coming on and miners children had been going barefooted. I was happy to help Mother Jones in launching a drive to buy shoes for them. I made a strong appeal from the platform for industrial solidarity. I urged everyone to vote for Eugene V. Debs. I denounced the smugness of churches and conventional people generally for their indifference to human injustice and suffering. No words of mine, however, could compare with the vitriolic wrath of Mother Jones on the same subject. She might have been any coal miner's wife, ablaze with righteous fury when her brood was in danger. Her voice shrilled as she shook her fist at the coal operators, the mine guards, the union officials, and all the others responsible for the situation. She prayed and cursed and pleaded, raising her clenched and trembling hands, asking heaven to bear witness. She wore very long, very full skirts and a black shawl, and her tiny bonnet bobbed up and down as she harangued the crowd. The miners loved it and laughed, cheered, hooted, and even cried as she spoke to them. A newspaper man managed to get an interview with Mother Jones after the speech. And at the end of the interview, he asked her what did she think would happen in the end of all this. And she looks at him and says, we will have revenge. That's what she told him. And so he says, then what? And she looks over at him and raises an eyebrow and says, isn't that a lot to get in one lifetime? So things have been turned up to 11, and a lot of that is thanks to Mother Jones. And now the miners on the north side of Kanawha county, these are the ones who are unionized. They're looking down south and watching all this happen and they are getting more and more agitated. Some of them are saying that they're leaving their brothers down in paint and cabin creeks out to dry. So at the end of August, a few more miners were killed and another was shot through the lung and survived by mine guards. And the union miners in Kanawha county had seen enough. The organized men were going to go help their brothers. They held meetings to decide what to do. And Frank Keaney, failing to get any direct assistance from the national union, made a direct plea to the men of Kanawha county to stand with his beleaguered minors. And so without coordination from some central authority, these men came together on their own. Men who already had their union contract, who had nothing to gain individually, nothing to gain individually from sticking their noses in somebody else's fight. Except it wasn't somebody else's fight. They knew that the coal miners would stand together or they would all die alone. And every one of them knew that. So on their own, on September 1, 1912, the union miners of Kanawha county, five or six thousand of them, grabbed their rifles and assembled and then crossed the river to march on Paint Creek to drive out the mine guards. Now the governor, you know, the poor governor, he's in a very difficult spot. The coal operators all but ran his state, including the state government. And they represented the economic core of West Virginia. I mean, coal mining was far and away the leading economic activity in the state. These men drew a lot of water and they had a lot of power, just period. They had real power that he had to contend with. And these men were absolutely refusing to even be in the same room as the miners, refusing company spies provided a report to the governor telling him about the five or six thousand miners who were arming themselves in Kanawha county and preparing a full on attack against the Baldwin Felts guards at Paint Creek. And so he's trying to placate both sides, but he's just finding that there is no compromise available here. These men had been killing each other for months. And more than that, you know, this had been building for years. These men had seen their families abused by the mine guards for years. A lot of people were demanding that the governor declare martial law. But he was reluctant to take that final step. And so in lieu of that, he issued what became known as the peace proclamation. All persons who were not members of the national guard, that included both minor and mine guard, were ordered to lay down their arms and to refrain from assembling or marching as armed bodies and from obstructing the public highways and from uttering inflammatory speeches calculated to incite riot, violence or injury to persons and property. The Peace proclamation gave the militia the authority to use force to put down violence and disorder and to disperse any unauthorized assemblies, violent or not. But it made little difference. The operators were not prepared to back down one inch. They began bringing in more strikebreakers and more mine guards, evicting more miners from their homes, now under the protection of the National Guard, who would drive off the miners if they tried to interfere with the process. One family was kicked out of their home in the evening. And so a neighbor offered to let that family sleep that night on his porch until they figured out what to do the next day. Well before nightfall, before everybody falls asleep, a guard comes around to the house and tells him to get off the porch, because that porch is company property, too. And so the family goes and sleeps in an open field. And these are. These stories are being shared around by people all the time. Everybody has had something like this happen to them or knows somebody who has. That same guard was killed by minors two days later as he was trying to march a captured Stryker off to the Baldwin Felt clubhouse. And then, just after the Peace proclamation was issued, just a couple days after it was issued, Janina Sevilla, that Italian miner's pregnant wife that I mentioned earlier, who had been punched in the face and kicked in the stomach by Baldwin. Felt's guards went in for an emergency procedure to have her baby, which had been dead for some time, taken out of her. Word of that spread, and the miners went ballistic. Next morning, mine guards came under fire from miners in multiple locations, with National Guard troops hurrying over to one location, only to find that the shooting had died down and men scattered into the forest and shooting erupted somewhere else. Now it was the union itself that was urging the governor. You got to declare martial law. They figured at least the military had to abide by some kind of code of conduct. Anything would be better than the terror of the mine guards and whatever the miners did in retaliation. And so, finally, the governor gave in, over the objections of the coal operators who didn't want to see their mine guards disarmed by the regular military. The governor declared the area around Paint and Cabin Creeks to be in a state of war. And he appointed a military commission and declared it to be the sole law in the strike zones. Judge, jury, and, if necessary, executioner. Arrests could be made without warrants, without judicial review. Trials could be held without the traditional rights accorded to defendants. No habeas corpus. Men could be jailed without ever standing before an actual judge or jury. The constitutional historian Robert Rankin, in his study of the use of martial law in US History, he wrote, in the history of the United States, martial law has never been used on such a broad scale in so drastic a manner, nor upon such sweeping principles as in West Virginia in 1912 and 13 during the paint Creek trouble. Here is the climax of the use by the state of its power to declare and carry into effect martial law with all its force. David Allen Corbin writes. Instructed by the governor and their commanding officers, the soldiers arrested hundreds of striking miners and their leaders without warrants and detained them in makeshift jails called bullpens without the right of habeas corpus in flagrant disregard of the U.S. supreme Court decision in Ex parte Milligan. The soldiers then established military tribunals and court martialed over 100 civilian miners. There was no pretense of balanced justice in this unconstitutional proceeding. The coal operators and Baldwin Felt's guards, who were known by all to have engaged in violence, were never even questioned, while a striking miner was sentenced to five years in prison for telling an army officer to go to hell with true military efficiency. The miner was arrested on Tuesday, court martialed on Wednesday, and was in prison on Thursday. The military did make a genuine effort to disarm everybody and stabilize things. They took all the weapons they could find from both the miners and the mine guards. They even disarmed the local justices of the peace. They went to the sheriffs and the justices of the peace, took their guns and said they weren't needed right now. They had no authority until martial law was over. Go home. But still the companies were bringing in scab labor. And still they continued evicting the miners families from their homes as the military stood by to make sure it all went smoothly. And the feeling among the miners who had initially had some positive feelings toward the soldiers were starting to change. They were thinking the soldiers hadn't come after all to restore peace, but just to help the operators break their strike. And so a few began exchanging gunfire with the soldiers. Now coal tipples were set on fire along with barns and other structures. Mobs of women attacked strikebreakers with broom handles. Mother Jones urged the miners not to engage directly with the government forces, but even she was pushing up on the limits of her restraining power. In one incident, she was barely able to restrain a mob of miners from murdering someone they thought was a scab. It was a black man named Felix Salmon, and he had gotten off the train at Cabin Creek Junction. And as he Walked into the ticket office. A local miner approached him and said he didn't recognize him. Where'd you come from? So Salmon says, I came from up the creek. And so the miner accused him of strike breaking. Salmon denies it, but the miner wasn't going to be put off. So he hits Salmon and knocks him down. Salmon jumps up and runs away, and now a whole group's chasing him, hitting him and kicking him, yelling, scab, Scab. So he runs to the other side of the train depot, where he finds himself cornered, and the crowd closes in on him. But he manages to break away and tries to run out of the depot. And at the door, he sees Mother Jones, little old Mother Jones, standing there by herself. Mother, he says, my God, I'm not guilty of this. I'm not guilty of this. Save me. God knows I'm not guilty. And so Mother Jones says to him, God has nothing to do with this. The miners are running this part of it. And so as the crowd runs up on him, she puts her hand up, they all stop, and she tells them they'd gone far enough. And some of the crowd wanted to defy her, but most of them were not prepared to do that. And so she led the man by the arm up onto a train and got him out of there, but barely. With martial law in effect and the guards and the miners mostly disarmed, or if not disarmed, at least unable to bear their arms out in public, they had to keep them hidden, the situation seemed to stabilize. Hundreds of men had been rounded up and held, some for quite some time without trial. Many of them faced military tribunals, which heard their case and pronounced a verdict and a sentence right there on the spot. And they were just let off. No lawyer, no nothing. Dozens of people were thrown to prison that way. Both the guards and the miners wanted to show that they were the good guys here. And anyway, they all knew that for all their toughness and bluster, the U.S. army was still the U.S. army. And so, for the most part, they tried to keep their heads down as soon as it was practical. The governor, who did not like this business, he was getting a lot of pressure from civil liberties groups in the state around the country. He said, mission accomplished, and he ends the period of military rule. And the fighting resumed almost immediately. And within months, martial law was declared once again. And again the fighting died down. And again civil liberties groups took the governor to the woodshed. And so again, he soon ended martial law. And again the guards and the miners were back at each other. That winter was Cold, and it was violent. Striking miners waited it out in tent cities, living on donated food and whatever they could hunt or fish or grow or scrounge up. Snowfell. One of these tent cities was set up on Holly Grove, which was the site of the attack on those two Baldwin felts guards, Foulp and Stringer, earlier. It was one of the few places where the miners could actually set up their tents to live because it was on private land, not owned by the companies. Well, that February, company guards rolled out a new weapon. Ralph Chaplin, that socialist wobbly who spoke on the levee with Mother Jones, he was still around, and he had gotten word that an armored train was being built up at the Chesapeake and Ohio rail yard in Huntington for use down in the Kanawha county strike. They were calling it the Bull Moose Special. And in addition to the armor slits were being cut to allow riflemen to fire out from the inside of the train without putting themselves in danger. Room was made for machine gun mounts on the train. So Chaplin and his wobbly friends go to the workers who are rigging this thing up. And Chaplin says, we appealed to the railroad men and shopmen who were unionized to lay down their tools rather than proceed with work on this deadly contraption. This seemed fair enough to the machinists, but the boilermakers and Carmen, members of a local holy roller cult, informed us that they had taken the matter to Jesus in prayer and had been told to go ahead and put it on the armored plates. The armored train was spirited away under cover of darkness. Our hearts sank when we discovered that it was no longer at the nearby C and O shop. We spread a warning to the hills and waited anxiously for newspaper headlines announcing new atrocities. We didn't have to wait long. And so, with their shiny new toy ready to go, the guards decided to try out the Bull Moose Special. After some trouble around Holly Grove, a few operators, along with some hired men and several deputy sheriffs loaded onto the train and started making their way in that direction. Several of the deputies had been deputized just that night for the purpose. And one of them was an Irishman named Lee Calvin. Now, Calvin had worked the previous fall for the mine guards when some of his men, who were afraid of being laid off for lack of action at the time, staged a false flag attack of gunfire to try to blame the striking miners. He found out about it and he tried to fire the leader of the men who had done it, but the company overruled him and so he quit. After that, he went to work for a railroad guarding Trains that were carrying scab labor into the area. But when one day he was given orders to shoot anybody who threw rocks or yelled at the scabs, he quit that job. And so it's early February, he's back in Charleston. He's out of work. He's been out of work for a while. And a coal operator recruits him to go up with a group of men to mucklow on Paint Creek. At first he says no, he doesn't want anything more to do with these people. But he had been out of work for a month. And so when the county sheriff who was gonna go on the trip came up and asked him to join, he said he would. And so Lee Calvin finds himself on the Bull Moose Special as it's pulling out to head up toward Paint Creek at 9:00 at night. And looking around the train, he notices rifles and machine guns and boxes of ammunition stacked everywhere. The train climbed up the tracks to paint creek at 15 miles an hour. With the train lights all turned out, it's pitch dark. Looking out the window, the men saw a small cabin that was brightly lit up with women and children visible in the doors and windows looking out. The night before, several miners had gathered to play games and sing songs and have a little party at the Fish residence. Everybody had such a great time that one of the partiers, Francis Francesco Estep, he was called Chesko by his friends, invited everybody up to his cabin for some more fun the following night. And so they all came. There were nine people there, not including the children, and those were the people seen through the windows. The Bull Moose Special, as it rolled by that night, Lee Calvin saw the cabin full of women and children. The operator saw it, and the operator on board announced that they must have been put there for safekeeping by the men to get them out of the attack zone. And they were all about to have a fight. And so the men start loading their weapons and the last of the lights are put out on the train. Calvin doesn't like any of this. They try to give him a weapon. He refuses to take it. Goes over to the right side of the train to just lean out the window and smoke a cigarette. As the train rides by the main tent city there at Holly Grove, the train all of a sudden gives two short blasts of the whistle in the pitch darkness. And at that signal, Gatling guns and rifles just open up on the tents in the cabins. Jenny Ayers writes, quote, moving quickly to the left side of the train. Sheriff Hill saw instantly that they were all shooting. Everybody shot he could hear the rapid fire of a machine gun. Looking out into the blackness of the night, he could see nothing except flashes of the shots which had come from the miners positions after the train had begun firing. According to Calvin, it looked like a bunch of fireflies, he remembered. The coal operator on board later described the battle that ensued after the initial shots. Something crashed through the window from the left hand side of the train about 2ft in front of me. He was sitting near Tom Stacy, who felt a bullet whiz by us. It tore a hole through the crown of my hat. The operator fired from the window into the tents and into the houses, and he could see the flashes of the fire directed at the train. With each flash of the men shooting from the village, he could see the man, his entire person outlined, end quote. And so the engineer keeps the train moving at 15 miles an hour as the shooting continues, just unabated. When the train gets clear of Holly Grove, the coal operator on board shouts to back up the train, we'll give him another round. But thankfully the sheriff on board, who had just sort of watched dumbly as this whole thing went down so far, finally intervened and ordered the engineer to keep going. The people who were gathered at Chesko Estep's party and many other families who had just put their kids down for bed, they were startled by the two blasts of the train whistle and the gunshots that immediately followed. The men put their women and children behind cover as best they could, and then those who had them grabbed rifles and tried to run outside to return fire. A woman ran to her children's room and tried to get them to safety as bullets were crashing through the walls and the windows. Her husband was following along, trying to shield her and the kids from the rounds, but one got by and hit his wife in the foot. Chesko Estep had run outside to see what was the matter, as one of the women at the party ran outside with her children toward the cellar. And so Cesco yells for all the women to hurry up and get in the cellar