The Battle of Blair Mountain

‟I HAVE ALWAYS found that if I could not make a living in one place, I could in another,” John L. Lewis told a convention of Illinois miners when he was an up-and-coming UMW official. A plan to use union funds to provide for unemployment benefits was up for a vote and Lewis opposed it, using an argument about the work ethic that he might have borrowed from the local Chamber of Commerce. “Many men do not hunt work if they can make a living without it,” he declared.

Lewis’s views, expressed in 1909, a decade before he became UMW president, drew on his own experience in life and the labor movement. Born in 1880, he was the son of an Iowa miner who moved from one coal town to another to provide for his family. After a few youthful years as a miner and construction worker in the West, Lewis returned to Iowa, where he sought a place for himself among the middle-class gentry of the town of Lucas, marrying the schoolteacher daughter of a local doctor and trying his hand at business and then as a politician. After his grain-and-feed venture went sour and he lost a race for mayor, Lewis decided to go back to coal mining and to make a future for himself in the UMW. With the active support of his father and five brothers, Lewis quickly became president of one of the largest locals in the state.

When he made known his opposition to unemployment benefits, ten years before he became the UMW’s president, Lewis was already embarked on a career path that relied less on comradely proletarian zeal than on his own energy, ambition and gifts for ingratiating himself with members of the union hierarchy. Friendly union leaders in Illinois helped him get a post as UMW lobbyist in Illinois, where he caught the eye of AFL President Samuel Gompers, who made him a national organizer for the labor federation. During the next few years Lewis rarely rested as he traveled around the land on political and organizing missions for the AFL and the UMW, assignments that gained him influential friends among labor leaders. In 1917 he was made acting vice president of the UMW. “Our ship made port today,” Lewis wrote presciently in his journal. Without ever standing for election for office in the national union, he had positioned himself to be its leader.

This blend of pragmatism and individualism, which carried Lewis to the top of his union, reflected the forces that shaped the shaky status of American labor in a land imbued by the spirit of free enterprise. While business ruled the roost, the promise of abundant economic opportunity supposedly loomed for one and all. Optimism about their chances for economic and social mobility widely shared by American workers undercut the class consciousness and sense of solidarity that held sway among European laborers.

To be sure, workers had to deal with plenty of inequity. This was true for all workers, but particularly for immigrants, who learned that they often had to pay off the steel plant foreman to get hired, and even so generally got the job closest to the open hearth furnace. As for African-Americans, they learned early on that certain preferred positions, such as the better-paying craft jobs were out of bounds. In sum, injustice was a fact of working-class existence, almost every day and everywhere.

Even so, the knife edge of unfairness did not bite nearly as deep or as sharp in this country as it did in the lands where the immigrants came from, or in the case of black workers as it did deep in the heart of Dixie. And there was enough hope for economic advancement and improvement, buttressed by the pledge of political justice and equality embedded in the nation’s fundamental charters, to curb resentment and restrain commitment to labor’s challenge to the established power structure.

Given what they hoped were favorable prospects of ascending higher on the economic ladder, many workers had to ponder whether they were better off trying to exploit their own chances for advancement rather than committing themselves to improve conditions on the lower rungs. The labor movement of course had other huge barriers to overcome—the might of entrenched corporate interests, the widespread bias of the legislatures, the indifference if not outright opposition of the courts and a fractious and diverse workforce. But the internal ambivalence of workers toward trade unions contributed to the difficulties in overcoming these external obstacles and to American labor’s slow and unsteady progress in redressing economic inequities.

Thus, frustration dominated the saga of the early trade unions as they hesitated and vacillated, shifting their energies from the economic arena to the political arena and back again, doing best in good times, and least, when they were most needed, in hard times. The labor movement did not gain a permanent foothold in the United States until late in the 19th century with the birth of the American Federation of Labor, a very businesslike labor organization. Established by a group of national unions in various trades in 1886, the AFL quickly staked out positions that symbolized labor’s willingness to come to terms with the American way.

The new federation backed away from the broad and idealistic political reforms that had been dear to the hearts of the once potent Knights of Labor and other earlier national labor amalgams. Unions would continue to aim at political goals, the new federation decided, but only by working through the existing political parties rather than entering the political arena themselves. Under what was called the “new unionism,” more mundane concerns close to home—wages, hours and the resolution of grievances—would now assume top priority.

