The Battle of Blair Mountain

ON A DREARY morning in May of 1920 seven men carrying Winchesters and pistols boarded the Norfolk and Western’s No. 29 at Bluefield, West Virginia, bound for the little mining town of Matewan on the Kentucky border. All were hirelings of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, personally selected by their boss, Tom Felts. Half a dozen or so others would follow by later trains. Nearly all “have been tried and can be relied on,” Tom Felts had written to his brother, Albert, who was already posted in Matewan.

The railroad that transported the agents to Matewan was part of the reason for their mission. More than thirty years before, the well-tailored, smooth-talking agents of the Norfolk and Western had descended on southern West Virginia like locusts, their checking accounts fattened by funds from Philadelphia and across the sea in the City of London, and systematically bought up all the land they could lay their hands on. And not just the land. They were careful to secure the mineral rights, too. That was, after all, the point. On their heels came another invasion sponsored by the railroad. These men were a rougher sort, crude in dress and manner. They were construction workers, some 5,000 of them, and they set to work laying the Norfolk and Western trunk line, putting up more than sixty bridges and carving eight tunnels out of the Appalachian foothills, opening up the region and its fabulous deposits of coal. The 190 miles of tracks pushed through valleys of crooked streams penetrating a rugged wilderness that lacked even wagon roads. The hill country farmers turned away from their corn and beans, signed up for the mines and made their homes in cabins along the right of way. Their wives bought overalls and groceries in the company stores while their children played amidst the slag heaps that tarnished the once verdant land. Mules, horses and oxen hauled their work to the surface. Coal cars rumbled along the hillsides, dumping their loads at massive tipples, where it would be stored and then shipped out to markets around the country. Investors, well-fed men in rich tweeds and polished boots, came from all over to tour the valley, inspect the mines and lay out their money, certain of a bountiful return. The coal mines proliferated and thrived. No one could question the riches that lay beneath the earth. Some called the region the “El Dorado” of Appalachia.

Coal was big business, but now it was in big trouble. It was this crisis that called the Baldwin-Felts agents to Matewan. Baldwin-Felts prospered by doing the bidding of the coal companies of West Virginia, serving more or less as their private police force. Tom Felts was sending these men to Matewan, in Mingo County, because there, as in the rest of southern West Virginia, the coal companies, whose output fueled the national economy, and the United Mine Workers of America, the nation’s most powerful labor union, were at each other’s throats.

By this date, Wednesday, May 19, 1920, America had been at peace abroad for more than eighteen months. The last doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force had long since shipped out of Brest, bound for home, hoping to return to normalcy. The huzzahs from the victory parades on America’s Main Streets had long since died out. But at home there was no peace between business and labor. The trade unions were up against it. During the war, with the help of Washington officialdom eager to keep production rolling, the unions had gained in prestige and numbers, gains that had translated into hard cash for the rank and file. But now labor was on the defensive. Struggling against rising prices, which shrunk their paychecks, and slumping demand, which threatened to take away their jobs altogether, many workers looked to their unions for salvation. But the nation’s captains of industry would have none of that. Instead they were eager to reassert their prewar hegemony over the economy, rid the unions of their newfound illusions and power and boost their profits, already lifted by the war, to even greater heights. Looking at the world around them, the more prescient among the leaders of corporate America sensed that they were on the right side of history, at one of the great turning points in the nation’s life story. The idealism that infused Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and his crusade to make the world safe for democracy was in the process of being repudiated by a rigorous rightward shift, breathtaking in its scope. Its most conspicuous feature was the Red Scare launched by Wilson’s own attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, which smothered dissent of all kinds. But the conservative trend was also marked by an enhanced reverence for free enterprise, its leaders and all their works, an attitude that served to reinforce the resistance of these worthies to the demands of labor.

The collision of labor’s desperation with management’s intransigence had triggered an unprecedented wave of strikes, more than 3,000 walkouts all told in 1919 involving more than four million workers. Steelworkers “hit the bricks,” as did coal miners and printers. Even police walked off the job. “I really think we are facing a desperate situation,” worried the normally sanguine junior senator from Ohio, Warren Harding. “It looks to me as if we are coming to crisis in the conflict between the radical labor leaders and the capitalistic system under which we have developed the Republic.”

The following year, 1920, brought no letup in strife. Labor tensions mounted around the land, but nowhere were the stakes as high as in West Virginia on the day that Tom Felts dispatched his men to Matewan. Their journey was only fifty miles and took little more than an hour. But it would open a new and bloody chapter in the annals of American history. Their arrival would set off a chain reaction of violence that would rock the government of West Virginia to its foundations and at the same time challenge the Federal government in Washington, testing the will and nerve of the highest officials of the nation. It would take months to run its course and conclude only after 10,000 armed miners set out to defy the government of the state and the companies that controlled their lives in the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War.

It was no accident that this upheaval would burst forth when and where it did, in Matewan in Mingo County. This county was the center of West Virginia’s richest coalfield. Within twenty-five miles of the county seat, Williamson, about seventy-five mines produced twelve million tons of bituminous a year, a healthy share of total national production. Nearly all these mines were non-union, many opened during the past few years to meet the nation’s growing demand for coal during the war.