with the children right quick. When the shooting seemed to have moved on past them, Maude Estep, Chesko's wife, calls for her husband and there's no answer. And so she ventures out and finds him with a small hole in his face, a great big hole in the back of his head, dead on the floor. And so she grabs her husband's rifle and goes out and starts shooting at the train. This all might have been the result of paranoid and keyed up guards on the train misinterpreting the situation and overreacting. But to the striking miners, the attack of the Bull Moose Special on Holly Grove was nothing short of an attempted massacre. Most of the residents of Holly Grove had been driven out of the village into the forest and spent the night out there. And so the next morning, when they tried to make their way back to assess the damage, mine guards were waiting and opened fire on them again. When a group of miners tried to dig a grave for Cesko Estep, they were fired upon by guards from a nearby hillside. They tried again. They were driven back again by gunfire. Most of these miners had their weapons and so a battle broke out and it continued off and on for a full day. When they finally fought their way back in, drove the guards off, they saw that bullet holes had turned their tents and the walls of their cabins into Swiss cheese. Up in Mucklow, where the Bull Moose Special had arrived, the guards and the scab miners and their families heard what had happened. And they were terrified that the miners were now going to descend on the city and massacre them. Telegraph wires were cut by the miners isolating the town. And the railroad refused to run any more trains up into the war zone. Some women went out and sabotaged train tracks to prevent the train from coming back their way. A few days later, miners launched a nighttime raid on Mucklow and at least two people were killed. After the attack on Holly Grove, Ralph Chaplin, the wobbly. He rushes to the scene with a camera and notebook to get details for a story so he can spread the word of what happened. Then he heads back to Charleston to the office to write it up. He says the state capitol, when he got there, was an armed camp. Martial law was in evidence everywhere. The streets were full of soldiers and sentries were stationed in front of the State house and the governor's residence. From the upper windows of both of these buildings jutted the muzzles of machine guns. At the city jail, we saw a squad of militiamen bringing a group of prisoners from the strike zone to the city lockup. As the great iron doors swung open to receive them, the spectators started to hiss at the militiamen. Calls of scab herders were heard. Some of the guardsmen brazenly glared back at the crowd. Others hung their heads well. Chaplin managed to get some first hand accounts of the conditions in which the jailed miners were being kept. The interior of the bullpen at Paint Creek was described as vile, with sleeping quarters inadequate, sanitation unspeakable and floors filthy beyond description. We learn that 50 miners were being held there. Only three of whom were not native West Virginians. Even with two or three men sleeping in the coal bin, many were forced to spend the night standing upright in the corners. And so chaplains rushing around from scene to scene reporting on this labor conflict in West Virginia. In every town we passed, miners were gathered in anxious little groups. Feeling was running high. I heard miners saying on every side, just wait until the leaves come out. The remark puzzled me until the desperate implications became apparent. The leafless hillsides made the miners targets for enemy fire and exposed their movements when they were seeking points of vantage from which to take potshots at guards and militiamen. On the way to Dickinson, we had the opportunity to survey the whole panorama of the danger zone. At two roadway junctions, we could plainly see the yellow wigwams of the militiamen with stacked rifles glistening beside them. Several times we caught glimpses of machine guns overlooking the frail tent colonies of the miners. While we were on our way back home, hell broke loose in the entire Kanawha Valley. We were caught in the midst of it. Armed miners from all parts of the state were on the march with the avowed purpose of destroying the hated death train. Terrible passions were aroused. There were hundreds of incidents. Vengeance stalked the green valleys of West Virginia. We passed through a district where, in a single engagement, 16 men had been killed. Or as the strikers put it, four men and 12 gun thugs. End quote. One resident of a company town at the time remembered not a week passed, but that tragedy touched some home. When a housewife chanced to glance through the window and see a group of miners bearing an improvised stretcher between them, she spread the alarm, and in a twinkling, women were on the porches, wiping hands on aprons, calling to one another. And before the grim faced bearers were halfway to the doctor's office, a multitude of folk trailed in their wake. Anxious, distraught. Women and children, uncertain of the fate of their loved ones, demanded to know the identity of the victim. When the dreaded news was revealed, the women gathered around their hysterical sister and offered comfort. Striking miners were not only evicted from their homes, as I said earlier, they were also banned from all company facilities and services, which were the only facilities and services in the whole region. And so when someone was sick or wounded, they went without a doctor. Women gave birth to babies in dirty tents without medical supervision. Six more companies of the National Guard were ordered into the area, and for the third time in eight months, the governor declared martial law. On February 13, Mother Jones was placed under arrest and charged in military court with inciting a riot. Literally for Reading from the Declaration of Independence to an assembly later on, conspiracy to commit murder was added to her docket. For her part, she refused to even recognize the legitimacy of a military tribunal held on US soil against US Citizens. So she wouldn't even make a plea or a statement. So without any due process whatsoever, the old lady was sentenced to 20 years in the state penitentiary. With all this turmoil, many people, really everybody on both sides, knew that the governor had lost control of the situation and that the only way it could be hoped to be getting gotten back was if they got new leadership. And fortunately, it was an election year. So Governor Glasscock was his name. Mother Jones liked to call him Governor Crystal Cock. He was a seemingly well intentioned and serious man, but he was in a situation that maybe nobody could have managed. And so he was defeated and he was replaced by a new governor who promised to end the mine war as his first priority. The new governor was sworn in on March 4, 1913, and that very day he traveled up to Paint Creek to see the situation for himself. This new guy, Governor Hatfield, Governor Henry Hatfield was his name. Very interesting guy, very colorful figure. He was the youngest governor in West Virginia history, at least at the time. And he was a nephew of Devil Ants Hatfield, who was the leader of one of the two clans involved in the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud. Governor Hatfield was born down on Mate Creek near the border in the heart of coal country in Mingo County. He was a tough man. He, you know, especially for a governor, he was known to fight. He beat the hell out of at least two men in his governor's office for disrespecting him. His branch of the Hatfield family had moved out of that area after the feud wound down, and he and some others in his family had gotten an education and become professionals. Obviously, he's the governor of this state, but he wasn't so distant from the lives of those miners. In fact, he still had cousins, distant cousins, not ones he was in any regular contact with. I mean, you understand these are big families like that. Families like the Hatfields are huge. They call them clans, and that fits just fine. Every other person it seems like in southern West Virginia back then carried the name of Hatfield or was married to or had an in law who did. And so he wasn't close to these cousins, but he knew they were down there mining coal. A younger cousin named Sid Hatfield will be along in this story very shortly. Well, this Governor Henry Hatfield was a doctor before he was governor. And so after he takes office, he decides he's going down to Kanawha county to see things for himself. Well, all of his advisors say, no, the hell you're not. Those miners are likely to murder you if you go down there. You're not going anywhere. Well, he's skeptical of that and he's not taking no for an answer. And this was not a man who lacked physical courage. And so rather than going down there with the governor's armed security detail, he went down there by himself, not as the governor, but as a doctor. Didn't tell anybody who he was. He brought his doctor's bag and everything and went down to the coal camps anonymously to see the people and provide some medical care to anyone who needed it. He found a lot of people who needed it. In fact, that's how Mother Jones actually met Governor Henry Hatfield. He was walking through a camp on the Kanawha river and saw a hut with a soldier marching smartly back and forth in front of it with his weapons. He goes up to the soldier, he tells him who he is. He says, what's in that hut? The soldier says, well, sir, Mother Jones is in the hut and I'm sent here to guard her. So the governor goes in and these are his words. I found her lying on a straw tick on the floor, carrying a temperature of 104, a very rapid respiration and a constant cough. She had pneumonia, so the governor orders her put on the next train to Charleston to go to a hospital. He says that he thought for sure she was going to die. But Mother Jones ain't so easy to kill, so she survived. He also saw the pitiful state of the thousands of miners living in those snow covered tent colonies. He saw and treated sick children and pregnant women. Now, he knew these kind of men well enough to have no illusions about the sort of trouble miners could get up to. And he knew that they'd played their part in this whole mess, but he'd seen enough. He ordered the release of dozens of strikers being held by the military authorities. Word spread throughout the camps who the doctor was who had been treating sick miners and their families. And that and the fact that he was born down on May Creek gave the governor some credibility with the miners. Governor Hatfield then sat the miners and the operators down and told them that this fight was over. And he instructed them both regarding the settlement his office had drawn up, and they were both going to accept it or they would face his wrath. The agreement contained some concessions to the miners. And so on May 1, the National Union agreed to the conditions, but they hadn't taken the Temperature of the miners in Kanawha county, and they rejected the agreement, prepared to renew the strike. So the governor gets word of that, and really the miners had called his bluff, because despite his threats, he knew that the eyes of the national media, not to mention now a U.S. senate investigative committee, were watching his every move. And he really did not want to start his administration off by calling in troops to renew the fighting in Kanawha County. So he tells the coal operators, hmm, not this time. I'm not coming. You guys are on your own out there, and there will not be another round of martial law. Well, I figure that was probably a bluff, too. I'm sure it was. If it got bad enough, I'm sure he'd have sent him in. But it was a good enough bluff that the mine operators finally blinked. And so finally, the miners of Paint and Cabin Creek were able to extract from the operators an agreement to all of their demands, including the most important one, to officially recognize the union in the coal fields at Paint and Cabin Creek. Now, the boys at Cabin Creek caused a little trouble for some time longer, but then they accepted the deal as well, and they agreed to go back to work. The miners had won. One year after the Paint and Cabin Creek strike had finally ended, by the way, the union had to transport many of those tents that had been used by the striking miners, many of them covered with patched up bullet holes, out to southern Colorado for use by striking miners and their families out there. Those tents wouldn't make the return trip. This was the incident where the Colorado National Guard, armed and paid for by Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron company and augmented by criminals and other dregs from Denver as well as mine guards who were wearing military uniforms, just massacred people at the Ludlow tent colony. Just attacked it and massacred these people, sprayed them with machine guns for hours, and then burning down the tent city as the people cowered in holes that they had dug in the ground under their tents for cover. Back in West Virginia, the Paint Creek, Cabin Creek strike had really changed the whole situation. It changed everything. There was no way for the miners or the operators in the state to go back to the way things had been. A new sense of solidarity and confident militancy emerged among the miners of Kanawha County. They had fought and won and had even won a better deal after the national union had capitulated on their behalf. Miners in the region had a new sense of independence because they not only stood up to the companies, but had defied the state government and even their own union leadership. And so local miners like Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney and Bill Blizzard, these guys now carried more water in southern West Virginia coal fields than anyone at the national union office. They came out of the experience convinced more than ever that violence was sometimes necessary and justified, and more importantly, that it could work. And that was a lesson that would bring them to the brink of disaster just a few years later. Now, down in the coal fields on the southern border with Kentucky, which at this point is the last remaining stronghold non union coal mining in the state, Some of the mine operators there took the lead in improving working conditions and adding amenities to the company towns where the miners lived. They improved the company homes, Some of them built playgrounds for the miners children. Many of the schools were improved, and the companies raised the pay of the teachers to try to bring in a better class of educators. Mine operators brought in welfare workers to instruct the miners wives in home management and cooking and gardening and other things. They built recreational facilities to give to the miners, to give them someplace other than the saloon to spend their off hours. David Corbin writes, quote, these were good faith attempts to regain the respect and loyalty of the miners. Is it not true a coal operator asked that too many coal operators treat their employees as belonging to what they term the mining class? The operator exhorted, because their occupation is different does not make them worthy of less consideration. It places a larger responsibility on those possessed of greater advantages. The new order was not designed to eliminate class differences, but to make them acceptable to the miners. Kinder and more benevolent. Indeed, paternalistic concern on the part of the operator was essential. Old creeds and old faiths are being discarded. They do not conform with new experiences. A company pamphlet to its store clerks read as it advised a better consideration of the needs and requirements of its miners. The trouble in the past, the handout explained, was a failure of cooperation where it should have had it, Instructing the store clerks to give better service to the miners. The pamphlet announced that the company was seeking new ends by new methods based upon broader, more altruistic foundations. These companies claimed that the improvements they were making made it so that the miners actually had access to better homes and better facilities, better infrastructure than they ever could have otherwise afforded themselves. And that actually might have been true in some of the company towns, but it was still a company town. One mine operator suggested to his fellow owners that it might be advantageous to allow the miners to own their homes. When a miner has something he can call his own, something he can improve, then he's going to appreciate his job more and will take better care of it. Indeed, mining companies had. They lost a tremendous amount of money on company housing. They charged rent, but they lost a ton of money on it. The operators in just one southern West Virginia county lost $422,000 on company housing in just a three year period. And that's in their money. That's a lot of money. Allowing the miners to own their homes, it would make them more loyal to the company, since it would be more difficult to just pack up and move to the next coal field for slightly better pay. But it would also take the maintenance costs of the homes off the company's books. And so it made all the economic sense in the world. But it was a step too far for the operators and so the proposal was quickly dismissed. There were limits to how much control they were going to give up. Because if the operators strategy for stopping the spread of unionism involved carrots, it involves sticks as well. They were extremely paranoid. They really believed that there was this great conspiracy between the United Mine Workers of America, the labor union and all the big out of state mining companies. There was a grand conspiracy between the two to destroy and seize control of the coal industry in West Virginia. That's what they thought. They said in public and private statements that they thought most of the miners were clueless and basically okay. But they were prey to these socialistic and anarchist radicals who only wanted to destroy and overturn everything. So every time there was an accident, anytime equipment was damaged, the operators assumed it was sabotage. They made the case that if the UMWA was able to organize their coal fields, bringing virtually all coal production in the United States under union influence, that the union could then hold the entire country hostage, could grab 110 million people in the United States by the throat. At the same time they were making improvements to company towns, they were also turning them into police states. They hired thousands of mine guards who patrolled the towns on foot and horseback, armed with shotguns, rifles, pistols, blackjacks, clubs. Some towns were surrounded with razor wire and sentries were placed to control who came in and out. Mounted Gatling guns became a common sight, installed on rooftops at the first rumor of unrest. Many of these mine guards specialized as going undercover company spies. These men had worked and lived alongside the miners, gaining their trust and reporting on their words and activities to the company. Any miner who was heard advocating for the union or even complaining about pay or conditions in the camp was immediately fired and evicted and often roughed up on his way out. Miners who gathered in