This practical doctrine found its most articulate spokesman in Samuel Gompers, who emerged as the paradigm for the modern American labor leader. Born in a London East End tenement at the midpoint of the 19th century to the family of a Jewish cigar maker, Gompers finished his formal schooling at the age of ten; he began work, first as an apprentice to a shoemaker, then like his father, in a cigar factory. But his education continued long afterward. In the United States, to which his family immigrated in the midst of the Civil War, Gompers began to spend much of his spare time at Cooper Union, the New York cultural and educational center, absorbing knowledge at lectures and testing his wits in informal debates.

Gompers also tried out his ideas on his fellow employees in the cigar shop. Everyone contributed to the conversations, and also to a fund for buying newspapers, magazines and books, which included the output of Marx, Engels and other socialist thinkers. But when it came to socialism Gompers was fond of quoting the advice of a fellow worker and ex-socialist. “Go to socialist meetings,” Gompers remembered being instructed. “Learn all they have to give. Read all they publish. Just don’t join.” He never did.

Also of great weight in shaping Gompers’s outlook was the infamous riot in Tompkins Square in lower Manhattan where jobless workers gathered to protest during the great depression of 1874. Mounted police, drawn by reports that radical agitators had instigated the assembly, charged the crowd, swinging their clubs with wild abandon, striking out at bystanders as well as protestors. Little public sympathy was forthcoming. Typical was the comment of the New York Times, which found the flight of the protestors from the charging police, “not unamusing” and portrayed the demonstration as the handiwork of alien troublemakers. Witnessing the violence, Gompers, who also blamed the violence on outside agitators, took the lesson to heart. “I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds had been woven the experience of earning their bread by daily labor,” he later wrote.

Vowing to steer clear of radicalism, Gompers helped to rescue his own Cigar Makers Union from near collapse by raising dues and providing health and unemployment benefits. His success compelled other unions to adopt his businesslike tactics. It was only natural that Gompers should play a leading role in melding these national unions into a new organization, which by 1886 would become the American Federation of Labor, with Gompers himself as its first president. It was a post he would hold, with the exception of a single year, 1895, when sour economic times led to the election of a socialist dissident, until his death in 1924.

Throughout his rule Gompers continued to preach straightahead dollars-and-cents unionism. He spoke scornfully of “theorizers” and “intellectuals,” whom he contended served only to sow confusion and dissension in the ranks of labor. Nevertheless, deep in his heart and in the back of his mind, he still cherished broader goals that reflected the idealism of his cigar shop seminars. “What does labor want?” he once asked rhetorically. “We want more school houses and less jails, more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed, more justice and less revenge, in fact more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and bright.”

But as time went on and the organization he headed became more entrenched as part of the economic system that ruled the nation, Gompers thought less about building a new Jerusalem and more about maintaining the power and influence of himself and his federation. It was Gompers’s conviction that labor never could displace the capitalists on top of the economic heap that encouraged the barons of industry to negotiate with Gompers and his unions. And this was a reality he never forgot.

In 1874 the same economic conditions that led to the Tompkins Square riot that had so impressed Gompers triggered pitched battles between police and Pennsylvania anthracite miners outraged by arbitrary wage cuts. Adding to the hostility on both sides were dark stories about the role of the Molly Maguires, a secret society whose members allegedly sought to intimidate the coal operators as their forebears had once cowed landlords in Ireland with threats of arson and murder. Ultimately it turned out that the coal operators themselves had manufactured many of these threats as an excuse to smash the unions trying to organize the mines. Meanwhile, though, mass trials in 1875 led to convictions of more than a score of the Molly Maguires, no fewer than ten of whom were hanged for murder.

The challenge of unionizing the coal mines was compounded by the nature of the coal miner’s job and of the industry. Digging coal was like no other task in the new industrial economy. The men toiled in subterranean chambers called rooms or places, linked by tunnel corridors to the vertical shaft that served as entrance and exit for the mine. Each miner worked in his own room under an earthen roof supported by layers of unmined coal and wooden bulwarks, which the miner positioned. Because the tunnels were shallow, the miner usually had to lie on his side and swing his pick against the lower part of the wall or “face” of his room to get at the coal. After he had cut a three- or four-foot-deep slit in the face, he placed a piece of wood under the cut to keep the coal from falling prematurely.