When the war ended, the mines remained, productive and unorganized, to threaten the UMW’s power elsewhere in the country by selling coal at a discount against the prices charged by unionized operators. Unless the UMW could organize all of West Virginia, the union’s leaders realized, the nationwide strength it had spent nearly half a century building would dwindle and eventually disappear.

But Logan was the base of the mine operators’ power. The operators subsidized Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin’s department; in return Chafin’s deputies did all they could to protect them against the union and its organizers. Outrage over the sheriff’s strong-arm tactics had boiled over in the summer of 1919, about nine months before the Baldwin-Felts agents boarded the train for Matewan. Union headquarters in the state capital of Charleston, about fifty miles north of the Williamson field, seethed with stories that Chafin’s deputies were beating and murdering the organizers the UMW had dispatched to Logan County, trying to cut out the boil that threatened its welfare and future. On Thursday September 4, angry miners began gathering in the town of Marmet, on the outskirts of Charleston, for a march on Logan County. By the next day, Friday, September 5, their numbers had grown to 5,000. Most were armed to the teeth.

This was enough to get West Virginia Governor John J. Cornwell to rush to the scene. Cornwell, a newspaper editor turned politician, had been elected on the Democratic ticket in 1916 with the help of miner support. He had won their votes by promising to give the UMW a fair hearing and curb the excesses of the guards hired by the coal operators. “Boys throw your support to me and I will do everything in my power to remove the gunmen from the state,” Fred Mooney, secretary treasurer of District 17, which represented most of West Virginia’s union miners, recalled the candidate saying. Cornwell had made token efforts to keep his promise, but in the judgment of the union men he had not done nearly enough. Actually Mooney, like other union leaders, believed that the mine guard system was so deeply entrenched that “only a superman, such as Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon Bonaparte would have been able to prevent its functioning.”

Far from being a superman, Cornwell was only a hack officeholder and a journeyman orator, as he demonstrated when he arrived at Marmet on Friday in the dead of night and clambered on top of a soft drink truck to address the rebels. They crowded around the impromptu podium, and with the moonlight glistening on their gun barrels listened to Cornwell with fast-diminishing patience. Mindful that many in his audience had fought under their country’s flag in France, Cornwell appealed to them as patriots and law-abiding citizens. “Boys do you not know that everyone of you is acting in violation of every law against bearing arms and that you are taking the law into your own hands?” he demanded.

Ignoring him, Cornwell pressed on, vowing to crack down on the mine owners and their guards if only the rebels would take their rifles and go home. But those promises had an all too familiar ring to the miners. They heard Cornwell out, but when he finished and headed back to Charleston, they signaled their defiance by firing their weapons in the air, the din drowning out the protesting voices of Fred Mooney and the president of District 17, Frank Keeney.

Cornwell got the message. Back at the capital on Saturday, September 6, the governor put through a call to President Wilson’s Secretary of War, Newton Baker, and asked for Federal troops to deal with the incipient rebellion. Since the birth of the Republic such requests had been considered a serious departure from constitutional norms and had required presidential approval. But when state national guards were called to the colors after the United States plunged into the Great War, worries mounted that governors would not be able to cope with domestic disturbances. To help them out in such emergencies, the intervention process had been simplified and expedited by eliminating the requirement for direct presidential involvement. Under the emergency policy known as “direct access,” once Baker heard from Cornwell, he bypassed the Oval Office and instead sent word of the threatened uprising directly to General Leonard Wood. Wood, who had won his first star fighting Aguinaldo’s guerrillas in the Philippines at the turn of the century, had been deemed too old for duty with the AEF in France. Instead he had been given command of the troops assigned to deal with labor disputes and other domestic disorders. Looking ahead to his prospects for gaining the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, Wood was eager for action and public attention. Within a few hours he reported to Baker that a force of 1,600 men had been assembled and was ready to march.

Informed of the deployment by Cornwell, Mooney and Keeney realized they faced the toughest challenge of their dual stewardship of District 17. Along with their Irish heritage they shared a common upbringing. Both had been raised in the mining camps of the state, worked in the mines since they were boys and joined the union early on. And both had been bloodied in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912–1913. Back then thousands of miners in the Kanawha Valley, just north of the Williamson Field, walked out demanding higher wages and recognition of their union, leading to what was, up to that time, the cruelest and most protracted dispute in West Virginia labor history. Keeney, sharp featured and square jawed, at thirty-five was the older by three years, the more articulate and the more aggressive. He was a quick thinker and also quick to anger. In 1912 he had fought against the local leadership’s initial attempt to settle the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike as offering only meager gains to the union and for his pains was blacklisted.

