The Battle of Blair Mountain

FROM THE ONSET of the struggle in Mingo County, with the shoot-out at Matewan Station, the fate of Sid Hatfield had been intertwined with the destiny of the mine workers union. It was Hatfield who, by gunning down Albert and Lee Felts, had turned the labor conflict into a blood feud. It was Hatfield who had sparked the union resistance to the use of strikebreakers during the violent months that followed the Matewan confrontation. And it was Hatfield’s acquittal in the murder trial in Williamson and his defiant testimony in the Senate hearings that had sustained the miners’ spirits. So it was only natural that as the conflict in southern West Virginia neared its climax, it was again Hatfield who would serve as a catalyst for the denouement.

The first hint of how events would unfold had come during his Senate testimony, when S. B. Avis, the coal company lawyer, had confronted him about a criminal conspiracy indictment in McDowell County, linked to one of the previous summer’s numerous violent outbreaks. Caught unawares, Hatfield had tried to laugh the matter off. But when he got back to his room in the Harrington Hotel, a few blocks from the White House, a telephone message confirmed that Avis had known what he was talking about. Hatfield and more than thirty others, most of them Mingo miners, had been indicted for raiding the mining camp at Mohawk and blowing up the coal tipple. Hatfield had of course been in and out of trouble with the law before. Ordinarily another criminal charge would not necessarily have been cause for concern.

But certain aspects of this indictment seemed suspicious on their face. First, the timing. The Mohawk raid had come the previous August, nearly a full year earlier. It was not the custom of the mine companies and their allies in law enforcement to wait so long to seek punishment for a crime allegedly committed by union men or their allies. Then there was the place. McDowell County, under Sheriff William Hatfield, was a coal company stronghold, and along with Don Chafin’s Logan County a center of resistance to the union drive. There the coal companies and their Baldwin-Felts allies could rest assured that they could do by and large whatever they wanted and get away with it.

Hatfield made no secret of his misgivings as he and his union comrades talked in the lobby of the Harrington. If he went to McDowell County, there was a good chance he would never come back, he said. But Sam Montgomery, the union’s erstwhile gubernatorial candidate, who had served as counsel at the Kenyon hearings, had a different perspective. As a leading member of the West Virginia legal and political establishment, Montgomery found it hard to believe that the system in which he had labored and put his faith could be so corrupted as to condone murder in cold blood. Go to McDowell County, Montgomery advised Hatfield. But leave your guns at home. Behave like a law-abiding citizen and you will be treated that way. As an extra precaution, sitting in the lobby with Hatfield, Mooney and Keeney dictated a letter to McDowell County Judge James French Strother, who would preside over Hatfield’s trial, to advise him of Hatfield’s fears for his safety. Judge Strother would see to it that the rule of law would prevail in McDowell County, Montgomery told Hatfield.

Satisfied with his lawyer’s advice, on Thursday July 28, only twelve days after he had testified before the Kenyon committee, Hatfield peacefully submitted to arrest on the Mohawk mine charge. Clearly this was no routine matter. Wary of what might happen in Mingo County, where support for the union was strong, McDowell Sheriff William Hatfield came to Matewan to personally take Sid Hatfield into custody, bringing with him Welch police chief Harry Chafin. They took the suspect and his wife Jessie with them on the next train to Welch, where Hatfield was booked and jailed and held overnight.

Jessie Hatfield stayed at the Carter Hotel, across from the depot, and the next day posted $2,000 bond, sufficient to free her husband and allow him to return with her to Matewan. Sheriff Hatfield promised the wife of his prisoner that her husband would be safe when he returned for trial, and offered the same assurance to reporters who called. “There isn’t going to be any trouble,” the sheriff told one and all. “We’ll see to that.”

But Sam Montgomery was not so sure. The more he thought about the situation and the more he heard rumors of what awaited Sid Hatfield in Welsh, the more anxious he became. It was too late now for Hatfield to refuse to go, if that had ever been much of an option. But Montgomery no longer felt satisfied that he could rely on Judge Strother to protect Hatfield. He tried another tack, calling the Wheeling Intelligencer to say pointedly: “I am very anxious about Hatfield’s case.” Hatfield’s friends, he said, “feared that if he submitted himself to be taken into McDowell County that he would be killed.” The newspaper dutifully reported Montgomery’s remarks on its front page. The lawyer now could only hope that his words would serve as a warning to Hatfield’s foes and thus as a deterrent to keep his worst fears from coming true.

He would have had even more reason for concern if he had known that McDowell County Sheriff William Hatfield, who had promised to guarantee Hatfield’s safety, had already left the county to “take the waters” at Craig Healing Springs in Virginia. On Monday August 1, two days after Montgomery made his somber assessment, Sid Hatfield and Jessie got up before dawn to take the 5:15 train to Welch. The Norfolk and Western, which had brought the Felts-Baldwin detectives to Matewan in May of 1920, now would take Sid Hatfield to meet his fate. Along with the Hatfields came Hatfield’s closest friend, Ed Chambers, who intended to testify on Hatfield’s behalf, Chambers’s wife Sallie, and Jim Kirkpatrick, a Hatfield friend and also a Mingo County deputy, who had volunteered to serve as bodyguard. Kirkpatrick’s presence was evidence that Hatfield and his friends knew the police chief was in danger. But it was a measure of how gravely they underestimated the threat that they relied for protection in the heart of McDowell County on one man. In reality, as would soon become all too clear, they needed not a single deputy but at least a dozen, all armed and ready.

