THE NEWS CAME BURNING through the Redneck ranks, streaking along the ridges and down into the hollers, jumping creeks and rivers like a wildfire. Sid Hatfield’s body barely cold in the ground, and now more of their comrades had been shot down in the street—while handcuffed. Just when they’d been sitting around their bivouac fires, staring into the coals, wondering whether Mother Jones did know best, whether they should go home to their wives and babes. Now that notion was gone, dead as those men in the road.
Shot them down same as Sid, unarmed. Un-American, what it is.
Only way we’re getting our rights is at the end of a high-powered rifle.
Same’s our forefathers done. Ain’t a lick different.
Who’ll do it but us?
THEY MARCHED ON BLAIR Mountain at dawn. Thousands of red-necked men filing along mountain paths, tromping down roads and railroad tracks, their ranks bristling with rifles. Frank and the Bad Seven crossed the Big Coal River and climbed a steep lookout above the roar of Drawdy Falls, seeking a vantage point.
They could see columns of armed men filling the roads and creekbeds in every direction, long rivers of them weaving along in mismatched uniforms and denim overalls, laden with weapons of every era and description. Single-shot scatterguns and black-powder rifles, horse pistols and trench guns and grenades smuggled home from France. Grim-faced, they raised hymns and ballads of their own making, songs of hanging the sheriff and whipping the company men, climbing the mountain and crossing the river.
O Mama, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn,
O Mama, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn,
Chafin’s army gonna drown, O Mama, don’t you weep.
When I get to Mingo gonna sing and shout,
Ain’t nobody there gonna turn me out,
Chafin’s army gonna drown, O Mama, don’t you weep.
Reinforcements flooded in from out of state. Frank and his comrades met miners from the Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana coalfields. They came riding in on top of boxcars and passenger coaches, sitting on flatcars or hanging from the hoppers of coal trains. Their bodies festooned the cars, hands and boots and rifles hanging in the wind, the engines throbbing beneath their weight. The boldest among them crouched right on the cowcatchers, watching for ambushes.
The president of each local mobilized his men into a combat battalion. They raided company stores as they marched, walking out with shotguns and rifles and dynamite, even a Gatling gun—weapons the coal companies had stockpiled against just such a revolt. By afternoon, the Redneck army had amassed at the foot of Blair Mountain, a combined force nearly the size of the 1st Infantry Brigade. They practiced military drills in the hollers and small-unit tactics along the woody slopes.
Frank and the rest of the Bad Seven were tasked with teaching small groups of men how to fire and maneuver, how to flank machine-gun nests and assault fortified positions—tactics they’d learned in the service. They stood before rounds of miners and spoke of individual initiative and rapidity of decision, resolute daring and driving power—infantry principles from the Great War. Frank wore his overalls rolled down to the waist, the straps tied like a belt, the August sun flashing off his scar-flecked shoulders.
Late in the afternoon, he heard the Logan fire siren sounding on the far side of Blair Mountain, calling the defenders to their posts. He knew King Coal’s whole army—Baldwins, deputies, constables, troopers, mine guards, and vigilance men—must be piling into automobiles and roaring up the steep and rocky roads to fill the vast array of trenches, sharpshooter’s nests, and machine-gun emplacements strung along the mountain.
During the Civil War, guerrilla bands had crawled these hills, Frank knew. Snake Hunters and Moccasin Rangers stalked and bushwhacked one another, visiting atrocities, and the state militia had fought the Shawnee and Mingo tribes in these lands a century before that, hand-to-hand at times, both sides taking scalps in what would become West Virginia. Who knew what frays in ancient times, fought with sledges or sharpened flints.
Now, as darkness fell, two great armies were encamped in Appalachia, each on one side of Blair Mountain—a great knuckled fist risen against the impending night.