Then, using an auger five or six feet long, he drilled holes above the cut for an explosive charge. Once he had packed and placed the charge, corked it with clay or dirt and attached the fuse, the miner backed away to what he hoped was a safe distance and lit the fuse. After the coal had been loosened by the blast, the miner loaded it onto tram cars, being careful to remove the larger pieces of slate and rock. The tram cars, mounted on tracks, were ultimately hoisted to the surface for shipment.

Not only was this work hard and tedious—it was laden with danger. Between 1890 and 1917 more than 26,000 miners were killed on the job, many in explosions. About 12,000 miners were maimed each year, some crippled for life. Sometimes hundreds died at a time; one blast in the little Illinois community of Cherry wiped out the town’s entire population.

The miners could feel a distant kinship with their bosses, since in a sense they themselves were entrepreneurs. In most cases they were paid not by the day or the hour but by the ton, their earnings depending on how much coal they dug. The one compensation for the arduous and perilous ask was the freedom the miners enjoyed, unusual for workers in the industrial age. They set their own hours. If the operators established work schedules, the miners ignored them. Separated as they were into dozens of individual rooms the miners were hard to supervise.

The auxiliary workers, or “day men,” who did not actually dig the coal but instead did the hauling and maintenance work, and made up about 30 percent of the workforce, were paid a daily wage. But they too were difficult to oversee since they often labored in remote sites, had little contact with foremen and relished their independence as much as the men who actually mined the coal.

At first glance the working conditions—isolation, danger and piece-rate compensation—would have seemed to make the chances of effective union organizing impossible. But other factors helped to draw the miners together, chiefly their resentment against the companies that controlled their lives, not only beneath the earth but above it. Miners worked in company mines with company tools and equipment, which they were required to lease, money that was promptly deducted from their pay.

The company stores that sold them food and other necessities charged exorbitant prices, which the miners had to pay, since there was no other available outlet. Just to guarantee the captivity of their consumers, coal companies paid the miners in scrip, which only the company store would accept. Even when wages rose, coal operators kept ahead of the game by boosting prices at the company store.

A couple of stanzas from Carl Sandburg’s “Company Town” captured the essence of that life:

You live in a company house,
You go to a company school,
You work for this company,
According to company rules.
You all drink company water
And all use company lights,
The company preacher teaches us
What the company thinks is right.

In addition to imposing their will on the workers’ lives, the mine owners often cheated on their own work rules, through a process called cribbing. A miner’s pay was based on the tons of coal he mined. Each car that left the mines supposedly held a specific payload, such as 2,000 pounds. However, operators at times rigged the cars to hold more coal than the specified load, so miners would be paid for only 2,000 pounds when they actually had brought in as much as 2,500. In addition, some operators docked the miners for slate and rock mixed in with the coal. Since docking was imposed at the judgment of the checkweighman, hired and paid by the mine owner, miners were frequently cheated.

One reason for the appeal of a labor union was that it offered the miners a way to combat such chicanery. In bargaining with the mine operator the unions would generally insist that miners have the right to elect the pit committee and checkweighmen, who would represent the miners’ interest in making sure they got an honest break from the company scales.

Still the autonomous nature of the job, and the idiosyncrasies of the industry, shaped the way unions were organized and did their business. “Coal mining is vastly different from any manufacturing or transportation activity,” John L. Lewis pointed out. “It simply cannot be standardized because nature has refused to standardize rocks, slate, coal or men.” Consequently miners from different regions tended to look after their own interests and found it difficult to make common cause with organized unions from other areas.

It was the mine operators who provided the impetus for the miners to band together. With the expansion of railroads, coal operators from various fields started to compete for each other’s markets. Price changes now affected large producing areas and a great number of producers and the miners who worked for them. When Ohio miners joined in 1882 to form the Ohio Miners’ Amalgamated Assn, their charter proclaimed: “It is evident that some step should be taken to check the evils that were fast accruing from insane competition, the heavy foot of which always rests upon the wage of the producer.” But the problem extended beyond Ohio’s borders and required efforts by management and labor that transcended state lines.