Groups of three or more were broken up. Unless they were at some company approved facility like a church or a movie theater, their homes continued to be subject to unscheduled searches. Their mail was monitored at the company post office. In addition to deciding who could go in and out of southern West Virginia, the companies decided still which book, books and other reading materials the miners could have. They banned any literature that, that they didn't approve. Like I said, carrots and sticks. Well, everything had changed for the miners as well. The families of Kanawha county had been through hell and back and they had stuck together and they had won. It was this profoundly unifying experience. In the company town, there were two, always two identifiable classes of people. There were the miners and the company men, which included all the store clerks and the bookkeepers and the doctors, the preachers and the teachers and all the rest. What that meant was that all of the people who in a regular town usually would have been able to serve as leaders and figures of respect in communities, you know, the doctor, the preacher, they were all understood to be company men and so they couldn't be leaders in the community. They did their jobs, but no minor looked to them as a figure worthy of special consideration. It also meant that the usual avenues for coming together as a community, especially the church, were not available for that purpose because they were all on the company payroll. Miners knew that ministers and teachers and doctors and even the saloon keepers had as part of their job description to report on them to the company. There was only one meaningful activity to bring them together on their own terms, and that was their solidarity in organizing and working as coal miners. One UMWA district leader said in a speech that the church has had its place, its natural place in our lives. Our various fraternal societies have had their place. But after all, the one organization that has done more for us than all the others combined, I say to you, is the union movement. The trade union movement is our very life. Because what trade union movement does for us through its strength, power and influence determines the kind of life that we and our wives and children are living in this country. The union not only determines what our material life shall be, but it determines to a large degree our spiritual life as well. The trade union movement gives us that existence that allows us to love our neighbor and worship God as we should. Now, with Irishmen and Slavs and Hungarians and Italians and southern blacks and more all mashed up with the local West Virginian miners, there were obviously as many religious denominations as there were people out in the fields. The Company usually only built one church and it was always the denomination of the operator himself. Corbyn writes. Gone were the circuit riding ministers and campfire revival meetings that native mountaineers had known. Gone were the prestige and independence of the black church and the black minister that the southern migrant black miners had enjoyed. And gone were the power and prestige of the mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church that the European immigrants had known. In their stead stood the company sponsored and controlled preacher. The company built and controlled clergy, all operating within the confines of the company controlled town. One of the features of the West Virginia coal mines over the years was, was that the miners moved around a lot. They would work one field for a while and then they would hear that a nearby field was short on men and paying a little more. So they'd pack up and go over there for a while, from county to county, hill to hill, valley to valley, they would move around a lot like this. And since different company towns had different churches, many miners would have had occasion to attend church in six, maybe 10 or more denominations over the course of his life. Sometimes even miners who stayed put had their denomination unexpectedly switched up on them when the coal mine changed ownership. So while there was some sectarian tension in the early days when operators were importing thousands of new people from all over the place to populate the hills, before long that was all washed away by the ecumenical nature of the miner's life. The Irish Catholic and the English Anglican both had to attend the Baptist church and are both preached at by a company minister. So they didn't see much use in fighting over who was right. This same spirit extended to racial and ethnic tensions. Of course, no place is perfect in that respect. But the coal fields of southern West Virginia were not only some of the most diverse, but but also some of the most tolerant places you were likely to find anywhere in the country in those days. As Corbin said, the blacks in another community, well, they would have attended a black church in the black part of town where a black minister would preach the gospel in a manner that is intended for a black audience. Their children would go to black schools, and the black adults would socialize with other black people. Well, this was not possible in the company town. To the operators, a miner was a minor. They came and went, occupying and vacating the company houses and facilities and then moving on, maybe coming back sometime in the future. But a miner was a minor, so there was no sense in building separate areas for different groups of people. Black and white usually lived right next to each other in identical houses. They ate identical food. They went to the same church, their kids went to the same schools, they socialized at the same saloons or recreational centers, and they bitched about the same mine operators. In the few towns where a separate area was built for black miners, everything was the same quality as the rest of the town. And very often the black section would be half occupied with white miners with nowhere else to put them, or else the black section would overflow and there'd be black families living over in the white section. So nobody really thought much of it, especially after a while, because the black miners saw that they and their ancestors had been through everything in the South. But here in West Virginia, the white miner was worked and abused and cheated and harassed and threatened just like he was. And the white miners saw that when the chips were down, the black miner held the line with him against the white operators and their white mine guards. The same went for the various European ethnicities. This was totally contrary to the intentions of the mine operators themselves. One mine operator told a journalist that they'd purposely hired all different kinds of miners. Americans, Dagos, Slavs, niggers, Hungarians and Poles. They're pretty well mixed, and you bet your life we try to keep them mixed. As long as you've got them mixed, they cannot talk to one another so well, and it keeps them out of mischief. You can control them better when you got them mixed. The thing is, it might be true for a while, but only for a while. See, the operators were worried that if they didn't mix the miners by race and ethnicity, that people of the same type would be able to come together and organize. But if they'd kept them separate, that might have happened, but the problem would have been smaller scale, maybe more containable. Oh, the Polish miners are starting to organize over there. No problem. Tell the Hungarian miners that the Poles are causing problems and get them fighting with each other. Other. Then get rid of the Poles. The black miners are organizing over here. Tell the white miners that the Negroes think they're just as good as any white man and let nature take its course. But that didn't work. When all the races were mixed together over time, people stopped identifying themselves by race or religion, which would have kept the workers chopped up into manageable groups and instead began to identify themselves as coal miners. It was the only identity that mattered. It was their class, not their religion, not their race or ethnicity that determined their lot in life, determined how they were treated, where they were, everything they knew. They could expect no solidarity from people of their own race. If Those people were part of the ownership class. They knew they could only rely on other miners, miners of all races and creeds. They drank together, they socialized together, they fought together, they argued together, they sang the same union songs together. And over time, they developed a real spirit of brotherhood. The miners being alienated from the people and the institutions that might have provided leadership or solidarity on other people's terms. They generated their own leaders from among their own number. And because the culture of the mountains was what it was, they followed those men who had put the most on the line and showed the most courage and competence in the fight. Local men like Frank Keeney and Bill Blizzard, and men like Sid Hatfield. Sid Hatfield was born in 1893 in the wilderness on the West Virginia Kentucky border. Just two years before he was born, his family, the Hatfields, had been involved in that most famous example of feud violence in American history, with the McCoys. Those are the final days of old Appalachia, when the leader of the Hatfield clan, Devil Ants Hatfield, finally had enough of the bounty hunters and the Kentucky posse that were always coming after him and he sold his 5,000 acres of timberland to a corporation and moved his family up out of the area. But not all the Hatfields left. And there along the Tug river in a county called Mingo, which didn't actually exist earlier in the story. It's part of Logan county, but it's been split off now. We got Mingo County. There on the border was where Sid Hatfield grew up. The first coal mine opened around the time Sid was born and he watched the industry grow up and his home transform. He grew into a teenager. He learned to read in a one room schoolhouse. But by the time he came of age, there was only one path available to anyone who didn't want to leave the region. And so, along with everybody he knew, Sid Hatfield went to work in the mines with the other men. He rode coal cars on his belly deep into the mountain, worked all day on his hands and knees in three foot shafts, tapping support posts into place, laying new rail for the mine cars as they went deeper and deeper into the earth, drilling holes with hand operated augers into the walls and then placing dynamite that blasted their way to the next stop. They shoved the coal into cars that rode out on the rails to dump their cargo into the tipple. They went into the hole when it was still dark in the morning, they ate their lunch in the dark and they crawled back out with black faces and sooty lungs when it was dark in the evening. And they did that six days a week. Sid was a young man in 1912 when Paint Creek and Cabin Creek exploded in violence just three counties to the northeast of where he lived. And he heard, like everyone heard that the miners in Kanawha had won their fight for the union. The police state conditions I was describing just a few minutes ago in these southern West Virginia counties that were still not unionized after Paint Creek and didn't intend to be right here in the Tug Valley, Sid Hatfield's home. It was right in the heart of that. Sid was a little guy, wiry though, maybe £150. He had short hair and big old jug handle ears. And he was one of those guys who smiled and laughed very easily with his whole face and body he would just burst out laughing double over. He's got gold teeth and they're flashing out for everybody to see. Sid gained a good reputation as a hard working miner and also as a reliable friend. He, he made friends and he kept them, they said. Eventually he was promoted to work as a blacksmith and so he was able to come out of the mines into the fresh air. But as Lon Savage writes, he never forgot the underground miners or that he was one of them. When Sid was a young man, he saw one of his friends killed in the mines and then the man's wife and children put out of their home by the company without aid or compensation. And that's the kind of thing that radicalizes a young man. Savage continues. From high on the Kentucky mountaintop, Sid could look across the Tug to Matewan on the West Virginia side. Matewan was a town of 800 people. A block of businesses, a main street lined by maples with whitewashed trunks, big wooden houses behind the maples, miners cabins along Mate Creek and the railroad, a high rock cliff behind it all. There were a depot, a bank, a company store, a hotel, a hardware, two drug stores and the Dew Drop Inn. There was also Testerman's Jewelry run by the town's Natalie dressed mayor and his attractive young wife, offering musical instruments, tobacco, patent medicine, eyeglasses and ice cream from a marble top soda fountain, as well as jewelry, Pool rooms, saloons and prostitutes prospered from the miners trade. Moonshine shooting and fighting abounded. Corruption was expected and votes were bought and sold. Coal operators in the area paid deputy sheriffs and private detectives to enforce the laws they liked. Company spies circulated secretly among the miners to learn of any union activity. And most people believed public officials took graft from gamblers and prostitutes. It was a frontier town as wild as the West. Matewan Some of the town's leading citizens once said was the worst governed town in the state. Sid liked it. He played pool, poker and slot machines, chewed smoke, drank at the Blue Goose Saloon and chased the women. He fought often and he beat one opponent so badly that they had to hospitalize the man. He shot guns along the riverbank. And they still say in Mingo that Sid could throw a potato in the air, draw his pistol and split it open. After he became famous, he told a group of congressmen, he once had a little shooting match with a fellow by the name of Wilson in the Auburn mines. Wilson was the mine foreman. Sid didn't finish the story except to say he was arrested, tried and found clear. These were the qualities that one respect in Matewan. And they caught the eye not only of Mingo's miners. CC Testerman, the mayor, appointed Sid Hatfield as the town's first chief of police. End quote. See, Matewan was a bona fide incorporated town. It was not a company town. It was a real town. It had a mayor, not a manager or a supervisor. And it had a police department, not mine guards patrolling the place. There was nothing the operators could do about that except to try to bribe or otherwise compromise the people in charge. There was a town up the way near Cabin Creek that was like that, a place called Eskdale. This was an incorporated town right in the middle of land owned on all sides by the coal companies. And the miners could hold rallies and mass meetings there, organize their union there. There's nothing the coal companies could do about that. The miners voted in a union friendly mayor up there in Eskdale. And he was so hated by the operators that he couldn't even leave town. Since every way out was company property. He was literally imprisoned in that town. On Sid Hatfield, the miners had a police chief and Matewan that they could call their own. He understood them. He was one of them. He still thought of himself as one of them. And he did things in a way that they could appreciate. When guys were fighting, he'd pull them apart and send them on their way. When they were too drunk, he'd bring them home and he would openly take their side. He even got him in trouble himself in the winter of 1919 for possessing illegal whiskey and for fighting. But that just endeared him to the miners more. And so Testerman kept his popular police chief on the job. Before long, Sid Hatfield's popularity was such that he decided to declare as a candidate for constable of the whole Matewan district. It was just at that time that the United Mine Workers began a concerted effort to finally bring the union to Mingo county. World War I had provided a brief respite from the tension between the miners and the mine operations. Coal was needed more than ever during the war, not only to fuel the US Effort once we got involved, but to supply the entente powers before that. The US Navy still ran on coal and needed the cleanest, purest coal possible for its ships. And that coal was to be found in West Virginia. The quality of West Virginia's coal was the major reason that the government built our largest Navy base nearby there in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1917. The miners could have used this opportunity to press their demands. There's never a better opportunity to do it. The federal government would almost certainly get involved, and the coal operators would have no choice but to negotiate with them. They could have crippled the military effort. They could have forced the nationalization of the mines if they had decided to strike in 1918, but they didn't. Word went out from the national union and from Frank Keeney personally in southern West Virginia that there would be no strikes and no labor unrest for the duration of the war. Coal miners were exempted from military service because they were doing a job that was so central to the war effort. But many of them volunteered anyway. So many of the miners had friends or brothers or cousins over there in France. And before you think the coal miners got off easy avoiding the war, I should tell you that during those years, coal miners in West Virginia experienced a higher casualty rate on a man for man basis than the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. I know that sounds crazy, but I've seen it in multiple sources when union leaders gave speeches. It was to encourage the miners to do their duty to the country, to dig as much coal as possible, make sure it was cleaner and freer of impurities and dirt than it ever was before. Although the coal companies were reaping record profits shipping coal out to Europe and supplying the US Military, many of them used the excuse that the government had put a ceiling on the price to justify cutting miners wages. But even still, the miners did not go on strike. These men had their problems with the coal barons. They had their problems with the county sheriffs and the state legislatures and their governors. But they were American patriots to the core. But now the war was over, and for years the miners had been inundated with government propaganda telling them that they were serving their country every day when they went to work in the most important way in the most critical industry. They've been told, as all the American people had been told that their service and their sacrifices, not to mention the killing and dying, were necessary to end tyranny and make the world safe for democracy. That violence was sometimes necessary to end tyranny and free people. The irony was not lost on them when they came back to the dreary and oppressive life of a coal miner in a company town. And so they sent men from unionized districts down to Mingo county to get them organized. Frank Keeney, who by this point was the Umwa District 17 President, he comes down, pistol on his hip, to supervise the operation. Billy Blizzard's another one. The union local president gave speeches