The lean, sallow-faced Mooney, though more deliberative and restrained than Keeney, was no shrinking violet himself. He too had attacked the original Paint Creek–Cabin Creek settlement proposal and after the strike finally concluded, had helped to foment the rebellion against the District 17 hierarchy. In the midst of his travails his wife died, leaving him to care for their three young children. Nevertheless Mooney along with Keeney pressed their insurgency. Ultimately an investigation by the national union confirmed their charges that the rulers of the local had sold out the rank and file during contract negotiations to line their own pockets. When District 17 elected new officers Keeney and Mooney agreed that Keeney, because he had led the secession movement, would seek the president’s job, while Mooney would run for secretary-treasurer.

The two were strong willed but they were not pigheaded. Pondering the warning from Cornwell that the Army was on the way they realized they had no choice but to stop the march. They spent that day alternating between frantic phone conversations to Charleston, pleading with Cornwell for more time, and frantic speeches to their members, urging them to listen to reason. Finally, armed with a fresh promise from Cornwell to appoint a commission, headed by West Virginia’s adjutant general, Thomas B. Davis, to investigate the allegations against the mine owners, the union men heeded the urgings of their leaders and agreed to disband.

Hopes for Cornwell’s inquiry, never too bright to begin with, were further dimmed almost immediately. He seemed to give little weight to the miners’ complaints. Instead, the governor told the New York Times that “some mysterious radical influence” was responsible for the march, sparking what he described as “false reports” of the rumors of atrocities against the union organizers. A fortnight after his interview with the Times, addressing a trade association convention in White Sulphur Springs, Cornwell underlined his suspicions of the labor movement, warning that radical labor leaders were at work on a deliberate plan to overthrow the government and install a communist system. “They do not intend to try to have their policies put into force through a popular vote,” he said. “That would be too slow,” and it would never happen. Laying the groundwork for the conspiracy, Cornwell said, was the union drive to shorten the work week, which he argued would inevitably reduce production and raise prices.

If Cornwell mistrusted the labor movement, his feelings were fervently returned by the leadership of the United Mine Workers. A few days after the miners’ march had ended, John L. Lewis, then acting president of the union, publicly rebuked the governor. If Cornwell had properly upheld civil rights and civil liberties, Lewis wrote in a letter authorized by his union’s national convention and released to the press, “it would not be necessary for free-born American citizens to arm themselves to protect their Constitutional rights.” Meanwhile the convention’s policy committee, in a militant mood, endorsed nationalization of the mines, and of the country’s railroads, actions that only darkened the governor’s already bleak view of the house of labor.

So it should have surprised no one when John L. Lewis called the mine workers out on a national strike set for November 1, 1919, that Cornwell could hardly wait to once again appeal for Federal troops; he acted two days before the strike was scheduled to start. The soldiers arrived in force, but life went on much as usual. Most union miners stayed out on strike; in Mingo County the non-union mines continued to produce coal. In the absence of serious disorder, the troops were withdrawn by mid-November. On December 10 the union sent its men back to work having gained a 14 percent wage increase and the promise that an arbitration commission would investigate their other demands, a pledge that turned out to have important consequences for the union’s cause in southern West Virginia.

The fact that their own miners had stayed on the job fostered the belief among the non-union operators of Mingo County that they were invulnerable to the union movement, a state of affairs they credited to the high wages and favorable working conditions they claimed to provide. This view was given full-throated expression on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington by Mingo County’s own congressman, Republican Wells Goodykoontz. A freshman on the Hill, but a veteran servant of the mine operators, he spoke of the “genial surroundings” and high wages enjoyed by local miners. They had avoided the tentacles of the UMW, Goodykoontz informed his colleagues, because they were “the most happy, independent and contented of all our citizenry.”

The real world was quite different from the picture Goodykoontz projected. In fact six mines had closed in Mingo County since the end of the war and miners still on the job were working fewer hours. Mingo County coal production in 1919 sank half a million tons below 1918. And though some miners were earning more—the average wage was almost 30 percent higher than before the war—this advantage was undercut by soaring inflation and shrunk dramatically in the eyes of miners when it was compared with the skyrocketing profits of their bosses, which neared 600 percent.

Most of the Mingo County miners were descended from Scotch-Irish pioneers who had opened up this hill country a century before. For most of that time the region was sparsely populated, inhabited mainly by subsistence farmers and hunters. Like mountaineers everywhere, they were proud, clannish and set in their ways. The harshness of their conditions tended to concentrate their minds on survival and little else. They were “a hard bitten lot,” in the view of one of the early mine owners. “They drank and fought and gambled and whored.” These West Virginia natives remained farmers at heart and they saw their work in the mines, irregular as it was, as merely a temporary expedient when crops were bad, a way to get through the hard times until they could return to tend their fields. Given this mind-set, the appeals of labor union organizers, with their talk of better wages and working conditions to be achieved in the long run, faced a hard sell.

The African-American miners who migrated to the southern West Virginia coalfields from the Deep South also posed a problem. They were relieved to have escaped the malignant racism of the Old Confederacy. A miner’s pay was significantly better than a sharecropper’s wages, and like their white co-workers, the black miners feared that heeding the siren call of the labor organizer would only cause trouble for them with their coal operator bosses.