To cope with the crazy-quilt pattern of the industry, coal mine unionists in 1885 launched the National Federation of Miners; by 1890 the new organization had evolved into the United Mine Workers, which soon joined forces with Gompers and the AFL. Mirroring the expansion of the industry whose workers it represented, the UMW grew rapidly. But it faced a major problem in one state, West Virginia, where the union movement lagged far behind. This reality had been driven home to the union in 1897 when it staged a nationwide walkout in protest against wage cuts brought on by the depression that devastated the economy for most of the decade. Over 100,000 miners responded and the strike paralyzed the northern fields.

The non-union miners of West Virginia, though, held out. Gompers threw the prestige and power of the AFL into the fray, summoning labor leaders and supporters around the country to rally the West Virginia miners to the UMW banner. Among the labor luminaries who flocked to the Mountain State were Eugene V. Debs, the founder of the American Railways Union, and the fiery “angel” of the miners union, Mary V. ( Mother) Jones, then nearing sixty, who had already made a name for herself as an organizer in the mines of Pennsylvania.

The mine owners fought back. Company police jailed organizers and drove them from the state. Courts issued injunctions to stop the unions in their tracks. UMW President Michael Ratchford convened an emergency meeting of national labor leaders in Wheeling, who protested to the governor of the state against the violations of civil liberties and called upon labor organizations around the country to join the fight. Unions sent thousands of dollars to the state along with more organizers. Mass meetings around the country registered support for the miners’ cause.

But whatever magic Ratchford hoped to conjure up was no match for the economic and legal power of the mine owners. Trying to organize the miners over the opposition of sheriff’s deputies and company police “was taking one’s life in his hands,” an organizer dispatched to proselytize the black miners of West Virginia’s McDowell County later wrote. “While we never had any injunctions issued against us, we had men and Winchesters against us which were in most cases just as effective.” John Mitchell, then vice president of the UMW, survived to become the union’s president a few years later only by fleeing the gunshots of company guards, jumping in an icy mountain stream and swimming to safety.

Despite the resistance in West Virginia, the impact of the 1897 strike in the Midwest was powerful enough so that the union won a major victory there. The ensuing settlement had profound impact on the UMW mainly through one key element—the establishment of the Central Competitive Field Agreement between miners and mine operators in four states—Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania. As a spokesman for the coal operators explained, the purpose of the agreement was to ease the pressures of competition between the mines in the four states: “The idea of this interstate movement was to establish as far as possible uniformity not only in the scale of wages, but in the conditions of mining, and as a result it was applied also to the selling price of coal.”

The agreement did not fix the price of coal. But it leveled the playing field in the four states and made it possible for each operator to know what his competitors’ costs were. The Central Field agreement won by the UMW opened the door for rapid growth of the union. By 1901 it would claim 250,000 members, making it the largest union in the country, a position that it would maintain for the better part of three decades.

Yet one cloud remained on the UMW’s horizon—the coal mines of West Virginia. Said UMW President John Mitchell in 1900: “The principal disturbing feature of the coal industry which in any degree threatens the perpetuity of the peaceful relationship between operators and miners is the absence of organization or mutual understanding between the operators and miners of the State of West Virginia.” Determined to expand the markets for their own coal, the West Virginia operators had refused to join in the Central Field Agreement and did all they could to oppose unionism. The United Mine Workers blamed this intransigence chiefly on U.S. Steel, which was one of the largest holders of West Virginia coal land, and notorious for its opposition to organized labor in its own industry. The union pointed out that through its subsidiaries and its corporate connections with the Pennsylvania Railroad, also a vigorous opponent of unionism, and the Norfolk and Western, U.S. Steel was a major force in the Mountain State’s coal economy. But apart from Big Steel’s anti-unionism, the coal producers of the state, including the independent operators who still produced most of the coal in southern West Virginia, had good reason to battle against the UMW, which could be traced to simple geography. While some West Virginia coal was said to be of higher quality than coal produced elsewhere, the truth was that it had to travel further to reach the industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest than the product of competing states. Only by keeping the union out, allowing them to hold down wages, could the West Virginia producers make up for their increased transportation costs and gain a proportionate share of the market.