to the miners in pouring rain. Nobody went anywhere. It was a real moment. You had men of all races and ethnicities coming together as miners. In Mingo county in 1920, there was one gathering where 500 miners prayed and sang songs together. And then a black miner stands up. This is mostly a white crowd. He says, if I wouldn't be a union man, I'd go home and ask my wife to chain me in the yard with the dog. And everybody, white, black, immigrant, didn't matter, laughed together, slapped him on the back. They were miners. Mother Jones came in and gave a speech In Matewan, about 100 yards from the Kentucky border. There, Frank Keeney had warned the operators that in their present temper, the Mingo miners are not to be fooled with. They will oppose to the last any use of private armies enlisted by the coal companies. The operators, of course, paid no attention to that, and they just imported more and more Baldwin Felt's guards. And so the miners begin going on strike. Many of them left their company homes voluntarily, taking up with their families on land rented by the union and tents provided by the union. Within the early months in 1920, some 3,000 miners in the Tug Valley had signed up for the United Mine Workers of America. They're making massive headway, but the operators were going to fight back with everything they had. Figuring Sid for an impulsive hillbilly, the Baldwin Felts agency tried to bribe Sid Hatfield, offered him $300 a month to work for them, which was a hell of a lot of money for a poor kid from the Tug Valley back then, you know, that's a. There's a hell of a lot of people today who would call that a pretty helpful dose of money in their lives. Well, Sid told him to get bent. Then they tried to pay him just to let them install a machine gun on the roof of a building in Matewan. He told them again to back off, and they better get out of town. So the operators started cracking down on the union organizing and the miners strike began to pick up. And like clockwork, Baldwin Felt's guards were everywhere, intimidating working miners and driving the striking ones out of their homes. One wet and Cloudy Day in May 1920, 13 Baldwin Felts men, including two brothers of Tom Felt, the president of the company, came into Matewan on a train. Most of them were big men with a very serious look, in dark suits and carrying cases that everyone who saw them knew contained guns. They get off the train and they go to Matewan's hotel for a quick lunch. And then as soon as they arrive, they climbed into three cars and headed up along Mate Creek to accompany town, where there were several striking miners who were still living in their company homes. And the people in town knew exactly what that meant. Before long, they got confirmation. Word starts coming back that the detectives have already kicked one family out into the rain. They've got plans, a whole list for many more. And so the men in the town decided they were not going to let this happen. And so they headed back to their homes and got their guns. Sid Hatfield was in town, and he was more angry than any of them. He goes to the mayor and tells him what's going on. And together they go up to the side of the houses to go talk to Al Felts, one of the brothers directing these evictions. When they get there, they see a husband and a wife standing in the road in the rain. The wife had been washing clothes out back when they came in holding guns and told her to get out. So she asked, can I finish my laundry and wait until my husband gets back? But they said, no, get out. They start dumping her furniture outside in the dirt. Her husband arrived just as Sid and Mayor Testerman were getting there. And so Sid marches up to the leader, Al Felts. He demands to know, what's your legal authority for making these evictions? Felt tells him, first of all, this is not within Mate 1 city limits, so it's not your jurisdiction. And second, anyway, sure, I've checked with the courts. I got all the authority in the world. So Sid says, well, let me see it. And Al just blows him off. He says, go back to Mate one and make some calls and figure it out yourself. Well, Sid's getting pretty heated by this point. So the mayor comes in and intervenes, pulls him back from the escalating situation, and they go back to town with a big crowd of miners following behind them. When they get there, they make some calls and they find out that in fact, the Baldwin Felt guys were not acting under any legal authority whatsoever. And so Sid announces with great satisfaction that this gives him the power to arrest them for unlawfully throwing people out of their homes. And so he asked the deputy sheriff over the phone to write up and send arrest warrant warrants for the guards. The deputy said they'd be on the next train to Mate 1 that afternoon. Somewhere in the conversation, Sid is supposed to have said that he'd like to kill the Baldwin Felts men, which may have been a figure of speech at the time he made it, but which would acquire importance as the day proceeded. Just to be sure, Sid asked the mayor to write up his own arrest warrants on the authority of the town, so that for the time being, until the county warrants arrived, he could hold the men for illegally brandishing firearms within town limits. And so the mayor did that. By now, everybody had heard what's going on. Miners were out in the streets, most of them carrying. The rain started to pick up and more stories started trickling in of families with all their belongings set out in the weather. There was one story of a pregnant woman, a sick child and a baby in its crib set out in the rain with nowhere to go. And so by the time the detectives rolled back into town, just after 4:00, the miners were in an excitable mood. The guards went back to the hotel for dinner, and afterward they came out into the street to catch the 5 o'clock train. One with the county warrants coming in. Well, Sid Hatfield goes and steps directly to Alphelds, the leader of the men. Both of them had holstered pistols. This is a scene straight out of an Old west movie. The champion of the miners standing nose to nose with the chief of the Baldwin Felts detectives. They're outside a hardware store and the tension was thick as armed miners are peeking through the doors and windows to see what's going to happen here. Nobody knows exactly, exactly what's going to happen. And so Sid, right now felt his face, tells him, I've got warrants to arrest you all. And Al Felts just shrugs and says, I'll return the compliment. So happens I've got a warrant to arrest you. And so one of the miners runs to fetch the mayor, saying, hey, they've got Sid under arrest. And so the mayor comes to the scene, he says, let me see the warrant you supposedly got. And so he's handed a piece of paper and he takes a look at it and he says, this is bug bogus. He Goes to throw it back. And just then, and the people still argue over who started it, shots rang out and the mayor went down, shot in the belly. Sid drew pistols and fired back. And he shot Alphelds, the brother of the Baldwin Felt's president, in the head, killing him. Then just gunfire was general up and down the street as the other detectives and the armed miners stationed about the square just opened up. And immediately the detectives realized, oh, no, they were outnumbered and outgunned. And so they started scattering for cover. One of them made it to the river, jumped in and escaped across into Kentucky. Two detectives who were brothers hopped a fence and ran inside a house, but inside there were miners, and then there was gunfire, and then they ran out bleeding. Both of them managed to make their way to the train station, where they hid until the next one pulled in and they got on board and they escaped. One of the guards, who used to be a police chief in Virginia, before signing on with Baldwin Felts, tried to run when the shooting started, but a miner with a rifle drew a bead on him and put him down. Lee Felts, the other Feltz brother who was there, he draws two guns, starts shooting when he sees his brother Al go down. While Miner draws on him and empties his.32 toward Lee felt misses with every shot. So Lee Felts turns toward him and empties his pistol at the miner and. And he misses with all his shots. And then, just then, a man with a rifle took aim at Lee Felt, the youngest brother of the family and the second Felt's brother to die that day. The miner who had missed Felt with all those shots was not going to let his day end on a note like that. So he grabs one of Lee Felt his pistols, reloads it and runs to the bank, where he sees a wounded detective, another former Virginia police chief, limping for cover. And this miner, his name was Art Williams, he walks right up and executes that Baldwin Felts man on the spot. The Detective who was third in command behind the Felts brothers, a man named C.B. cunningham, was standing right next to Al Felts when the bullet went through his head. And so Cunningham had. This is a serious operator with a checkered past. He had been at the Ludlow massacre seven years back in Colorado, manning the machine gun that was raining the bullets down on helpless miners and their families when Felts got shot. Cunningham drew starts shooting into the hardware store where he could see several miners with guns. Sid and several others turned on him, and they took his life. By the time the gunfight Drew to a close seven of those 13, Baldwin Felt's men had been killed, along with two miners and Mayor Testerman. Five others had gunshot wounds. Mayor Testerman took some time to die, and with his dying breaths he just kept repeating, why did they shoot me? I can't see why they shot me. Depending on who you talk to, even to this day, you'll hear it called either the Battle of Matewan or the Matewan Massacre. Tom Felt, the president of the agency whose brothers were now dead, he had no hesitation in calling it a massacre. When he heard what happened, he formed up a posse of heavily armed men and took the night train straight to Mingo County. Someone called ahead to Matewan to warn the men there. So Sid and the Mingo county sheriff deputize a hundred miners, make sure they all have guns, and prepare him to fight off this attack when it comes. When the train is bearing down on Mate one, the engineer, who apparently was a very wise man, wanted no part of what was about to happen. He just gunned the engine and tore right through town onto Williamson as Tom Felts and all his men were screaming and threatening him. Probably the right move. To the miners, the Battle of Matewan made Sid Hatfield a folk hero. Baldwin Felt's men had harassed and bullied and beaten and killed minors and their families for years. Stories of their atrocities were well known to minors all over the country, not just in West Virginia. And now Sid Hatfield, their popular leader, a police chief who had spent his youth down in the hole with the rest of them, had thrown down with the Felts brothers themselves and sent their detectives scurrying for their lives. The miners before would take potshots at them. They would hit and run, but when it came to a face to face confrontation, they would scatter. They would try to avoid that. Sid got right in their face and threw down and he won. There's always been conflicting accounts about who shot Mayor Testerman or why. Sid and the miners say that Al Felts shot the mare and that that's how the whole thing started, followed by Sid drawing his pistol and killing Al Felts. Tom Felt spread the story that it was actually Sid himself who shot the mayor, a story that Sid helped to get around a little bit when just a few weeks after the killing, he married the mayor's young widow. Tom Felt said that Sid had shot the mayor to get him out of the way and then shot his brothers in cold blood in a calculated ambush. Well, Sid and his supporters shot back that if he'd really wanted to kill the mayor, There were better ways to do it than starting a massive gunfight in broad daylight with 13 heavily armed. Baldwin felt detectives, in fact, Sid said, and other people backed him up on this. He and the mayor were very close and the mayor had asked him to take care of his wife should anything ever happen to him him. Six days after the fight at Matewan, in statewide elections, the effect of the incident on Sid's reputation was pretty clear because he carried all six precincts in his district and became the Democratic nominee for constable. The action in Matewan gave the union movement a burst of renewed energy. It didn't have anything to do directly with the union, but everybody was blessed. Buzzing about it, the UMWA announced that all the coal operations along the southern West Virginia border, east McDowell county had all been organized. All of them except for two. And those were next. Mother Jones, she's 85 years old. Now she comes storming back into town in full form, cursing and swearing about the mine owners and their pet politicians with all their usual wit and sarcasm on display, condemning and mocking the miners to go to Mon. That was one of her favorite tactics with the men. Quote, you have stood and seen yourself robbed of every ton of coal you mined. So much was taken out and professional murderers were hired to keep you in subjection. And you paid for it, damn you. You were not fit to live under the flag. You paid professional murderers with that money you were robbed of and you never said a word. You stood there like a lot of cowards robbed by the mine owners and you let him do it. And then you go about shaking your rotten head, not a thing inside. You call yourself Americans. Let me tell you, America need not feel proud of you. Well, the miners might have rioted and killed any man who said that to them, but from Mother Jones, they ate it up in Mate one. She met and spent time with Sid Hatfield and the two became friends. Miners swarmed to mass meetings in Mingo and Williamson. About 90% of Mingo county miners had taken the union oath by the end of June 1920. Frank Keeney said that was more than enough to justify a demand for official recognition by the operators. And so a resolution was made that all the miners would go on strike on July 1 unless the operators of the holdout districts agreed to negotiate. The operators were not about to do that, but instead doubled down on breaking the union movement. And so on July 1, 1920, the strike was really on. More Baldwin felt mine guards and operator funded deputy sheriffs were brought in to put an end to it. Within days, there were reports of skirmishes and gun battles between the miners and them. Workers in the non union mines were warned by the strikers not to go to work, told to come join the strike or they would not be safe from the consequences. Because there were miners who just didn't want to join the union. They perceived their wages as fair enough and had a positive relationship with management because there were some operators that were pretty solid and they saw no reason to invite the trouble or even to pay the union dues. Fair enough from the standpoint of the individual worker, but the union's position was that it had to be all or nothing. If any coal fields were left without a union, it would always undercut unionized fields and make the union's position in those fields untenable. Some non union miners received pay hikes or other benefits Every time union organizers came around on the condition that they refused to hear the union out. The union told them that those gains would be temporary because every individual miner is expendable. Sure, they raise your pay now, but what are you going to do when they claw that raise back? In six months, you won't be able to do a thing, because no miner can stand on equal terms with the owners. But the miners, the miners collectively as one, decide whether or not coal gets dug in this country. No individual miner has any effect whatsoever on that question. The goal was that anytime any coal mine operator in the country needed workers, he would have to negotiate not with individual men, but with the Mine Workers of America. Miners who resisted unionization were seen as a wedge that the companies could use to splinter and break up the whole movement. And so they were not looked on kindly very often by the miners who were trying to organize. And of course, scabs, as sympathetic as many of their stories were. And the miners were aware that most of the scabs were just poor schmucks looking for a job. But the miners viewed them like soldiers in the enemy trench. Not bad men, necessarily. And in more peaceful days they could have all been friends, like the French and German boys freezing a hundred yards from each other in Belgium. But there was a higher principle at stake. And if fate and history had arrayed those men among the forces brought to bear by the operators, then so be it. But as determined as they were to gain recognition of their union, the operators were equally determined to stop it. Corbyn writes, the Mingo county operators were not about to surrender to the institution that they hated and that they claimed would cause the downfall of the United States. They brought in trainloads of strikebreakers from the south and New York and Chicago to run the mines and imported more and more guards to protect their plants and the strikebreakers. Like their union brethren in Raleigh and Fayette counties, the Mingo county miners would not settle for a war of attrition. They were prepared to fight for their union and they too took the offensive to stop production. The Mingo county strike had now become the Mingo County War. The miners brought in and distributed guns. They attacked, beat and sometimes killed mine guards and strikebreakers at mines all over the non union zone. With so many Baldwin Felts guards and state police in the area, these attacks could not be haphazard. On several occasions, the striking miners placed material across the tracks of the mine cars. When the driver of the car stopped to remove the obstacle, the miners ambushed the strikebreakers. The striking miners also blocked and shot up trains that were importing potential strikebreakers into the county, sending the passengers fleeing back to New York. The miners also stopped production by destroying coal company property. The tipple at Rose Siding was blown up. The railroad tipple at Thacker was dynamited. The drum house at Ajax was dynamited and the head house gutted and the head house at War Eagle was dynamited. Fires of incendiary origin destroyed the head house of Stone Mountain Coal Company and the company store at Lynn. The striking miners also attacked the superintendents, foreman, plant managers and other company officials who attempted to keep these mines running. The striking miners of Mingo county aggressively and at times ruthlessly attacked anything or anyone standing between them and their union. Casually, a Mingo county miner wrote of the new means of responding to the activities of the mine guards. A thug was killed last week on the Mingo county line. He had just driven two union men out of the county. Our people want no trouble, but the thugs can sure get it if nothing else will do them. Neither did the striking miners tolerate the strike breaking activity of the state police who were sent into Mingo county to keep the mines from closing. They shot and killed at least three state policemen at Vulcan and Nolin. We are going to fight until the last ditch, declared Frank Keeney. There will be no abatement of effort and neither time nor money will be spared to protect the lawful and statutory rights of the mine workers in Mingo County. Those who are wondering whether they will be organized may rest assured that this means the organization of the coal miners of Mingo. Gun battles between striking miners in the mine guards and state police became frequent occurrences at Nolan in June 1920, at Freeborn in July and September, at Merrimac, in Chattaroy in November, to name only four. Several of the battles lasted hours and resulted in numerous deaths. End quote now from Lon Savage. Bullets peppered down on working non union miners at the Borderland mine near Williamson. 