NO SOONER HAD THE miners surrendered than the state charged more than one thousand of them with treason, insurrection, and murder. Bill Blizzard went to trial first. In a strange twist of fate, he would be tried in the same small-town courthouse where John Brown had been found guilty on similar charges for his famous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—that ill-fated attempt to spark an antislavery rebellion across the American South.
Old Man Brown had ridden to the gallows atop his own coffin, drawn by a pair of white horses, and left his final words scrawled on a scrap of paper for his jailer: I John Brown am now quite certain that the sins of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.
In Blizzard’s case, the state prosecutor recused himself, calling the trial a farce, and the coal operators’ own attorneys stepped in to lead the prosecution. Yes, the hired guns of the Coal Operators Association would try a man for treason against the state and bill that state more than $100,000 for the privilege—such was the law in that time and place.
Blizzard was acquitted after the defense unveiled their secret weapon, an unexploded bomb dropped on the marchers. It was dismantled on the courtroom floor to reveal a cruel payload of intended shrapnel: fifteen nuts, seven bolts, a ratchet wheel, and a bucket’s worth of nails, screws, and irregular metal fragments meant to liquify human flesh. The miners cheered the verdict, carrying Blizzard through the same streets that led John Brown to the gallows, but such victories were few.
The Battle of Blair Mountain was quickly forgotten, the story cribbed, its soul cut out. The largest battle on American soil since the Civil War, buried. A million rounds fired, unheard. The coal operators hired one of the nation’s foremost evangelists to preach against the Union miners, Billy Sunday, who called them “human lice,” while industry-funded politicians and newspapermen denounced them in the press. Soon, few outside of Appalachia had even heard of Blair Mountain.
Mother Jones’s heartbreak nearly killed her. Her rheumatism flared up, vicious as a fiend, and over the intervening years, the black-dog blues came to sink their teeth into her heart again and again. Still, she lived until 1930, passing away just months after her one hundredth birthday celebration (though some sources say she was but ninety-three).
In 1933, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act into law, which guaranteed the right of American workers to join labor unions of their choosing. It was part of his famous New Deal legislation, aimed to bring the United States out of the Great Depression.
Though Mother Jones didn’t live to see this victory, Bill Blizzard was one of the first UMW leaders sent back into the Tug Valley, where he drove from town to town in an old Ford jalopy, announcing the news on a loudspeaker. He was welcomed as a hero, given gasoline and biscuits and more names on his rosters than he’d ever dreamed. The Tug Valley was organized.
The battle lost on Blair Mountain had been won in Washington. Thug rule in Appalachia was a dead beast walking, doomed. And yet the thunder of the battle can still be heard today. If you stand still and listen, truly listen, you can hear it echoing in our streets and valleys, here and abroad.
If this book were a body, it would be a skeleton of historical fact fleshed with imagination (fiction). I have endeavored to remain true to the historical record wherever I could—and many of the most pointed, telling, and outrageous scenarios are grounded in witness testimony, newspaper accounts, court transcripts, or the work of historians. That said, many of those very accounts are puzzling, factually problematic, or downright contradictory. I believe it’s the fictioneer’s work to cast the light of imagination into such shadowy spaces, to bring them alive, and this I have endeavored to do.
Doctor Domit Muhanna is inspired by my own great-grandfather, Doctor Domit Simon Sphire, a farmer’s son who emigrated to the United States from Mount Lebanon in 1889, at the age of fourteen, alone but for a priest as chaperone. He graduated from the University of Kentucky School of Medicine, eloped with Buddeea Muhanna of Deir al-Ahmar, and became a well-respected physician and medical examiner in rural Kentucky. My maternal grandmother, Amelia Sphire Smart, was the fourth of six children, five daughters and one son—the “baby,” Mosa. My great-grandfather and I share the same birthday, and I’ve always felt a special connection with him because of that—especially because my grandmother liked to remind me of the fact.
Big Frank Hugham is inspired by two men: Dan “Few Clothes Johnson” Chain, a prominent labor organizer with fists like “picnic hams,” who was a member of the Dirty Eleven commando force during the Paint Creek Mine War of 1912, and Frank Ingham, a veteran Mingo miner and UMWA member who was beaten, jailed, and evicted on multiple occasions for his Union membership and sympathies. Ingham’s wrongful arrest and attempted murder in Welch runs particularly close to the scenes portrayed in the book.
I am heavily indebted to my friend and freelance editor, Jason Frye—a native son of Logan County, West Virginia—for his stories, encouragement, and sharp-eyed editing—and also to the directors of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum for providing invaluable recommendations during my journeys to the historical sites described in this book—some of which remained at risk of mountaintop removal mining.
I’ve included a bibliography to recognize the most enlightening and helpful books that accompanied me on this journey, and more information on the “Second Battle of Blair Mountain” to protect and preserve this historic battlefield.
I am grateful to all of the authors who’ve delved into this subject, and most of all, to all those who’ve stood up to the injustice they saw in their world—often to their own ruin.
Today, I like to imagine Mother Jones at her one hundredth birthday celebration, standing at the top of the stairs, ready to descend among her friends and guests—many of whom she knew she’d be seeing for the final time. I see her holding the balustrade in her gnarled hand and closing her eyes, praying that these stories would find new breath in years to come, rising among those who need to hear them most.
THE TERM “REDNECK”
To quote the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum: “Although the term ‘redneck’ predates the Mine Wars era, this period is often understood as the birth of the term as slang in America. It was originally used in the popular media to denigrate an Appalachian working class uprising as backward, uneducated, and dangerous, and the stereotype and negative use of the term persists today.”