Not that UMW leaders anticipated theirs would be an easy road. Cornwell’s paranoid view of organized labor was widely shared in Mingo County, particularly among the well-to-do, and by some war veterans, who having finished off the Kaiser were ready to crush the latest threat to American security posed by the Bolsheviki and their union allies. In October of 1919, as the mine owners were facing down the striking union, Mingo County veterans set up their own American Legion post, excluding ex-doughboys who sympathized with the union, and picked local businessmen and other UMW foes as their leaders. Most significant was their choice of a commander, Anthony “Bad Tony” Gaujot, who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Meuse-Argonne offensive against the German legions. But he had earned his nickname as a leader of the mine guards in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike, when his brutality made him notorious even among that ruthless bunch.

Nevertheless, the union pressed ahead, with Lewis himself traveling to Bluefield, to announce a campaign to organize miners throughout the southern Appalachians. “Now is the logical time for this work,” Lewis said, “and the campaign will be pushed through to a finish.” What made the timing particularly logical from Lewis’s standpoint was his expectation, which turned out to be well founded, that the arbitration commission appointed as part of the coal strike settlement would agree to grant the union miners an additional wage increase. Given the economic hard times prevailing in Mingo County, it was reasonable to assume that the non-union miners would demand the same raise, thus adding to the momentum behind the union drive.

Another boost came from the mine owners themselves by the heavy-handedness of their dealings not only with their workers, but with their communities. Thus in January of 1920 an explosion in the headquarters of the Superior-Thacker coal company in Williamson rocked every building within a mile, smashing store fronts and living room windows. Remarkably, only one person died. The company denied any responsibility, though it did agree to pay 25 percent of the cost of property repairs. That same winter, the Hunt Forbes Coal Company refused to compensate the city for damage to the city streets from its lumbering coal-hauling trucks. About twenty miles to the north, in Kermit, the Gray Eagle Coal Company, weary of arguing with the town fathers about access to a public road, declared itself the winner in the dispute and posted armed guards to protect the property it claimed as its own on the contested land. Powerless to act, the citizens brooded and grumbled among themselves.

The notion that some of the inhabitants of Mingo County might take exception to such behavior apparently did not occur to either the coal companies or their supporters, among whom they could still count Governor Cornwell. A week after union leader Lewis had laid down the gauntlet to the coal companies in Bluefield, the governor hastened to that same city to reassure the business community. Praising the non-union mine owners for helping to break the 1919 strike, he warned a meeting of West Virginia builders that union success in organizing these fields would surely lead to nationalization of the industry. If he could not keep peace during the union organizing drive, Cornwell promised, he would quit his job, whereupon the assembled builders leaped to their feet to urge Cornwell to stay at the helm of West Virginia’s ship of state.

In the minds of Mingo’s miners, all such rhetoric was overshadowed when the arbitration commission recommended that union coal miners receive a 27 percent raise, an increase that would be denied non-union miners. Unrest swept the pits in Mingo, and non-union miners pressed their bosses for an increase. The response of the Howard Colliery at Chattaroy typified management’s attitude. The Howard manager offered a modest increase but then boosted prices in the company store. When some miners complained, they were pistol-whipped by mine guards. At Burnwell Coal and Coke, one impatient miner posted a notice at the entrance. “To the miners of the Burnwell Coal Company: We shall have this 27 percent raise; we want this 27 percent raise which the government has granted us.” The response from the president of Burnwell was not long in coming. He said, as one of his employees recalled, “he would let his mine go until moss grows over it, until it falls in the huckleberry ridge, before he would ever work a union man.” Eighty of the ninety-two Burnwell miners walked off their jobs and sent two of their number to Charleston to ask District 17 for a charter; hundreds of other miners elsewhere in Mingo did much the same thing. In accordance with union policy, they were instructed by Tom Keeney to return home, reclaim their jobs and reopen the mines. Then, Keeney promised, they would be welcomed into the union. The discontents did as they were bidden. As the last week in April began, the organizing drive swept like wildfire through Mingo County. The union counted 300 new members on one day, hundreds more the next. And its new members went into the mines proudly bearing their District 17 cards. But as fast as they joined, that was how fast the coal companies fired them, and rousted them from their company homes to boot.

Yet the organizing drive seemed to pick up energy from the outrage of the fired men. By early May union operatives in the field claimed to have formed fourteen locals and signed up nearly 3,000 of Mingo’s 4,000 miners. It greatly helped that Mingo political leaders turned the county into sort of an organizing haven. They were a different cut from the coal company satraps who made up the regimes elsewhere in southern West Virginia. The highest ranking of this group was Mingo County Sheriff George T. Blankenship. Combining a reputation for honesty that appealed to the better citizens of town with a background in the Railroad Brotherhoods that won him the support of working people, Blankenship gained office in 1916 in an election that broke the back of the Republican machine that had long controlled the county.

Two years later the municipal elections in Williamson brought to power as mayor another union friend and Blankenship ally, Cabell Testerman. The mayor, who owned the town soda fountain and jewelry store, was a businessman, but he counted on the miners for his political base. Standing five foot five inches tall, weighing a portly 170 pounds, he did not cut a prepossessing figure. But he was not a man to be lightly dismissed, as he made plain after he won a court battle against political foes who brought charges of Prohibition violation against him shortly after his re-election in 1919. “I am the mayor of Matewan elected by the people for a second term which speaks for itself,” he declared. “They can say what they please, fight when they please, but I am going to run the town according to the laws of this state.”