100 miners opened fire on non union miners at Freeburn, Kentucky, shooting from the West Virginia mountains across the Tug Valley. An operator of the mine's cable cars fell wounded and women and children ran screaming from the camp. Kentucky's governor dispatched 200 National Guardsmen to the Kentucky side of the river and West Virginia has ordered state police back into the back Domingo. Violence only increased. On August 4, riflemen shot down from the West Virginia mountains at Kentucky guardsmen opposite mate one. A horse was shot out from under one guardsman and a bullet ripped through another's campaign hat. When strikers attacked at Freeburn again, Kentucky guardsmen drove them back with machine gun fire. Freeburn was attacked a third time. A gun battle broke out at Mohawk. A rail car was torpedoed. Deputies beat a black striker with clubs and dumped him semi conscious from an automobile. A baseball game turned into a free for all between union and non union sympathizers. Everybody bought guns. Coal operators ordered rifles and machine guns as part of their standard mine equipment. State police rushed from one outbreak to another. Now back to Corbyn. The destruction of company property in the guerrilla warfare involved more than the miners hatred, the mine guards and their vindictiveness toward the coal companies. There was a purpose to their to close the non union mines. The coal company at Mohawk, for example, attempted to continue operations with imported strikebreakers. The UMWA sent an organizer into the town to talk to those miners. He was run out of town by the company's mine guard. A second organizer was sent in and he was accompanied out of town by the mine superintendent, a mine guard, a deputy sheriff and three state policemen. The strikers tried a third time to organize the miners and to persuade the company to cease operations. Several hundred of them then gathered in the hills surrounding Mohawk and shot down into the town until the company officials agreed to close the mines. A group of armed miners intercepted a patrol of deputy sheriffs and state police under the command of a man named Captain Brad. Real hot head didn't get violent, but the miners disarmed them and humiliated them and then chased him off. And Captain Bracus took the whole matter very personally and his vendetta will come back to haunt us very soon. The miners overwhelmed the mine guards, they overwhelmed the state police and they gained control of most of Mingo County. Now, rather than mine guards patrolling the streets of Company towns. It was the miners who were posting sentries to watch out for scabs or for Baldwin Felt's men. They controlled the streets. When the telephone company wanted to repair downed telephone lines, they had to request permission from the miners to do it. Tom Felt, president of Baldwin Felt. He knew he had to strike back and he had to strike back hard or else risk his agency losing any hold they had whatsoever in the West Virginia coal fields. He decided to strike directly at the head of the snake. Or at least that was the way he saw it. He had personal reasons obviously for hating Sid Hatfield, who had killed his two brothers in the Mate 1 gunfight. He and the operators used their influence to secure murder indictments on Sid. And 22 of the miter miner is purported to have been with him that day in Matewan. They instantly all became local celebrities to the point that 500 people came to try to get into the overflowing Williamson courthouse to see their arraignment. The people of Matewan came together and paid the bail for every single one of them. And soon enough, Sid was back walking the streets of Matewan, pistols on his hip, police chief badge on his chest. But when the hotel owner who had fed the Baldwin Felts guards on the day of the gunfight, this is a man who was known to oppose the union and be sympathetic to the guards. Cause when he was shot and killed, Sid was blamed for that too. He had witnesses backing an alibi that put him somewhere else, but he was indicted for that murder. Behind the scenes, Tom Felt and the operators were doing everything they could to make sure that Sid's fate was sealed before his trial even started. Finally admitting that the state's forces were completely overmatched by the enraged miners of Mingo county, the governor, now a man by the name of John Cornwell, called Washington D.C. and asked for federal troops. In late August, as the leaves were beginning to turn, federal troops came in and occupied Mingo County. Now the miners were tough and resourceful and they were able to stand up to bullies. But they were no match for US soldiers. The ones that didn't get the word that daddy was in town and tried to continue their attacks were dealt with quickly by trained men using well honed infantry tactics. Throughout the fall, the operators in Baldwin Felts hung back and watched the soldiers do their work. Several mines reopened under the protection of federal troops. The operators were content to wait, knowing that one of their best weapons would be deployed in a few months. That weapon was the mountain winter miners. Wives and children were living with them in the freezing tent cities. Those who got sick or those who had wives scheduled to give birth would have to do so without medical care. The union had to provide for all the people well enough to keep them going, and that cost a lot of money. In the past, the winter had broken probably more strikes than a thousand Baldwinfeld's guards. As it began to get cold and things seemed to calm down, the federal troops were pulled out. But fighting resumed almost immediately as miners went on the offensive against the working mines and the strikebreakers brought into work the them. On November 27, the governor declares Mingo county to be in a state of insurrection and places the entire county under the dictatorship of the commanding General of the 5th Corps. When the soldiers arrived again, many of them were shocked to see the desperate state of the striking miners. Savage writes, quote, rain, snow and wind swept across the Appalachian range, tearing the last leaves from the hardwoods and exposing the rocks and brown compost to the mountains. In the tent colonies, miners built fireplaces of rock and mortar, and many floored their tents. Families of five lived on $10 a week. Barefoot children played in the snow. Women gave birth in tents. Children died in the tents. In a widely published story, one reporter told of following a barefoot child through the snow to a tent near Matewan. And now he's quoting the article. Inside, on a cot improvised of bricks and sand, a woman was writhing in pain. By her side sat a skeleton like man, coughing desperately. On the bare, frozen ground, these barefoot children sat huddled together, holding hands over a miserable little wood fire. The tent sagged and strained under the whipping of the wind. A New York Times reporter who was there on scene saw the degradation on the faces of the children living in a tent colony near Williamson. He had brought several pounds of candy to distribute to the children, and they accepted it and they thanked him. But he noted that there was no laughing or squeals of delight, only the downcast faces of children who were grateful for the calories. Some of them asked about Santa Claus. One boy said his brother was too sick to come get his candy. And so the reporter and the crowd of children went to the tent where he was resting. And when he raised his hand up to get a piece, Lon Savage writes that the others nearly buried the little boy in candy. One thing that I suppose is worth mentioning, because I probably have not emphasized it enough, is that the coal operators were not monolithic. They were not uniform in their ruthlessness. They were all opposed to the union, but they weren't all the same. When the weather got so bad, that people began to die. One mine owner opened up his empty houses to let the strikers families live in them until the weather moderated. But others went far in the other direction. One of them forced a family out of their home on Christmas Eve. Media reports made the story widely known around the country. And other unions as well as charity groups and many regular people on their own volition, started shipping food and supplies to Mingo County. Seeing American families in this kind of desperation, other Americans stepped up on their own to help them. As Christmas approached, a train came in with 2,000 hams, followed by loads of candy and nuts and fruit and toys for the children sent by the people of America. With the soldiers back in town, violence ceased almost immediately. Many of the miners and their families at this time were actually welcoming the federal troops when they came in this time they actually staged a little parade for them or treated the soldiers like they were on a parade rather. They all lined up on the road the soldiers were coming in on and they passed out little American flags and they had all the kids waving those. And everybody was dressed in their Sunday clothes, waving and singing songs for the soldiers to welcome them in. They knew that the county sheriff and the state police and the West Virginia state government was beholden to the coal operators. They knew they couldn't hope for fair treatment from them. But they still believed that the nation at large and the federal government to which they were all loyal, for which many of them had fought in the trenches of France in 1918, that when the federal government saw their situation and saw that they were only asking for the basic right of freedom of association to gather and organize themselves and to negotiate with their employer with a collective voice that they would be treated fairly by the US Government. The soldiers themselves did their part to justify the miners hope. An army truck went up into the hills and came back with a big Christmas tree which was set up in Williamson and covered with colored lights. And the union even circulated a document around Christmas time instructing the miners to keep within the law. The soldiers put out Christmas trees at their encampments. And on Christmas night, the martial law injunction against large assemblies was temporarily suspended. And in a scene that kind of calls up memories of the Christmas truce in 1914, you had strikers, non union miners, soldiers and local Williamson citizens all gathered around the big tree to sing Christmas carols together. But the amity was short lived. In January, the trial of Sid Hatfield and his friends began. Tom Felt had hired seven high powered lawyers to assist the prosecution to make sure that Sid Hatfield was convicted and executed. Felt wanted nothing to do with a prison sentence. He wanted Sid Hatfield dead, one of the lawyers that he hired to assist the prosecution. A practice which even by itself seems pretty inappropriate, I think. You know, imagine you're accused of a crime and the wealthy brother of the alleged victim hires a bunch of lawyers to go to work for the prosecution. Well, one of those lawyers he hired was named James Dameron, who had been a judge until the previous August, when he handed down the indictments on Sid and the others and then immediately resigned his position and went to work prosecuting them for Tom Felt. It seemed like everybody in West Virginia showed up to watch that trial. The miners came in wearing their working overalls or corduroys, all of them except for Sid, who was marked off as the group's leader by a brown suit fit for a Matewan police chief now seeking higher office. Not long into the trial, there was an uproar when it was discovered that Sid had two guns on him, and he said that he'd been threatened with assassination, but he willingly surrendered his weapons. In the courtroom, Sid was loose, smiling, hamming it up for reporters. When he was surrounded by a dozen of them looking for a quote. He said, I reckon you thought I had horns. They got a kick out of that. And headlines went out calling him smiling Sid and the boy leader of the mountains. Since he looked younger than his 28 years, he's only a 28 year old man. Asked about the Mate 1 gunfight by a reporter from Philly, Sid told him it was a life or death matter. He did only what everybody would have done in the circumstances. The judge surprised everyone and revoked bail for the whole group. And so after the day was done, they were moved to the jail. But while the judge might have been more sympathetic with the owners, the men closer to the ground favored the minors, and that included the jailer. The jailer's wife invited Sid's wife to stay in their house during the trial. The jailer gave the miners their own wing and left their cell doors unlocked so that they could circulate and socialize with each other when their wives and girlfriends and other relatives were allowed to come visit them. They turned it into a full fledged party right there in the jail. While everyone was singing and dancing inside, Sid went to the window and shouted out to a gaggle of reporters that this wasn't jail, it's the Matewan Hotel. That was a tough task, finding a jury that could even pretend to be impartial, not least because it was fine. Hard to find people who weren't related in one way or another to any of the 22 defendants. The charges on two of them were dropped almost as soon as the trial began, and both of them were super upset about it. They demanded to stand trial with their friends, and they stormed out when the judge told them that it wasn't up for discussion. Well, the lawyers for the minors knew their audience in both the jury and the gallery, and they played the songs that they knew those people wanted to hear. They were asking Baldwin Felt's witnesses how many women, children, and sick people they'd evicted from their homes that day. Day. As it became clear that the trial was going pretty well for the defendants, the prosecution's hired lawyers tried a different strategy. Isaac Brewer, one of the miners who had been standing behind Sid Hatfield when the shooting started, had taken one in the chest and had his gun shot out of his hand, and he was able to make his way to safety, and he survived to be indicted and tried with the rest of them. The operator's men got word to the defendants that they thought might be vulnerable to compromise, that they would pay $1,000 to anyone who switched sides and witnessed. For the prosecution, Brewer was initially rock solid, but a Baldwin Felt spy set up in Mate 1. As the owner of a restaurant where the miners regularly gathered, he worked Brewer over for months. This is a very skilled undercover operative, been working for a long time. He was telling them that Sid and the others were planning on framing him and putting the whole thing on him and that they were going to leave him hanging to get themselves out of trouble again. These labor spies were snakes, but they were good at their job. This man, his name was Charles Lively, at least we think that was his name. He gave so many different ones over the years, it could be hard to track. He made Brewer think he was his friend. Come into the restaurant, he'd feed him steaks and free liquor. As he whispered this poison into Brewer's ears, Lively later said that it was the toughest assignment in terms of difficulty that he that he ever had as an undercover agent. It took months. There were times when his prodding pushed Brewer to the point of rage, and he was close to giving Lively a beating one night. Lively told an interviewer later, one night, Brewer ate in my place, and I decided to turn him for good. I told him, it means your life or theirs. They're gonna swear you fired the first shot. Are you gonna swear you fired the first shot and be the goat? He got up and started to go out. I said, come into the kitchen. I got something nice I gave him a drink of White Lightning Moonshine whiskey and talked. I gave him another and kept talking. Finally he said, well, what do you want me to do? We had another drink. Then I said, get in touch with one of the state's lawyers and tell them you're ready to tell the straight of it. Those boys are going to sacrifice you. Go and save yourself. The next thing I knew, Isaac Brewer had turned state's witness. Well, the jury and the townspeople seemed skeptical of Brewer's story, though many of them were just outright hostile to him. And in any case, he couldn't say for certain that he'd seen who fired the initial bullet that had killed the mayor. That question was very quickly becoming the crux of the whole dispute. And so worried that things were really turning against him, Baldwin felt reluctantly, very reluctantly put their top labor spy, Charles Lively, on the stand to testify. They blew his cover. Among all the other ways you could describe him, one thing that Charles Lively was, was a murderer. He had killed a man in Colorado just before the Ludlow massacre there in cold blood. Or he was arrested and did time for it. And then he had worked as a spy and a strikebreaker for Baldwin Felts all over the country. Lively was transferred out to West Virginia when trouble looked like it was on the horizon, and he went to work in one of the mines to embed himself among the miners and start to gain their trust. He joined the union local at Stone Mountain, became one of its most active members. He was organizing meetings and recruiting members, giving speeches. Very often the speeches were laced with violent rhetoric. He was encouraging people to go out and do violent things. He could work for the FBI today. Anyway, like I said, this guy was good at his job, and the miners really trusted him. They had no idea. Well, eventually he hatched another plan and Baldwin felt set him up in the east end of Matewan with a restaurant. Better yet, it was on the lower floor of a building that contained the offices of the United Mine Workers there. Well, Lively was already a popular figure with the miners, so the restaurant became a popular place for them to gather. The men would go there and speak freely. Sometimes he would catch bits of conversation from union men coming down the stairs. And every night, Charles Lively sent out coded reports to his superiors at Baldwin felt nobody, I mean nobody, had any idea Lively was a spy. So when the prosecution announced the addition of a surprise witness and Charles Lively walked into the room, the whole courtroom went into an uproar. Minors glared at him. They watched and listened to Lively give his testimony with murder in Their eyes. But the move turned out to be another misstep for the prosecution, and the defense knew exactly how to parry it. You know, nobody likes a