The stance of the West Virginia operators created a threat the union could not afford to tolerate. In 1902 the UMW launched a major effort to organize in the Kanawha–New River Coal field in central West Virginia and won a contract in that area. But unable to make gains elsewhere in the state, the UMW soon lost its foothold in the Kanawha area. The coal operators had formed the Kanawha County Coal Operators Association in 1903, the first such organization in the state, which relied on court orders and Baldwin-Felts detectives in Bluefield to block the union drive.

The UMW retreated, but meanwhile miner resentment against the low wages and heavy-handed treatment by the operators festered and mounted. In 1912, a decade after the UMW’s retreat in the Kanawha Valley, thousands of West Virginia’s miners, acting on their own, staged a walkout in the nearby Paint Creek–Cabin Creek area, demanding higher wages, the right to organize and an end to cribbing. Eager to exploit the opportunity, the national UMW pledged full support, imposed a special levy on its membership to help finance the strike and dispatched its vice president, Frank Hayes, to the state, along with the redoubtable Mother Jones, whom many miners remembered from her previous visit in 1897.

For a labor organizer, Jones’s origins were improbable. A native of Ireland and a former schoolteacher, her life was changed in 1867 when a yellow fever epidemic wiped out her husband and four children. After that she drifted around the country, even working as a madam in a Colorado brothel in the 1880s. Then she began attending union meetings and discovered a talent for proselytizing. Her great strength was her showmanship; the skill and guile she displayed in her performances would have done credit to a Barrymore or a Bernhardt. Her white hair and rounded features gave her a grandmotherly appearance, an advantage she exploited as a license to infuse her diatribes against the mine operators with profanity that would have made a longshoreman blush.

Mother, as the miners called her, displayed her style during the 1900 strike against the anthracite operators when she organized miners’ wives to march over the mountains late at night banging on tin pans with the goal of alerting the union picket lines to the strikebreakers trying to slip into work for the morning. Campaigning against child labor, in 1903 Jones organized a week-long march of child mill workers from Pennsylvania to the New York home of President Theodore Roosevelt, selecting the most physically stunted and scarred children she could find, as evidence of the abuses inflicted by their employment. Along with a theatrical flair, Mother Jones was endowed with enough courage to lead a march of strikers through the frozen and treacherous waters of mountain creeks and to stymie a belligerent guard by covering the muzzle of his loaded rifle with her hand.

For the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike, she drew on her full range of demagogic talents. In August of 1912, addressing hundreds of miners at a Sunday afternoon rally in front of the State Capitol, she demanded that the governor, Republican William Glasscock ( whom she referred to for “modesty’s sake” as “Crystal Peter”), drive the mine guards from the state. “You can expect no help from such a goddam dirty coward,” she told the crowd, while a court reporter hired by the operators took down every word. “But I warn this little governor that unless he rids Paint Creek and Cabin Creek of these goddam Baldwin-Felts mine guard thugs there is going to be one hell of a lot of bloodletting in these hills.”

The Baldwin-Felts agents were everywhere. They threw up iron and concrete forts bristling with machine guns throughout the area, evicted the miners from their homes, destroying their furniture in the process, and then attacked the tent colonies in which the strikers took refuge. Their crowning gambit was the “Bull Moose special,” a train rigged with iron plate siding and machine guns, which they raced along the tracks one night spraying bullets into the tents sheltering the miners and their families as they drove along, a tactic they would, some months later, adapt for use against striking Colorado miners and their families.

In the wake of the Bull Moose special’s ride, the Cabin Creek–Paint Creek miners retaliated in kind. Using weapons and ammunition provided by the national union, the strikers attacked a mine guard encampment. The ensuing battle raged for hours and took sixteen lives, mostly mine guards. In their fury the miners also blew up the tipples of the mines being operated by strikebreakers along with the trains carrying coal from the struck mines. They met trains carrying new strikebreakers to the mines and sent them packing.

In September 1912, a month after Mother Jones’s fiery speech, Glasscock did intervene, but not in the way she had hoped. Imposing martial law, the governor sent 1,200 state militia to disarm both the miners and mine guards. The miners at first cheered the arrival of the troops until they realized the guardsmen’s real mission was not to restore peace but to break the strike. The soldiers arrested more than 200 strikers without warrants and detained them in makeshift jails. Still the strikers fought on. In February of 1913 Glasscock ordered the arrest of Mother Jones on a charge of inciting to riot, and, despite the fact that she was stricken with pneumonia refused to release her.