Testerman had previously demonstrated his resolve to deal firmly with Matewan’s rough-and-tumble environment by his choice as police chief of Sid Hatfield, a man regarded by the coal operators and many of the town’s respectable citizens as little better than a thug, a man of “primitive scruples and dubious attainments.” The miners, though, saw Sid, as they all called him, as their champion, a man who could be counted on to stand up for their side, even against the odds, in confronting the hired guns of the mine owners.

Having just entered his twenty-seventh year, Hatfield already was recognized as a dangerous gunman, an impression bolstered by his cold, close-set eyes and the menacing glare he cast upon his many adversaries. In part he owed his reputation as “The Terror of the Tug” to his family name, stamping him as a member of the clan that had waged the much celebrated feud with another mountaineer family, the McCoys. This bloody vendetta traced its roots back to Civil War border clashes. Back then William Anderson Hatfield, a crack shot better know as Devil Anse, led a band of Confederate marauders based in West Virginia while the McCoys fought on the Union side in Kentucky. The murders, kidnappings and arson perpetrated by both sides were much romanticized by the press. But many of these clashes were nothing more glorious than drunken brawls. After the turn of the century the feud guns fell silent and the clan rivalries and allegiances were blurred by time and intermarriage. As the Hatfields proliferated, so that many could no longer trace the bonds of kinship, some became quite respectable. One of their number, Henry, was even elected governor of West Virginia on the Republican ticket in 1912, and played a role, soon after taking office, in settling the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike.

Nevertheless the memories of Devil Anse’s marksmanship lingered on and police chief Sid Hatfield of Matewan kept the legend alive, even though his relationship to the old Confederate was somewhat obscure. He was said to have been born out of wedlock to a drifter named Crabtree and the wife of a local resident named Jake Hatfield. But having been raised by Jake Hatfield as his own son, the police chief chose to call himself Hatfield and no one in Matewan was prepared to argue the point.

Whatever his lineage, Hatfield’s loyalty to the miners had firm roots. He had grown up among them and worked alongside them, riding cars deep into the earth, then making his way through a maze of underground tunnels, with the only light coming from the safety lamp stuck in his cap. He had to be always on the watch for broken wires or stray timbers until he finally reached the chamber where he could actually mine the coal, swinging his pick, drilling and blasting, crawling through blackness, sweating on his knees as he shoveled coal into waiting carts. And always close at hand lurked the threat of a cave-in or blast of a violent death.

What set Hatfield apart from the other young men of the area was his skill at gunplay, exceptional even among the many hillcountry men who took pride in their marksmanship. In the fashion of the legendary heroes of the Old West, Hatfield often carried two pistols, and it was said he could shoot with either hand with deadly accuracy. Sometimes, for the sake of speed, he would fire right through his pocket. To demonstrate his marksmanship he would throw a potato in the air, draw his pistol and split it open. About five years earlier Hatfield had engaged in what he liked to call “a little shooting match” with a mine foreman named Wilson. The unfortunate foreman did not survive the encounter. Questioned by authorities, Hatfield had claimed self-defense and was cleared of wrongdoing.

Hatfield’s fists were also a formidable weapon. In his first year in office he had inflicted what the Williamson Daily News called “a good pummeling” on former Matewan Mayor “Squire” Andy Hatfield, whom Sid Hatfield had never forgiven for his testimony against him in a civil suit. Arrested for felonious assault, Sid Hatfield was released when no one pressed charges. Asked about the injury done to the “Squire,” Hatfield demonstrated his scorn for the whole Matewan establishment. With a straight face, the police chief contended that the former mayor had been bending over to feed his swine, when “one of the pigs grabbed him by the nose and came very near biting it off,” before Sid Hatfield could rescue him. “We hope our people can get along better in the future,” commented the Williamson News.

Hatfield had been a heavy drinker until he realized that liquor got him into trouble and dulled his reflexes. When he was twenty-four he quit cold. Two years later Testerman made him chief of police. His new responsibility and his sobriety did not cause him to alter his other habits. Single and carefree Hatfield ran with the boys, excelled at pool and poker, chewed and smoked and had an eye for the ladies. One lady he was particularly interested in, according to local gossip, was Jessie Testerman, the twenty-six-year-old wife of Matewan’s mayor. It was not hard to see why. The First Lady of Matewan was buxom and vivacious, with warm brown eyes and a coquette’s smile. Once Hatfield became police chief he spent considerable time visiting with the mayor and his wife. Beyond that, some of Hatfield’s detractors in town, of whom there were more than a few, claimed that he also managed to visit with Jessie Testerman when her husband was absent. And on occasion, it was said, Hatfield and the mayor’s wife could be seen evenings, walking near the Tug, among the trees that lined the river bank. If the mayor himself had heard these stories, he gave no indication in his dealings with his police chief.