sneak, nobody likes a liar, and nobody likes a snitch. And all of those things were part of Charles Lively's job description. Lively told the courtroom about conversations he said he'd heard which had the miners bragging about their role in the massacre. But in the end, it was just hearsay. Under cross examination, Lively, the sociopath, was so tone deaf to how he was coming across to regular people that he just made the defense's job easy. They asked him, so when you became a member of the union, did you not raise your hand and swear a solemn oath? He said he had. So the defense says, well, that oath didn't mean much to you, did it? So why would we believe that you value the oath you took today in this courtroom any more highly? Have you not already proven yourself willing to betray your oath as part of your obligation to the men who pay you? The same men who today are paying the state's lawyers? The defense smelled blood, pressed the advantage. He asked what he knew about the attempt by Baldwin felt to bribe Sid Hatfield. And the usually calm and collected Lively shifts in his seat. He says he said something about an offer. He turned down the offer, didn't he? That was the substance of it. Was anything else said on the subject? Well, he said something about being offered $1,000 in a monthly salary. And that got him. Charles Lively was an admitted liar and an oath breaker, while Sid Hatfield had turned down a $1,000 bribe rather than betray his friends or his job as police chief. Nothing Lively was gonna say after that was going to register with the jury. By the time of the closing statements, the defense was just strutting in front of the jury. They knew they'd won. They wanted to buy Sid Hatfield like they did Isaac Brewer and Charles Lively. If Hatfield could have been bought, he would have been in the place of Brewer and Lively today. But he could not be bought, and he stands trial for his life. I am proud to know that Matewan elected such unimpeachable men to office. Poor, perhaps, but men who will not sell their manhood. They tried not only to buy Sid Hatfield, but. But offered to pay $1,000 to bring a machine gun and to Matewan. And what for? To shoot down that little band of union men. The trial lasted 43 days, and by the time it came to a close, it was nearly springtime. The jury convened to discuss the fate of the men, but no Sooner had they closed the door to the deliberation room than one of them, a farmer who had ridden into town from his wilderness home on horseback, looks out the window into the distance. He says when this trial started, the mountains out there were green and bare. Now the trial was ending and the mountains were turning green and the dogwood and laurel were about to bloom. He says. He says he was prepared to sit there in that room until the mountains turned brown again and the dogwoods bloomed again before he would vote to convict a single Matewan boy. There was no point in arguing it if anybody had wanted to. So the jury quickly returned a verdict of not guilty on all the men. People in the courtroom signaled to the people in the lobby, and the people in the lobby informed the assembled crowd outside, and a great cheer went up when the men returned on the 5 o'clock train into Matewan. The entire town turned out to welcome them back like war heroes. Charles Lively, the coward, did not go back to Matewan, even though his wife and children were still there. Later, his son, who did not retain a positive memory of his father, wrote that he had abandoned his family to whatever the outraged miners might have in store for them. He said his mother kept the children inside and pulled the curtains closed, fearing that there was going to be a knock on the door from the men that her husband had betrayed and tried to hang. When the knock finally came, she creeps to the door and she answers, and it's a bunch of union men standing out on the porch. This is all from her son. And they told her they had nothing to fear from them or anyone else. And they helped her get her things together and loaded onto a wagon and took her to a train and saw her off back to Bluefield, where Baldwin Felts was headquartered and where their father had fled. So Sid was free and back in Mate one among friends. But everybody knew that Tom Felt was not through with them and that he was a marked man. Sid even said so. He admitted they'd probably get him one day, sooner or later. He still had another murder charge ahead of him, the one for the hotel owner. And this time, Tom Felt was not going to leave anything to chance. One of the lawyers that he had hired to assist the prosecution also happened to be a state senator in West Virginia. And during the trial, he rushed through a bill that would allow the prosecution in criminal cases to draw a jury from outside the area. It's long been the practice to allow the defense to request a change of venue if they feel like the local community is too involved in a case to be impartial. But this was spinning that on its head. Now it would be the prosecution complaining that the local community wouldn't be impartial and demanding in flagrant violation of the right to be tried by one's peers. I'm no lawyer, that's how it looks to me, to get a jury that will be more likely to convict. In the meantime, the federal troops pulled out of Mingo again as springtime opened and again almost immediately. The fighting resumed on May 12 when half a dozen towns came under fire guards and the non union miners grabbed their guns and started firing back, and there were battles up and down the Tug Valley. The state police came in on a passenger train with sniper rifles, firing them from the train into the hills. Juan Savage writes quote that night families slept on floors, under beds, in cellars. In the shooting continued, lighted windows drew gunfire until one by one they blinked out at Matewan. Streetlights were extinguished. The battle resumed full fury at dawn Friday and raged all day. A woman walking across a clearing with her baby drew fire in Matewan. She ran for safety, clutching her child as bullets kicked up dust around her. A teamster jumped from his wagon and fled amid a hail of bullets as his mule stampeded aimlessly, the wagon bouncing behind him. Two more persons were killed. Ambrose Gooseland, 16, was hit in the stomach on a railroad bridge near Matewan and lay there all day alive as bullets hit around him. He died two days later. Dan Witt of Matewan was killed the same morning when he left his family to go for water. 40 miners were hemmed in at a mine by heavy fire. Stray bullets killed half a dozen cattle and a mule. At one mine, a bookkeeper was driven back by gunfire each time he left his building to retrieve a pile of groceries that were spoiling by the railroad, like running a gauntlet. Passenger trains roared through the valley at full speed, their passengers lying on the floors. In Matewan, businesses closed, school was canceled and non union miners abandoned their cabins and fled. Sid walked through the largely deserted town with his friends, heavily armed, and found the superintendent of the stone Mountain Coal Co. Supervising a group of men unloading a rail car. They quarreled and Sid hit the superintendent. Some said Sid struck him down with his rifle. Sid admitted only that he slapped him down. The superintendent was hospitalized nine days, and another criminal charge, the 10th, was filed against the young constable of Magnolia District on Friday. Sid, a deputy sheriff waving a piece of white muslin, made contact with Union riflemen in the mountains behind Matewan, and they promised to stop Shooting if their opponents would do so too. Acting on that promise, the commander of the state police sent a prominent physician into the Kentucky mountains to negotiate with the non union miners there. The physician crawled a half mile under fire and standing among bullet riddled buildings obtained a promise that the non union miners would cease their firing. The doctor returned triumphantly Saturday night to Matewan where an elated state police commander welcomed him. As the word spread, the three days battle slowed and stopped. End quote. Well, by this point the governor of West Virginia is in full panic mode. He calls on President Harding to send in federal troops, saying Nothing short of 100% Federal martial law with regular army troops could restore order to Mingo County. And the unrest was spreading. Now miners in other counties up to central West Virginia near the Capitol were holding their own mass meetings. The boys up at Kanawha county were getting riled up. Many of them wanted to form up their ranks and march down Domingo to unionize the Tug Valley miners once and for, for all these meetings, these were wildcat meetings, they weren't coordinated by the union. And in fact, Bill Blizzard, the sub district president, who was not some pussycat afraid of a little action, was doing his best to calm everybody down. Now the state of West Virginia had a big problem. I should have mentioned this before actually. The state's National Guard had been federalized during World War I and sent off to fight. The problem was when the war was over, nobody had taken the time to re establish it. The legislature hurried through a measure to get it going, but that was going to take some time. The governor had only 100 men on the state police force. That was it. And so he's pleading with President Harding, please send federal troops, I need the army. But he said that the president, he said that West Virginia needed to take care of its own problems for once instead of calling for help from the White White House every time it popped up. Well, the commander of the state police there in Mingo, Captain Bracus, he taken that humiliation of his men, that happened very personally, like I said. And he was determined to pay the miners back, but he lacked the forces to really do it. And so in desperation he took a step. That kind of really shows how the class antagonism at play here went far deeper than just the miners and the mine owners. He called on the better people of Mingo County. Those were his words. They were the better people. Doctors and lawyers, preachers, insurance brokers, merchants and shopkeepers. People who worked indoors and wore smooth soled shoes to work every day. He called them to A meeting in the courthouse at Williamson, the same one that recently hosted the miners trial. And he said he needed men who were prepared to stand up for law and order in Mingo County. Everybody knew what he meant. He needed men prepared to fight the miners. The office dwellers were enthusiastic in their support, and they declared their readiness to clean up the scum in Mingo County. The next day, the governor issued a harsh declaration of martial law. He banned all public gatherings and suspended the second amendment. And he ordered that no publication, either newspaper, pamphlet, handbill, or otherwise reflecting in any way upon the United States or the state of West Virginia, may be published, distributed, or circulated on pain of imprisonment. There were no troops to enforce martial law, so the militia, newly formed from the better people of the county, did it. Well, they sorta did it. From day one, martial law was only enforced against miners. Other people continued to assemble freely, conduct parades, hold political rallies. But in Matewan, if more than two miners stopped to talk on the streets for more than a moment, they were confronted by armed state police or militia volunteers and told to scatter. The jails overflowed with miners, so arrested men were sent to other counties to be held, and then eventually those jails filled up. Captain Brockus openly admitted that many of them had been put in jail for carrying unauthorized literature. Many miners were arrested, jailed, and then eventually released without ever having any kind of a hearing whatsoever. The union filed a lawsuit complaining that the military dictatorship was unconstitutional. And the judge agreed, since the citizens militia was not an armed instrument of the state. Well, the governor got around that quickly enough by signing an edict inducting the state militia, or rather, inducting this non state militia into the service of the state. The miners fought back, sabotaged more mine equipment, fighting with the state police and militia. The police and militia retaliated. On June 3, after a report of a shot from near one of the tent colonies. Captain Bracus and 40 of his men stored, stormed the camp, arresting every miner they could lay their hands on. 42 random miners were thrown in jail. When the militia commander was shot at from near the same colony 10 days later, he ordered his troops to spray the tents with machine gun fire to force the families in the colony undercover so that he could come back until he came back with more men. And so he comes back with 70 militiamen and more state police back to the scene. And all the people are ducking down because they've been ducking machine gun fire. And then on a signal, they all storm the tents and go in and just take everyone they can catch the order given was to shoot any armed miner on site. A group of them was spotted in the woods nearby and a squad of militia opened up on them. The miners fired back and a state trooper was shot in the stomach. The militia and the police cleared that camp and then rampaged through the place, slashing all the tents with their knives, destroying the furniture, destroying the food, destroying all the supplies that the miners needed to live out there. 48 men were brought in, many of them wounded, and they were stuffed into a single jail cell. Next, Captain Bracus raided the offices of the United Mine Workers. He held them hostage until they agreed to leave the well. Soon it was time for the miners next trial. The first time around that prosecution, they'd been very careful in how they structured it. That was only for the murder of the two Feltz brothers. They wanted to keep their powder dry in case they needed another shot. So even though it was from the same incident, I guess technically it wasn't double jeopardy. This trial was for the murder of the other six Baldwin Felts men. And so as this day approaches, Sid gets word that he's been indicted again. This one was a little more ominous. He was accused of leading an attack on a mine at Mohawk which was well outside his stomping grounds. And he was ordered to appear in court in Welch, West Virginia, which was a stronghold of the operators and their allies. Everybody told him not to go. They told him it was a setup. Frank Keeney wrote to ask the governor to provide protection for Sid and Welch. The governor refused, but he assured Frank that steps had been taken to ensure his safety. Sid's lawyer wrote the judge who was assigned to the case, and he said that he was concerned for his client's safety in welch. But the McDowell County Sheriff assured the judge that everything was taken care of and there was no trouble coming. Well, when the day came for Sid to appear in court, that sheriff took an out of town vacation paid for by the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency. Sid, his wife, and his good friend Ed Chambers, who was charged with him, along with Ed's wife, rode the train into Welch along with the Mingo County Sheriff. Of all people, Charles Lively boarded and came and sat near them. He even tried to make small talk with them. It may have been only the sheriff on board in the presence of his wife, that kept Sid from tearing his throat out with his teeth. In Welch, they rented a hotel room across the street from the courthouse, and there they sat to discuss the case with the union lawyer who was sent to defend them. Sid had brought two pistols with him as he always did. And his lawyer warned him that you need to leave the guns here in the hotel room this time to avoid creating another scene like he did last time. The sheriff was there, and so Sid handed the guns off to him. Then it was the Mingo sheriff who looked out the window and spotted Charles Lively standing on the courthouse lawn. He says he's keeping pretty close track of us this morning, isn't he? Sid looked out the window and the street was buzzing with activity, much of it having to do with the upcoming trial. Charles Lively was standing at the top of the courthouse steps and he wasn't alone. At least six other Baldwin Felt's men were there with him. Sid and Ed Chambers and their wives and lawyers left the room and headed to the courthouse unarmed, each of them with his wife on his arm. It's from RG Yoho's biography of Charles Lively. As Sid started up the steps, he smiled, waved at the crowd and said, hello boys. Those were the last words that ever came from his lips. Charles E. Lively, Buster Pence, Bill Salter and perhaps other Baldwin Felt's men assembled there sprang upon the pair of Matewan boys, firing their guns as they charged forward upon their two helpless victims. Their furious shooting and and the barrage of slugs coming from the guns somehow missed the two innocent wives accompanying them. But it did however, wound a bystander. Lively, firing a pair of guns, shot Sid Hatfield first, spinning Hatfield's body around and knocking him from the grasp of his wife, who fled in fear while she ran to the purported safety of the office of the vacationing sheriff. Her husband's lifeless body tumbled down the stairs, blood streaming onto the concrete sidewalk behind below. Although the former Matewan police chief died almost instantly, the detectives continued firing shots into his body. As the fellow agents concentrated their efforts on killing Hatfield and Chambers, one of the Baldwin Felt's men emptied his revolver into the blocks of the granite courthouse. This was obviously part of a well coordinated attempt to persuade others and also to lend credibility to the agents future claims of self defense by making it appear that these shots came from the guns which were then deliberately placed in or near the lifeless hands of Hatfield and Chambers, a fact admitted to by the man later. Almost as soon as Hatfield was hit, the Baldwin Felts gunmen turned their weapons on Ed Chambers, shooting him multiple times. Chambers fell in a crumbled heap on his side with his back still facing the steps. They advanced on his body, continuing to trigger gunshots into both Chambers and Hatfield. Ed Chambers wife stayed at her husband's side when the shooting started, she followed his wounded body down the steps, begging the detectives to leave him alone. Charles Lively rushed down toward the fallen Chambers as Mrs. Chambers pleaded with him. Oh please, Mr. Lively, don't shoot him anymore. You've killed him now. But seeing Chambers was still breathing, Lively placed a gun behind Ed's ear and administered a final killing shot into his skull. Brokenhearted and infuriated by the Detective's merciless act, Mrs. Chambers clubbed lively with her umbrella. Lively pointed the hot barrel of his gun at her and said, don't you hit me with the umbrella again, you dirty devil, or I will shoot you. End quote. So Mrs. Chambers is screaming for men standing around watching to come and search her husband's body to see that he was unarmed. But the Baldwin Felts men held guns on on everybody and told him to get away. Then they took Mrs. Chambers by force and led her away from the scene into the courthouse. All of them would go before a friendly jury and they would all be acquitted on grounds of self defense for what was a pure cold blooded assassination in broad daylight, sponsored by some of the wealthiest men in the state and carried out with the connivance of the local authorities. Word went out across the mountains Sid Hatfield had been murdered by Baldwin felt thugs. 