It was nearly 8 A.M. when their train paused on its winding passage to stop at the little town of Iaeger, about fifteen miles outside of Welch, where the boarding passengers included a personage all too familiar to the Hatfields—Charles E. Lively. A man not easily fazed by situations that would disturb most people, Lively offered the Hatfield party a perfunctory greeting and then calmly took a seat next to Kirkpatrick, where he remained in silence for the forty-five additional minutes it took for the train to get to Welch.

With the trial’s start still about two hours off, the visitors from Matewan tried unsuccessfully to get a room at the booked-up Carter Hotel, then stopped for breakfast at a restaurant near the depot. They could hardly avoid noticing the presence there, as on the train, of the ubiquitous Charles Lively. After breakfast C. J. Van Fleet, the union lawyer who had been assigned to Hatfield’s defense and who had come in the night before, invited them to use his room at the Carter until they could get one of their own.

The trial would not start until the arrival of the 10:30 train, bearing witnesses and some of Hatfield’s codefendants. When Hatfield and his companions heard the train whistle they should come across the street to the courthouse, Van Fleet told them. The lawyer had high hopes for a motion for change of venue, which he had already filed and which he planned to argue before Judge Strother. But in any case, as the lawyer explained before leaving for the courthouse, Hatfield would have to appear in court until the judge ruled on the motion.

Hatfield went to the window and looked out himself but said nothing. To pass the time Hatfield showed Kirkpatrick the two guns he had brought in his wife’s traveling case. He had decided not to bring the guns to trial and cause another commotion like the furor he had touched off at his trial in Williamson. Kirkpatrick admired one of Hatfield’s weapons, a large army-issue revolver. A big gun like that could come in handy, he said. Hatfield readily swapped the military weapon for one of Kirkpatrick’s service pistols. Soon after, they heard the whistle of the 10:30 train and the five of them headed for the court.

Kirkpatrick had the pistol he had traded for with Hatfield, but both Hatfield and Chambers were unarmed. The day was sunny, but there was the threat of rain and Sallie Chambers clutched an umbrella. Just ahead was the McDowell County courthouse, an ivy-covered Victorian structure sitting atop a hill, behind an eight-foot-high stone wall. Above the wall the lawn sloped upward toward the building. Two sets of stone steps, running toward each other from the street, led to a common landing at the top of the wall. From there another flight of steps led to the courthouse entrance.

Unnoticed by Hatfield or his companions as they headed out of the hotel toward the courthouse, a group of Baldwin-Felts detectives watched them from the top of the steps. In charge of the group were Lively and two other veterans of the mine wars, Bill Salter, who had survived the Matewan shoot-out by hiding in a trash can, and George “Buster” Pence, renowned for the tactic he used to escape prosecution for killing union men: “Shoot ’em with one gun and hand ’em another one,” was the way Pence put it.

Climbing the steps, Ed and Sallie Chambers were in the lead, followed by Hatfield and his wife. Kirkpatrick was in the rear. Inside the courthouse, at just about this very moment, Van Fleet, the lawyer for Hatfield and Chambers, was shaking hands with the McDowell Country prosecutor, G. C. Counts, on an agreement to change the venue of the trial to the less perilous surroundings of Greenbrier County. But it was a victory that came too late for Van Fleet’s client.

Hit four times, Hatfield fell dead. Meanwhile Lively had raced down the steps to confront Ed and Sallie Chambers, reached across in front of Sallie Chambers and shot her husband in the neck. As Chambers rolled down the steps Lively kept firing. And when Chambers’s body came to rest on the steps, Lively ran over to him, gun in hand. Sallie Chambers cried out, begging him not to shoot anymore. But Lively ignored her and shot Chambers again, behind his right ear.

Sallie Chambers was made of sterner stuff. She stayed at the scene and in her grief and fury, began to beat Lively with her umbrella. Lively swore at her and tore the umbrella out of her hands. Overcome by shock and grief, she threw herself on her husband’s body, rubbing his hands and face and trying to open his pockets to show that he had no weapons. Lively ordered her taken away.

The Baldwin-Felts agents had good reason to remove Sallie Chambers from the scene. They had work to do. Buster Pence, true to his formula of “kill ’em with one gun and hand ’em another one,” saw to it that pistols were placed in the lifeless hands of Hatfield and Chambers. It was another piece of evidence, along with the bullets Hughey Lucas had fired into the wall, to bolster the claim of self-defense for Lively and his accomplices. Immediately after the shooting, G. L. Counts, the McDowell County prosecutor, ordered the arrest of Lively, Pence and Salter and told reporters that the evidence against them was “absolute.” But the McDowell County jury that tried the killers evidently felt differently because their claim of self-defense won them acquittal in the same county courtroom to which Hatfield and Chambers were headed when they were assassinated.