Working together, Mayor Testerman, Chief Hatfield and Sheriff Blankenship managed to serve as a buffer for the miners of Mingo against the power of the coal operators, whose rule elsewhere in southern West Virginia was unchallenged. Their role as protectors led to increased tension when the coal operators sought to counter the union’s organizing drive by evicting union members from their company homes. The miners lived in these houses without leases and the company’s legal argument for the evictions was that the tenancy of the miners was dependent on their employment. “It is like a servant who works in your house,” S. B. Avis, a lawyer for the Williamson Coal Operators, explained. “If the servant leaves your employment, if you discharge him, you ask him to get out of the servants quarters. It is a question of master and servant.”

But neither the miners nor Sheriff Blankenship accepted this master-servant theory. On April 27 Blankenship arrested Albert Felts, the detective agency’s man in Matewan, charged him with illegally processing evictions and hauled Felts and twenty-seven of his men into magistrates court. Felts and his cohorts were released but only after agreeing to have Blankenship handle future evictions. Blankenship insisted that the companies give their tenants ample notice before acting, and with him at the controls, these ejections moved at a much slower pace.

Though frustrated by the sheriff’s foot-dragging on evictions, the companies nevertheless pressed ahead on that front and deployed another weapon, so-called yellow-dog contracts, a tactic developed by the Hitchman Coal Co. in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1907. Under these agreements, whose name signified the contempt in which they were held by union members, workers pledged not to join a union under penalty of forfeiting their jobs and, not incidentally, their right to live in company housing. If these contracts were violated, the coal companies not only fired the offending employee but went to court to get an injunction to stop the union from organizing. The yellow-dog contracts had been challenged in the courts by the UMW but after a prolonged legal battle had finally been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917.

“Obey the law,” Mooney admonished the good people of Matewan. But he also told them that the same law should bind the mine operators as well. The operators, he pointed out, had posted notices ordering miners to vacate their houses, and several of them had been ejected by Baldwin-Felts agents before the eviction proceedings had even reached the courts. These private detectives, Mooney told the crowd, had no right to assume the authority of duly appointed law enforcement agents.

The next day Mooney fired off a telegram of protest against the tactics of the mine operators to U.S. Attorney General Palmer. “Miners are being evicted without due process of law,” Mooney wired. “One miner held up with Winchester while roof was torn from his home. . . . Cannot some action be taken by your department?” But Palmer, who many believed like General Wood had his eye on a run for the White House, was busy with his drive to defend the nation against the Bolshevik menace, and not incidentally promote his own future. He left the miners and operators to their own devices.

In Matewan, a few days after Mooney’s futile telegram, a notice addressed to employees of the Stone Mountain Coal Company, signed by its superintendent, P. F. Smith, went up on the window of the company store. Smith reminded the miners that the houses in which their families lived were owned by the company and stated, in no uncertain terms, that miners who joined the union must leave these houses at once. It was to enforce this order that Tom Felts had ordered the dispatch of extra men from Bluefield into Matewan on May 19.

It was only natural that the mine operators should turn to the Baldwin-Felts agency when they had a tough and dirty job to be done. Founded in West Virginia thirty years before, the agency had gained a nationwide reputation for its dedication to union busting. In 1908 a West Virginia mine owner named Justus Collins, who pioneered the role of the detectives as strikebreakers, in a letter to an Alabama operator credited “these gentlemen” with having wiped out the union in the Williamson field. “Gentlemen” was not a term that everyone would apply to the Baldwin-Felts agents, certainly not the union miners. The detectives were a rough and harsh-tempered lot, many of them former policemen, others of a type often pursued by police. One union sympathizer labeled them as “nothing more than ‘bums,’ with psychopathic personalities.” In 1913 when the UMW struck the southern Colorado coalfields, Baldwin-Felts agents riding in two armored cars strafed a tent colony of strikers with machine gun fire, killing one worker and wounding another. Later Tom Felts would claim that if there were machine guns used in the Colorado strike violence, they did not belong to the Baldwin-Felts agency and he knew nothing about who might have fired them. He had made the same denial about the machine guns used against union miners in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia.

The Baldwin-Felts agents performed a variety of chores for the mine operators. Deputized by obliging sheriffs under West Virginia’s permissive laws, they maintained order in the mining camps, collected rents, guarded the payroll and also kept out “undesirables,” a broad category that included known criminals, professional gamblers, prostitutes, moonshiners and, certainly not of least importance, union organizers. Baldwin-Felts agents stirred particular hostility among the miners for their undercover work. Joining the workforce ostensibly as ordinary miners, they reported back to the company on the plans and remarks of their co-workers who appeared sympathetic to the union. These unfortunates were then fired and blacklisted so that other companies would not hire them.