2000 people showed out for the funeral procession. But when that was complete, the time for mourning was over. Now it was time for war. Coal miners from around south and central West Virginia began to assemble at Lens Creek Creek, up by Paint and cabin creeks, about 10, 15 miles from the state capitol, just up the Kanawha from Paint and Cabin Creeks. It's where the state's most militant miners worked. There were thousands of them coming in. They came on every train, not only filling the seats, but the aisles, the vestibules, sometimes the roofs. Others came in on cars, some on horses or in wagons, and a lot of people just hiked. Some of them wore the steel helmets they'd kept from their service in the war, but they wore a different uniform. They wore blue overalls with a red neckerchief tied around the neck. And virtually every single one of them was carrying a gun. They gunned him down in cold blood, shot him down like a dog, one of the miners said. They killed him in front of their wives, another said. Frank Keeney said that it had become apparent that the only way to get justice in West Virginia was with a high powered rifle. If the governor was going to empower a middle class militia and hired mercenaries to murder miners under cover of martial law, then the miners had no choice but to put an end to it themselves. All up and down the rivers and the creeks, in coal camps all over the region, men gave speeches and they took votes. And they all resolved to march on Mingo county, free the miners who were being imprisoned under martial law and hang the corrupt sheriff who ran the place. If the better people of Mingo county wanted a fight, now they're going to get one this time from miners who had been through it before during the paint and Cabin Creek strikes. The Kanawha sheriff saw what was happening. He went and warned the governor, but the governor said he didn't have any more power to stop it than the sheriff did. So the word went out on to Mingo. Miners went through the mining camps warning any stragglers that if they didn't get up and join the march, they better not be there when the rest of them got back. But pretty much everybody went with enthusiasm. Many of them walked or piled into cars or wagons, while others commandeered trains and and ordered the engineers at gunpoint to take them south. Domingo. The marchers were not black, they were not white, they were not immigrant. They were coal miners. They formed up in military style units. War veterans from the first World War were identified and put in positions of leadership. Some of them were actually Spanish American War veterans. Along the way, these guys gave crash courses in weapons handling and and basic tactics to the Meyers, who had never been in combat. They raided the company stores at the towns they passed along the way, taking food and supplies, weapons and ammunition. But merchants at the independent towns were not bothered. One group of miners fell in with a gatling gun and 5,000 rounds and more machine guns were reported stolen from several company camps. Wives of union miners who were trained as nurses accompanied their men, wearing nurses white uniforms and caps, but with their local union number on the cap instead of the usual Red Cross. They expected there to be wounded and they were prepared for that. At one point, people in the Capitol thought that the miners were marching on the city of Charleston. And the place flew into a panic until the reports were disproven. The authorities went to Frank Keeney and the union headquarters there in Charleston and told them, you got to call this off. And he told them, this is not a union operation. This is the miners on their own. And neither he nor anyone was going to stop them. I've interfered again and again, he said. This time they can march, Domingo, as far as I'm concerned. The union local at Blair, having been given prior instructions, ran out ahead of the rest of the army to the base of Blair Mountain where they explained expected a fight and dug trenches in preparation. An advance patrol of 500 to 800 miners went ahead, cut down telephone and telegraph wires and cleared a 65 square mile area of Baldwin Feld's guards. Mother Jones drops what she's doing, comes back to West Virginia and as soon as she arrives it becomes clear that this was something much different than she had ever seen. Something much more dangerous. So she met with the Governor and both of them expressed concern about where this was headed. And so with the Governor's blessing, she went down to Mingo to talk to the miners there she could feel their rage. Fearing what was to come, she hurried back to Len's Creek to try to talk the miners down. This old fire breathing radical, Mother Jones is urging the miners to go go home. She even pretended to have a telegram from President Harding himself ordering the miners to disperse. When the miners weren't buying it, she even pretended to read from it. I request that you abandon your purpose and return to your homes. And I assure you that my good offices will be used to forever eliminate the gunman system from the state of West Virginia. It was the best she could come up with on short notice. Frank Keeney and the other union leaders were there and they asked to see the telegram themselves. Mother Jones wouldn't give it to them and so they went back to Charleston and got confirmation that no telegram had been sent. Even Mother Jones had lost control of the miners already. They had begun to march in columns of hundreds across the ridge toward Mingo County. More miners joined them as they made their way through Boone and toward Logan County. When the miners made camp, their army went on for 20 miles along a creek. There were thousands of them. More showing up every hour. Guns in hand. Miners hijacked a train with three empty flat cars and loaded it up with miners and supplies and ran on ahead. Each night when they made camp, the mood was serious. They weren't clowning, they weren't drinking. Men gave speeches and everybody spoke of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers and how they'd been shot down like dogs in front of their wives. In the evenings and on the way, war veterans continued to try to impart some basic military training on this ragtag redneck army. To get to Mingo, the miners first had to get through Logan County. Logan was an anti union fortress, ruled over by that sheriff I mentioned before, Sheriff Don Chaffin, the one who made $300 a month but somehow had a million dollars in his bank account because he was paid a fortune by the coal companies to keep the union from spreading any further south. In West Virginia, in Logan, all anybody spoke of was the miners. March. Chaffin had sent out word to those better people of his county. The bankers and the clerks and the lawyers and merchants and insurance salesmen and of course the mine officials and the non minor employees to be ready to muster at the courthouse at the sound of the town fire alarm. And so, as the miners approach Logan, the fire alarm blares and it's very, very early in the morning. It was like two in the morning. And so all the better people of Logan county prepared to fight off the invasion of these dangerous, dirty, ignorant coal miners from the hills. This motley army made up of the deplorables of their day. Immigrants, negroes, hillbilly, white trash. Rifles were handed out and the bankers and the lawyers and the insurance salesmen of Logan town went up to fight the miners. They took cars up to the ridge of Blair Mountain where breastworks and trenches were being set up to make a stand against the oncoming rednecks. Chaffin had been preparing since the miners had begun to gather at Lynn's Creek. He anticipated this. He set up a commissary to supply his middle class militia and had workers start building the defense on Blair Mountain. Before the miners even started heading south. His men cut down trees, they blocked roads, they built up breastworks of boulders and dirt and logs that stretch for 10 miles across the path that he knew the miners would have no choice but to cross. He had a fleet of cars set aside for dedicated use, running men and supplies up to the front line. He'd even gotten his hands on three airplanes along with pilots to observe and possibly attack the miners. Remember, this is only 1921, so there's no airfield available and the biplanes were parked on a baseball field with enough room for them to gather speed and take off. As the alarms continued throughout the morning, the better people of Logan fill the streets and make their way up Blair Mountain. Deputy sheriffs went to the mining camps that were being worked by scabs and non union miners, waking people up and shouting that anybody who didn't pick up a gun and go fight was fired and would be arrested as a potential traitor. By the time the sun came up over Blair, Chaffin had 700 armed men dug in atop the ridge. Later in the day, one of the planes made a reconnaissance flight over the mountain and saw the column of miners stretching back for miles. There were thousands of them. Some miners fired on the plane, so he hightailed it back and told Chaffin what he'd seen. Corbyn writes, quote, a sizable proportion of the marchers were from out of state. Approximately 2,000 of them were World War I veterans and all of them were from industrialized backgrounds. This army was organized and prepared to fight. The marchers had their own doctors, nurses and hospital facilities. They had sanitary facilities. The marchers were fed three meals a day in mess halls and commissaries in in addition to robbing the local company stores for food, the marchers bought Every loaf of bread, 1,200 dozen in Charleston and transported the loaves to their campsites. The miners were prepared to fight and they had to be, for they would sustain a week long battle against Chaffin's army of over 2000 men who were equipped with machine guns and bombing planes. Approximately 2,000 army veterans were the field commanders and they instructed the other miners in military tactics. A former member of the National Rifle Team of the US Marine Corps and a former captain in the Italian army gave shooting lessons. Several former officers, including an ex major, drilled the miners. After watching several hundred ex servicemen drill the miners until they marched in something like military order. A reporter walked down to another area and heard an ex serviceman tell a squad of miners how to fight machine guns. Lie down, watch the bullets, cut the trees, outflank them and get the snipers. End quote. The governor got reports that there were no fewer than 7,000 miners on the march. He heard that Mother Jones had tried and failed to stop them and that they were determined to go to Mingo county to free their friends from jail and avenge the murder of Sid Hatfield. He had no National Guard. He knew that Sheriff Chafin's army of deputies and office dwellers and mercenaries could at best only hope to slow the miners down. He called on the White House and the Secretary of War and he told them that the southern part of his state was in open rebellion and that he needed the U.S. army. And so Washington sent down a Brigadier general to determine whether that was a necessary step. Step. The general took the next train down to Charleston. He arrived at 4am without stopping for breakfast. He goes directly to the Governor's residence and wakes him up in bed to get the story. As soon as he's done with that, he sends men to get Frank Keeney and another local union leader named Fred Mooney out of their beds and bring them before him. He tells them in no uncertain terms that things cannot get more serious than they are right now because the next step was to call the US army and air Service down on their miners. He told them that they would be held personally responsible for whatever happened. This had to be stopped now. And he ordered them to go to the miner's army and make them stop. They were on their way in a car before 6am Savage writes, quote, minutes before the arrival of Mooney and Kini, the advance guard of the miners army, marching with near military precision and discipline, had set out for the Logan county line 12 miles away. They had lined up, an observer reported, when their leaders commanded, fall in. And at the command, forward march. They swung away on the road to Logan with fire and determination in their eyes, their guns firmly grasped in their hands. Keaney made a quick decision. At 2pm he said that he would have a meeting in a nearby baseball park. All union miners were required to attend. He ordered those around him to spread the word and make the arrangements. Then he and Mooney sped out of town toward Logan to overtake the advance guard. They had gone only a short distance. The taxi passed the column on the road and swung in front of its head. Keaney jumped out and spoke. The column halted. There was a heated exchange. The miners could not stop. Keaney insisted, and he prevailed. The miners agreed to a temporary halt, turned around and marched back to the rest of the army. The miners assembled at the ballpark. When Keeney and Mooney approached, they found the bleachers filled with miners, their guns glistening in a bright sunlight. Other men lay full length on the grass in the shade of the high board fence. Guards manned the gates. Miners gave a new password. I come creeping. They turned away newspapermen, a policy Keeney endorsed. The men were in an angry mood. Keaney spoke from the hood of the taxi. A lot of you men are going to disagree with me, he began. But don't interrupt. I am telling you facts. And you will find there is no time to argue. Then Kinney said, now, I've told you men God knows how many times that anytime you want to do battle against Don Chafin and his thugs, I'll be right there in the front lines with you. I've been there before and you know it. But this time you've got more than Don Chaffin against you. You got more than the governor of West Virginia against you. You got the government of the United States against you. Now, I'm telling you for your own good and for the good of the cause. And you've got to do it. Break up this march. Go home. Get back to your jobs. You can't fight the government of the United States. Savage continues. Quote Mooney followed Keeney Union men, he said, didn't balk. Federal authority. Union men were loyal to their country. It was time to give up the march. Trains would be dispatched to Madison and Danville to take them home, back to their jobs. Others spoke generally, agreeing that the march should be abandoned, at least for now. An aged black miner rose. Boys, he's right, he said of Keeney's warning about federal power. You ain't fooling no more. This is your daddy talking. It's your real Uncle Sam. The decision emerged. They would go home. Slowly, the men began edging out of the ballpark. Many started immediately on the long march home. Others waited for the promised trains. Word spread into the hills and hollows and back along the line of the march. As darkness fell, miners built campfires in the hills and talked of their adventure waiting for the trains. The march, they thought, was over. Well, Sheriff Chaffin had informants near the miners army who had listened in on events at the ballpark. And some. So they called and said, good news, boss. The miners are disbanding and heading home. And so Chafin sends words up to the word up to the ridge to recall his troops back to town. Those men come back to cheering crowds like they're war heroes. And the Logan Banner newspaper sends out a special edition with the front page headline reading attempted Invasion Fails. The governor was elated and Washington D.C. was relieved. But not all the miners were ready to call it quits, and others simply hadn't gotten the word. Somehow, rumors started circulating that Chaffin's deputies in Logan were killing miners, including women and children. And so some of them, at first only a few hundred, grabbed their rifles and set out again toward Logan. That night, those men went through the nearby mining camps full of men who had not accompanied the march to begin with, and told the miners there that the mines would be closed in the morning and called on them to come fight with their brothers. And most of them did. Other union leaders heard of Frank Keaney's speech, and at first they didn't believe he'd made it. Frank Keaney, of all men, was not the one to back down. When they found out it was true, they decided to go past him, straight to the miners, and they sent a delegation to get him fired up and turn them back around. The next morning, one of Chaffin's airplanes flies up over the mountains and sees that the miners are reforming their lines. In his hurry to get back, he flew too low and clipped a tree and crashed upside down on the roof of a house. The pilot was not hurt, but still, how many insurrections have you been in that resulted in a downed military aircraft? In Charleston, there was an airstrip and three large Army Air Service combat aircraft armed with machine guns and bombs had arrived and were parked as the people of the town showed up to gawk at them. One of them was the Seagull, which was the aircraft flown by the country's most famous pilot, Billy Mitchell. Mitchell was there in Charleston himself, General Billy Mitchell. And he stood around the aircraft talking with the local officials and the townspeople. You know, Billy Mitchell is one of the prophets of air war in the 1920s. He was dedicated to trying to make the nation's leaders see that aircraft were going to rule the next major war. He had just flown in from a training exercise off the coast of Virginia, where he was showing how an aircraft had the power to sink an armored ship. When he heard what was happening in West Virginia, he saw it as another opportunity to show what the planes could do. So he developed plans to stop the march from the air, first by blanketing the miners with tear gas, and if that didn't stop them, then attack with bombs and bullets while his aircraft spotted for nearby artillery. It took a long time to recall all of Don Chaffin's men from the ridge. Most of them didn't arrive till evening, and others didn't come back until it was close to midnight. They were dusty and exhausted and unaware that the miners had actually come back in their direction. And so just after midnight, they're just getting home. And the fire alarm blares again, and the better men of Logan town were out of bed and back to the courthouse to muster faster this time than before, having been through it already. Once they got their supplies, they hopped in the waiting cars and they headed back up to the barricades atop Blair Mountain. Some of them were armed with hand grenades, sandbags, reinforced machine gun nests, looking down the mountain toward the path of the miners. Miners. 