In March the newly elected Governor, Henry Hatfield, took office, setting the stage for the end of the strike. Hatfield, too, was a Republican like his predecessor and no great friend of labor. But he was determined to get a settlement, even if it meant forcing the operators to make concessions. He laid down terms including a nine-hour workday, the right to shop in stores other than those owned by the company, the right to elect union checkweighmen and the elimination of discrimination against union miners.

The operators accepted, and so did the UMW officials. But many rank-and-file miners were dissatisfied, because the settlement ignored their two most important demands—recognition of the union and an end to the mine guard system. Despite the lack of support from the national UMW and many of their own local leaders and in the face of Hatfield’s threat to deport men who refused to go back to work, the miners staged wildcat walkouts, blew up mines and tipples in protest and prepared to renew their strike.

The tide turned in their favor when a U.S. Senate committee that had been investigating the strike issued a report denouncing the arbitrariness of the governor, the intransigence of the operators and the abuses of martial law. Stunned by the public tongue lashing, and fearful of a new walkout by the defiant miners, Hatfield rushed to the scene and pressured the operators into granting the miners’ original demands, including recognition of the UMW as their bargaining agent.

The end of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike brought no genuine peace but rather an uneasy truce to the coalfields of West Virginia. The strike would have an enduring and polarizing impact on union and management for years to come. Though they had gained important ground, many miners still felt that they had been betrayed by their national union and their local officials, who they believed had been too willing to accept Hatfield’s dictated compromise that ignored key union demands. Their resentment led to a search for new leadership among the more militant elements of the union and ultimately to the election of Tom Keeney and Fred Mooney as president and secretary treasurer, respectively, of District 17. “Keeney was all fire and dynamite,” Mooney later recalled. “He asked for and showed no quarter.”

It was an attitude widely shared among the miners in West Virginia, who were finding it hard to accept the moderate doctrine of new unionism preached by Gompers, with its emphasis on doing business with business, and also difficult for them to maintain their belief in the American promise of economic opportunity and equal treatment under the law. Following the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike, violence had come to be regarded as an almost routine and necessary tactic to deal with the brutal excesses of the mine guard system. After the end of the strike a miner wrote the Mine Workers Journal about the slaying of a mine superintendent who had “always kept the miners under an iron rule.” Such slayings were justified, the miner wrote, because “as long as they believe in that infamous guard system, peace and harmony is in doubt.”

For its part, management harbored at least as much hostility and mistrust. Coal Age, the journal of the coal operators, declared that the “so-called strike on Cabin and Paint Creeks was in reality an armed insurrection, formulated by agitators hired by the union and afterwards reinforced by socialists.” The coal operators now saw the miners and their union not simply as economic adversaries but as a diabolical force seeking not merely unionization but domination of the West Virginia coal industry and of the United States. The Mingo County operators condemned the union as “unlawful per se, revolutionary in character and a menace to the free institutions of the country.”

This perception was heightened when in 1912, the same year as the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike, the UMW adopted in its constitution a clause stating that miners were entitled to the “full social value of their product.” This language redolent of the reform socialism that then intrigued some labor activists, beyond the reach of Samuel Gompers’s influence, outraged the mine operators of southern West Virginia. They viewed the phrase not as harmless rhetoric but as a battle cry, confirming their suspicion that the mine workers union had in reality abandoned the labor movement and instead become a spearhead of revolution. “Their whole object is now and has been since 1912 to cripple all the protecting powers of government so that their armies can march unmolested into the territory of non-Union mines and shoot down the workman and destroy the mining plants at will,” warned Harry Olmstead, chairman of the Williamson Coal Operators’ Association.

So the battle lines were sharply drawn. Over the next decade the Great War would for a time transform the coal industry, and its fortunes would rise and fall. But one fundamental reality was unaltered. The miners of southern West Virginia and the operators of the mines remained on a course that left no doubt both would someday collide. The only questions were where and when. The answers turned out to be the main street of Matewan on May 19, 1920, where Sid Hatfield and the Baldwin-Felts agents shot it out, an explosion that would bring Harry Olmstead’s nightmare of the marching armies of miners to the verge of reality.