West Virginia’s law enforcement officials marveled at the zeal and ruthlessness of the Baldwin-Felts spies, likening the agency’s network to the secret police of Czarist Russia. One of Tom Felts’s most intrepid snoops, Charlie Lively, posing as a union sympathizer, went to great lengths to ingratiate himself among union members, even organizing several locals in Mingo County at the height of the union’s campaign in the spring of 1920. A familiar figure at union meetings, Lively also found time to establish a restaurant in Matewan, which became a gathering place for union men. Even as he reported back to the coal companies, Lively “was loud in his denunciation of the gunman system and advised the miners to join the union and fight for their rights,” Fred Mooney later recalled. Lively was much in evidence on the May evening that Mooney addressed the mass meeting of miners and afterward invited Mooney and Blizzard back to his restaurant. Lively and Mooney had been raised in the same Kanawha Valley town of Davis Creek, and had once belonged to the same UMW local. Lively could not have been more hospitable to his old friend on this rainy evening, urging Mooney to spend the night at his own home. But to Mooney, Lively’s enthusiasm seemed a bit overdone, and he turned the invitation down, a decision that saved him from later regret.

Still and all, memories of the agency’s role in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike were fresh enough in May of 1920 that as the Felts brothers readied for trouble in Matewan, they thought it prudent to proceed with caution. Soon after he arrived in town, Albert Felts, the agency’s field superintendent, approached Matewan’s Mayor Cabell Testerman, to ask permission to mount machine guns on the roofs of some downtown buildings.

Despite the dim view some people took of his detectives, Albert Felts saw himself as a paragon of respectability. In Bluefield he lived in one of the town’s “most picturesque homes,” and he was a member in good standing of the Shriners and of the Elks. In trying to negotiate with Testerman, Felts was careful to couch his proposal in restrained and courteous terms. The chief concern of the Baldwin-Felts agency was helping preserve the peace in Matewan, Felts stressed.

But no one knew when there might be trouble, Felts argued. The machine guns would give his men command of the streets in case of a disturbance. And then the detective played his trump card. This was important for the job the agency needed to do in Matewan, he told the mayor, important enough that he would be willing to invest $1,000 in the mayor’s goodwill. Would that help Testerman see things his way?

Albert Felts took the mayor’s refusal in stride. He remained in Matewan, keeping his eye on the union’s activities and prepared for the confrontation he knew would be coming someday soon. Once his brother told him that reinforcements were on the way, Albert realized that day had arrived. When the seven agents Tom Felts had dispatched to Matewan arrived, Albert Felts was on hand as train No. 29 pulled into the Norfolk and Western depot.

The station was just off Mate Street, the main thoroughfare of this town of only about 800 people, whose name its citizens pronounced as “Maitwahn.” Lined by maple trees with whitewashed trunks, Mate Street had just a single block of businesses, dominated by the Old Matewan National Bank building on one corner. A few doors down, past Chambers Hardware, the Dew Drop Inn, and a couple of drug stores, a jewelry store and the pool hall was the Urias Hotel, which served as headquarters for the Baldwin-Felts men. Right across the street, in another office building, was the union’s headquarters.

The hotel owner, Anse Hatfield, was such a good friend to the detectives that Tom Felts had written his brother Albert, just a few days before, suggesting that Albert “show Anse Hatfield a little attention and let him know that we appreciate the attitude which he has taken.” The seven men who came in on No. 29 stopped off at the Urias and while they waited for the other agents due to arrive on the next train made quick work of the lunch Anse Hatfield served them.

Shortly after noon Albert Felts, who by then counted thirteen men in his party, including himself and another Felts brother, Lee, decided it was time to get to work. The detectives piled into three cars and drove to the Stone Mountain property on the outskirts of town, where they began clearing the miners’ cabins, hauling the furniture out and piling it on the street, while the miners and their families stood by helplessly. The Baldwin-Felts men intended to finish in time to make the 5:15 train back to Bluefield.

But Felts and his crew were soon interrupted by Testerman and Sid Hatfield. Felts knew that both were friendly to the union, but of the two it was Sid Hatfield who most worried Albert Felts. Indeed the Baldwin-Felts agency viewed Hatfield as such a formidable adversary that Tom Felts had decided he would rather have the police chief with him than against him. In his pocket as he waited for Sid Hatfield to approach outside the homes of the evicted miners, Albert Felts carried a note from his brother, Tom, proposing that Hatfield be persuaded to change sides for a consideration, perhaps $200 to $300 a month. “Whatever arrangements you make,” Tom Felts had cautioned, “must be understood and have this understood with Hatfield. If you make a deal with him I think you should suggest some means of bringing about a controversy or misunderstanding of some sort which will result in a split between him and the bunch which would look plausible and give him an opportunity of turning against them and telling them where to head in,” Felts explained. “Because that is what we will expect if we make a deal.”

The circuit judge in Williamson had given approval, Felts told them. But he had no written court order with him, and Hatfield and Testerman were not satisfied. Felts simply shrugged off their arguments and directed his men to go on with their work. Testerman, not one to swallow such affronts readily, was plainly indignant. “Well you don’t pull anything like that and get away with it around here,” the mayor snapped. Then he turned on his heel and together with Hatfield strode away.