800 men of Logan were there. Keeney and the others hadn't realized yet that the miners had gone back on the offensive. The trains that they had sent down had come back with some miners on them. And so they took that as confirmation that the orders were being followed. But all of a sudden, the general summons them and shares the reports that he's been receiving that the march was not over after all. And so Keeney's colleague, Bill Blizzard, rides up with the general so that he can go get a look at the situation for himself. When he came to a group of miners who were coming up on a bridge crossing the General blocks the bridge and gets out of his car and stands there waiting for the miners to bunch up as a crowd. Now, the veterans in the miner's army knew a general. When they saw one, one of them shouted, are you General Pershing? And he says, no, no, I'm General Bandholz and I'm here for the United States government. And so the general pauses to let that sink in. And then with perfect timing, he says, there's servicemen among you. You know what the army means, what it can do. You know that it never bluffs, but always calls them. I don't want martial law here. Neither do you. I've seen enough men killed. I don't want to see any more die. But if it must be, then we will go under martial law. I don't want it, but I must obey orders. The General, like all flag officers, understood how to stand before men and awe them. And he awed the miners, especially the veterans. Suddenly a miner in the crowd blurted out, my God, we wouldn't revolt against the national government. And with that the tension broke and some of the vets started rushing forward to try to shake his hand and tell the General about their military service. And the general stayed there and talked with the men until a train arrived and then saw them off on it. Well, that experience had won General Bandholz over too. What he saw were not blood crazed anarchists, but good American boys who just gotten a little riled up, that's all. And so he wired Washington D.C. and said, Keep the troops on standby, they won't be needed for now. And that night he got on a train and went back to Washington. But there were still miners headed to Logan and still Chaffin's forces were arrayed on the ridge to oppose them. There was also Captain Braccus, that vengeful commander of the state police whose men had been humiliated by some of the miners. He had spent the interval getting the names of all the men who were supposed to have been involved with that and was determined to get them back. And so he took a force of 70 state troopers on an expedition to go arrest them early one morning. And so he rendezvoused with Chaffin, who reinforced him with another 230 men, bringing his number up to 300. And they set out toward a camp where several of their targets are supposed to be holed up. As they made their way up the mountain toward the miners camp, they were spotted. And the men who spotted them ran back to the camp shouting that the thugs were coming. So the men got guns and hid their families. Braccus forces were coming across small groups of miners and they'd corner them and disarm them and arrest them. And they would set the POWs in front of them as human shields and march them at gunpoint. At this point they came across two miners and they had guns. So Captain Bracus approached and demanded to know why they were armed. They told him it was their business. And one of the state police shouted from the crowd that they'd come to get you goddamn miners. And it was then that the shooting started. Miners emerged from the trees and began firing on Bracus men. Three miners went down immediately. Another was hit. Bullets whizzed through the forest and through the walls of cabins and tents. Bracus men are being hit. He looked around at the chaos. He thought maybe this was a mistake. And so he orders his men to retreat and they go tearing down the mountain. Word spread that the thugs had attacked. The miners were going home and the thugs attacked anyway. People were dead. Miners came from all around and saw the bloody bodies. Women and children were screaming and crying. The miners saw that, many of them over the corpses of their husbands and fathers. They told the men that the state police had come down in the middle of the night and hundreds of them had opened fire on their homes. Terrified women and children fled down the road and as they went spread word among the miners what had happened. This time when the miners assembled, they would not be turned back. 13 and 14 year old boys stood armed alongside their fathers and older brothers. On Wednesday morning, August 31, 1921, all the building frustration and anger and resentment that had bubbled up over the years in the West Virginia coal fields exploded into full scale war. The President of the United states ordered the U.S. army to go put down the miners rebellion. Don Chaffin calls on neighboring McDowell county for reinforcements. He asked the middle class and professional citizens there to send all the men that they could to fight off the barbarians headed to Blair mountain. And so McDowell sent their bankers, their lawyers, their businessmen and doctors 600 more men reinforcing Chaffin's defenses on the ridge. But no fewer than 10,000 miners were headed there their way. Some estimates have the number at 12 to 15 or even 20,000. Two or three times as many wives working as nurses and cooks, young boys as supply runners and messengers supported the army in non combat roles. The word in the capital and among the mine owners had been that all the trouble was being caused by the hotheads from Kanawha county. The same miners who'd given the state so much trouble a decade before. At Paint And Cabin Creeks. Certainly those miners were a strong element, played a major role in getting the march going. But by the time the army reached Blair Mountain, everybody realized that this weighs way bigger than one county. Miners from mingo, Logan, Boone, McDowell and other counties were there. Miners from even further away. It seemed as if all of southern West Virginia had risen up in rebellion. As Savage says, George Washington had fewer soldiers at the Battle of Trenton, the engagement which changed the course of the American Revolution. That morning the miners began their ascent up Blair Mountain. Almost immediately, rifle and machine gun fire begin spraying down the mountainside. Aircraft appear overhead and begin dropping bombs. These were Chaffin's planes dropping improvised bombs that were about 21 a half, 3ft long and maybe 6 to 10 inches in diameter. I've seen one of them before. I don't have the measurements exactly in my head, but they had put them together basically giant pipe bombs rigged up and they would fly over and drop these down on the miners. And some of these things turned out to be duds. And they were captured by the miners. That's why I've seen one of them. It's on display at the Blair Mountain Museum in Matewan today. A few days of military training was not enough to turn the miners into a Navy SEAL team. So their tactics were sloppy and their coordination was often non existent. But they were brave. I mean, just think, without being given orders from an officer, without just you and your boys storming up a mountain with dug in machine guns firing down on you while planes are dropping bombs on you and you and your friends are storming up this mountain, it's crazy. It takes a lot of training, a lot of military training to get trained infantrymen to go up a hill like that. And these miners were doing it. Small units made their own way up the mountain, fired their weapons and then attracted fire and they'd retreat and then try to make their way up another way. The whole thing was somewhat disorganized. It wouldn't have impressed Napoleon, but the miners were brave. Now just imagine a group of you and your friends tearing up a mountainside with machine guns dug in to trenches pouring down on you while planes are dropping explosives on you. It takes a lot of training to get infantrymen to do something like that. And these miners were doing it. They did have one thing that Napoleon would have understood well, and that was numbers. They swarmed Blair Mountain like angry bees. Corbin's account reads, quote, when the miners arrived in the battle zone and began to fight, they demonstrated preparedness and organization. Arriving on foot and in Cars, trucks and trains that they had commandeered. The miners with cartridge belts and packs rolled as neatly and smoothly as a stovepipe, responded to a bugler sounding of assembly and their sergeant's shouts of packs and guns. Fall in. A coal company official later testified that I noticed one company march up opposite the station, face to the front and commanded by a man acting as a captain. He faced the men to the front like the captain of an army would do. He called the roll. Later he ordered the men to throw down their tin cups. He said they were going into action that night and he didn't want anything to rattle. Sentries were then placed along the mountain ridge. Sharpshooters with telescopic rifles were stationed at strategic locations to clean out Chaffin's machine gun nests. The other miners moved out in flank movements, each under the command of an army veteran. Harvey Dillon, a veteran of the Spanish American War and World War I, commanded the Drawdy Creek Division. Hewitt Creek Division was led by a former army colonel and another high ranking officer led the charge up Blair Mountain. It was carefully done, a coal operator later testified, just as well as General Pershing had his army in France, the battle raged for over a week. A veteran of the Spanish American war reported that he heard about as much shooting at Blair as I did at Manila. Planes that the Logan County Coal Operators association had rented shelled the miners with gas and crudely made explosive bombs for three days. As a side note, I think that's probably the first recorded use of poison gas dropped from an aircraft in combat and it was being dropped on coal miners in West Virginia. Both armies took prisoners and each side was accused of torturing them and both sides killed. A message sent out from the headquarters of Chaffin's army read, as I have returned from the frontline trenches, thought I would try to tell you a little something about what has been going on over there. We certainly have been doing some honest to God fighting the past few days. I lost three men yesterday. Happened about 8am yesterday. Perhaps I will stop off and tell you all on my way home if I don't get bumped off before I get away. Give my regards to the boys and kill all the rednecks you can. A horrified nation sat back in disbelief as newspapers reported on the largest armed conflict in American labor history. The headlines of an issue at the New York Times read, fighting continues in the mountains. Planes reported bombing, miners heavy firing unabated. An issue of the Washington Evening Star declared in bold letters, martial law fighting now ranging on a 20 mile front. The Charleston Gazette headlined Logan now in a state of Siege. Well, by the morning of September 1, the miners had already captured half of the mountain ridge that was blocking their way, and they were preparing to roll up the rest of Chaffin's lines and storm down into Logan and Mingo counties. A state police captain appeared in Logan town. A machine gun had jammed at one of the mountain passes and the miners had broken through. Chafin hastily tried to construct a second line of defense for his men to fall back to, and the people in the town went into a total pain. A coal operator there in Logan town called a congressman that he knew personally and told him that unless troops were sent by midnight that night, the town of Logan was going to be attacked by an army of thousands of miners. A squadron of 17 military aircraft were flown in. People gathered and cheered when it was time for them to take off for the battle. But when the third one tried to take off, it glanced off a telephone pole and nose down and flipped over and a field. Two other of the aircraft had engine problems and couldn't take off at all. Another one had engine trouble and made an emergency landing and hit a mound of dirt and blew a tile and tire and broken axle. Two others lost their way in fog and ended up in Tennessee. When they tried to return to Charleston the next day, they hit a storm. And when they tried to land, one of them hit a ditch and took out the landing gear and demolished the plane. And the other one looked for another landing spot until he was almost out of gas, then tried to land on the side of a hill, ran into a fence, and he crashed. So not the finest hour for America's Air Force. Just then, with Chaffin's forces scrambling back to secondary lines and the people of Logan evacuating the town, that's when Daddy showed up. US army regular soldiers, most of them combat veterans from World War I, began rolling into the area in train cars, thousands of them. When the miners first saw the soldiers again, many of them were pleased. They smiled and waved. These men were in rebellion against the coal operators and their local government. But by and large, they were naively loyal American patriots. They knew the state and local governments were captive to the coal interest. But again, they just thought if they could just get the attention of the federal government, that's all they had to do, then their case would be heard. Many of them took the arrival of the army as confirmation that they had been heard that the federal government was finally sending help. They really thought that. They thought the army would settle things down. And then as A neutral party force a settlement. They didn't imagine that the army had been sent to take the side of the coal operators and their hired guns. The soldiers arrived, coming up behind Chaffin's forces on the Blair Mountain ridge, told them all to go home. Army men manned their positions and sent word down to the miners that Chaffin's forces were gone. And from now on it would be the U.S. army that you would be shooting at. And so as word spread that the US army had arrived, the shooting died down and finally stopped. You know, the miners again, many of them were war veterans and they took that very seriously. And they were just, it wasn't just fear. These guys were obviously prepared to die. They're charging machine gun nests, but they were not prepared to fight with American soldiers. They just were not prepared to do that. The miners climbed down their side of Blair Mountain, made camp, or prepared to make their trip back home. The miners had sworn an oath of secrecy that held until the oldest of them passed. So we don't know exactly how many were killed, but there were reports of dozens and some said hundreds dead. I wish this story had a happier ending. After the Battle of Blair Mountain, the miners and the miners union was pilloried as a bunch of savage Bolsheviks. In the nation's business friendly press. The owners re established control of their coal fields and miners went back to work. Hundreds of them were thrown in prison and several union leaders were tried for treason. Others, including a pastor who had taken a gun up to march with the miners, were sent up for murder. There were no arrests of the mine guards or the citizens militia from Logan or any of the state police or sheriffs who had beaten and tortured and killed minors in 1920 and 21. Frank Keeney was one of the men who were tried for treason in 1922. But a sympathetic judge, or one who just wanted the whole thing to be over moved his trial to a friendlier venue where the charges were dismissed. Many other cases were also transferred to minor friendly jurisdictions and most of them were dismissed as well. Old Sheriff Don Chaffin was lauded as a hero by the better people of West Virginia, although a little while later, during Prohibition, he was caught up in a bootlegging scheme and ended up doing two years in prison. The strike in Mingo dragged on a little while longer, but eventually had to be called off. The cost of it had bankrupted Keeney's district 17 of the UMW and at least 20 people had been killed, not counting the march on Blair Mountain. The coal operators, the county authorities, the better people of West Virginia. And the U.S. army had finally crushed the union in the state of West Virginia. In 1920, when all this began, the UMW in West Virginia had nearly 50,000 members. And by 1929, at the end of the decade, it would be down to about 600. The miners crawled back to their company towns. They kept their heads down, avoided the mine guards, and they did what they were told to do. Across the Kentucky border, not too far from our story here in Harlan county, the miners had only begun to fight, and they wouldn't stop for another decade. It wasn't till the 1930s, under FDR's New Deal legislation giving workers the right to organize themselves as a union, that the coal miners of West Virginia finally had a permanent voice. Today, there are less than 10,000 miners working underground in West Virginia coal mines. The industry finds itself under attack mostly by the same kind of people who signed up to fight the miners in 1921. Office workers, businessmen, students, middle class professionals. The better people of America who wear flannel and other work clothes as a fashion statement, but try to avoid shaking the dirty hand of an actual miner when they come across one. Almost 80,000American coal miners have died of black lung since 1960. And God only knows how many of them died before that had a name. The miners march on Blair Mountain may have been ill, considered at times chaotic. Certainly it set their cause back a long ways. But these Americans, these people who identify themselves on census reports simply as American and whose sons and daughters still do a disproportionate percentage of the fighting in America's wars. There's a. There's a joke that goes around the US Military that we wouldn't have an infantry if it weren't for Appalachia. I've heard the same one about Texas and Florida, and probably both versions are true. Well, these people, these Americans who went off into battle here at Blair Mountain, who did something that seems so crazy and so over the top to so many of us, these people were not living under a democracy. They were living under a form of peonage that has no parallel in American history in its scale and its oppressive nature, aside from the institution of slavery itself. Self. And so what do you do in a situation like that? What do you do when a mindguard beats or kills you or one of your friends or. Or abuses your wife or your children? And you go to the sheriff, and that doesn't do any good because the sheriff works for the mine company. Okay, well, you go to the county authority. Nope. The judges work for the Mine company go to the governor. No. Nope. What do you do? What did the founding fathers of the country do? Men don't do what these men did just because they got riled up. They do what they did because they saw no other choice. And if men like these had not fought, even though they lost, if they had not fought and put the fear of God into the better people of this country, if you think the barons of industry and finance would have, out of the goodness of their hearts, lifted working people off the barrel, they had them over in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We can agree to disagree. And so of course I can't condone violence of any kind. No, no, no. Can't go that far. Cannot condone violence. But on the other hand.