Back in town about 1:30 P.M. Testerman and Hatfield immediately phoned Sheriff Blankenship’s office in Williamson and asked the advice of Deputy Jesse “Toney” Webb, the sheriff’s office manager. Webb put Testerman through to Wade Bronson, the county prosecutor, who told him the eviction orders were illegal and that warrants should be issued against the detectives. Testerman sent Charlie Kelly, one of the evicted miners, to Williamson to swear out the warrants.

Rapt listeners to these conversations were the Matewan phone operators, Elsie Chambers and Mae Chafin, the latter a cousin of the great enemy of the union miners, Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin, whose views of the mine workers union she shared. Mae lost no time in calling Anse Hatfield, the ally of the Baldwin-Felts men at the Urias Hotel to warn him. Anse, she knew, could be relied on to alert the Baldwin-Felts detectives.

By mid-afternoon the whole town knew that Charlie Kelly was due to arrive with the warrants Testerman sought on the 5:15 P.M. from Williamson, the same train the Baldwin-Felts men planned to take back to Bluefield. Fearing trouble, Testerman told Hugh Combs, a UMW loyalist, to select a dozen “sober-minded men” to back up Hatfield, as special officers. By about four P.M. Combs’s deputies, duly sworn in by Testerman along with some other miners, began gathering at the railroad station. Nearly all were armed and while they waited cleaned their guns and checked their ammunition.

Meanwhile, Albert Felts and his men had returned to the Urias Hotel to pack. After they learned of Sid Hatfield’s plans, they broke down their Winchesters and wrapped them up. Albert Felts and his two top deputies, C. B. Cunningham and Lee Felts, the only detectives who had licenses to carry small arms in Matewan, stashed their pistols on their belts as they walked to the station. They were almost there when Sid Hatfield once again appeared, accosted Albert Felts, and told him that he and his men were under arrest. The warrants, Hatfield said, were coming on the next train.

They all stopped when Testerman joined them in front of Chambers Hardware, across from the station, and asked to see Felts’s warrant. Felts handed the mayor the warrant and Hatfield backed off into the hardware store. While Albert Felts still smiled Testerman studied the warrant, which in vague language charged Hatfield with taking a prisoner away from a local constable a few days before. Finally, the mayor declared: “It’s bogus.”

There would be nearly as many versions of what happened next as there were witnesses to the scene. By some accounts Albert Felts shot the mayor, then whirled and fired into the hardware store at Sid Hatfield. Others said that the first shots came from the store itself, and from Hatfield’s gun, striking both Felts and Testerman. At any rate everyone agreed that the first men to fall were Cabell Testerman and Albert Felts.

Then all hell broke loose. Immediately Hugh Combs’s deputies and some of the other miners who had been looking on raked the street with gunfire. Albert Felts, his brother Lee and Cunningham drew their pistols and returned fire, but they were badly outgunned. Most of their comrades, whose guns were packed away, scrambled for cover behind trees and fences. But Combs’s men were relentless. One after another the Baldwin-Felts agents fell.

Not everyone’s marksmanship was that good. Art Williams, a miner and another special deputy, fired all the rounds in his .32 caliber revolver at Lee Felts but missed with every shot. Felts fired back with the same lack of success. Finally Reece Chambers, whose son Ed was a Hatfield crony and who had just seen Lee Felts shoot his brother, Hallie, opened fire with his rifle and Felts fell to the ground, mortally wounded.

Another detective and former Virginia police chief, A. J. Boohrer, managed to find his weapon and shot a miner, Bob Mullins, who had been fired that morning for joining the union. “Oh Lord, I’m shot,” Mullins cried as he fell to the ground, mortally wounded. But then Art Williams picked up another gun he found on Lee Felts’s body and shot and killed Boohrer, standing so close to him that Boohrer’s blood covered his pistol.

His comrade J. W. Ferguson staggered away from the station after taking a round from a miner’s gun. A bystander helped the wounded man to a chair on the porch of a nearby home, but fled as a group of miners ran toward the house. When Ferguson’s good samaritan returned a few minutes later he found the detective lying dead in an alley and a bullet hole in the back of the chair. The miners carried Ferguson’s body to a burial ground on a litter fashioned out of Winchesters. As they passed through town one of the miners nodded at the rifles and said: “They brought them in here and they’re going out on them.”

Some of the detectives were more fortunate. One, John McDowell, running for his life, asked a woman bystander: “What’s the best way out of town?” Pointing to the river, she said, “Split the creek.” McDowell jumped into the Tug River and swam to safety in Kentucky. One of his colleagues, Bill Salter, took the same route, after first hiding for hours in a trash can until the violence had ended and the coast was clear. Another detective, Oscar Bennett, escaped because he had gone to buy cigarettes just before the battle started. When he heard the shots he sneaked on a waiting train and rode safely out of town.

The Baldwin-Felts men did not come, though one train that passed by did carry a contingent of state police who thought it wiser to delay their arrival in that bloody town until morning. But there was good reason for concern in Matewan and all of Mingo County. This place and its people were now fully caught up in a ruthless conflict between two old enemies. For the clash at Matewan Station that took ten lives and lasted twenty minutes was just the latest outburst in the struggle that had raged for half a century between the men who owned the mines and the men who worked beneath the earth.