Only a few months earlier, on March 21, 1921, Sid Hatfield had returned to Matewan in triumph after his acquittal in the Williamson murder trial to receive the cheers of the largest crowd Matewan had ever seen. Now just before dawn on Tuesday August 2 Hatfield returned again, this time in a coffin along with his slain comrade Ed Chambers to an even larger crowd. But this time there was no cheering, simply silence broken only by the sobbing of the mourners.

Some 2,000 persons lined Mate Street or plodded along the thoroughfare made muddy by an intermittent summer shower, following the coffins onto the swinging wire footbridge across the rain-swollen Tug. As the coffins and the huge crowd moved across the river the flimsy bridge swayed and sagged under the extra weight. Hatfield’s casket came first, with his widow walking close behind, followed by Chambers’s coffin, and his widow. Earlier that day hundreds of miners came with their families and filed into the homes of Hatfield and Chambers for one final look into the caskets of their two heroes. In Huntington, 2,000 union men laid down their tools for an hour and sent a committee bearing wreaths to the graves. The UMW closed its headquarters in Charleston and placed a placard on the door that asked a pointed question: “Shall the government live of the people, for the people and by the people in West Virginia or be destroyed by the Baldwin-Felts detective agency?” In many of the nation’s newspapers, the coverage of the funeral overshadowed the news that the unforgettable tenor of Enrico Caruso would be heard no more, the world’s most celebrated opera star having died of pneumonia in Naples the day after Hatfield and Chambers were slain.

By the time the procession reached the cemetery, on a point in the mountains overlooking the Tug and the Kentucky shore, the rain was pouring down in sheets. The Reverend J. C. Holbrook of the Methodist Episcopal Church saw to it that the caskets were hastily closed as he conducted the brief graveside ceremony. Few in the crowd had umbrellas, but most stayed, listening in silence to Holbrook’s reading from the Scripture. “And now abideth faith, hope and charity,” the clergyman intoned. “These three, but the greatest of these is charity.”

But charity was not what was foremost in the minds and hearts of the mourners. It was Sam Montgomery, delivering the eulogy, who best captured the moment in a bitter impassioned speech. It was not only the friends of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers but also the great mass of Americans whose attention had been captured by the bloodshed on the courthouse steps, to whom his words were addressed.

He did not let the occasion go to waste. “We have gathered here today to perform the last sad rites for these two boys who fell victims to one of the most contemptible systems that has ever been known to exist in the history of the so-called civilized world,” Montgomery began. And who was to blame? Montgomery focused his outrage not on the gunmen but rather on the higher-ups who gave them their orders and their reward. “Sleek, dignified churchgoing gentlemen, who would rather pay fabulous sums to their hired gunmen, to kill and slay men for joining a union than to pay like or less amounts to the men who delve into the subterranean depths of the earth and produce their wealth for them.”

The Reverend Holbrook had spoken of faith, hope and charity, but Montgomery saw little opportunity for any of these virtues to flower in the bloody soil of the Mountain State. “There can be no peace in West Virginia,” he declared, “until the enforcement of the laws is removed from the hands of private detective agencies and from those of deputy sheriffs who are paid, not by the state but by the great corporations, most of them owned by non-residents who have no interest in West Virginia’s tomorrow.” As he neared his peroration, Montgomery looked around at the rain-soaked audience and took inspiration from the circumstances of the day. Earlier in his talk he had thundered his indignation. But now, as he concluded, his voice fell low, just loud enough to be heard over the rain in the silence of the graveyard. “Even the heavens weep with the grief-stricken relatives and bereaved friends of these two boys,” he said.

Sid Hatfield, the hero of Matewan and defender of the union cause, shot to death with his wife by his side. His killers free on bond advanced by the mine owners and certain in the view of the union men to escape punishment for their deed. Meanwhile in Mingo County hundreds of union men remained in jail without any formal charge and without benefit of bond. The Wheeling Intelligencer pronounced the shooting on the courthouse steps “the most glaring and outrageous expression of contempt for law that has ever stained the history of West Virginia.” The UMW Journal declared: “Probably never in the history of the country did a cold blooded murder ever create as much indignation.” Around the country labor groups adopted resolutions that blended sympathy, outrage and the demand for revenge.

In the midst of this backlash, Charles Lively called a press conference from the safety of Welch, where he explained the killings as “a case of self-defense, pure and simple.” As Lively told the story Hatfield caught his eye as he was ascending the stairs to the courthouse. “I could see Sid’s jaws set like a steel trap,” he said. Both Chambers and Hatfield pulled out their weapons and after Hatfield fired, Lively fired back. To buttress Lively’s account, Mitchell, the Welch police chief, stated that after the shootings he found a still warm pistol lying beside Chambers’s body and also found a pistol in Hatfield’s trouser pocket.

Those statements only added to the fury of the union and its supporters, since it lent credence to their belief that Lively and his confederates would escape punishment. Meanwhile, in the midst of this crisis for their union, its leaders were hamstrung. The week before Keeney had announced plans to send large groups of organizers into Mingo County with the idea of having them arrested and thus overcrowd the jails in the southern part of the state. Sam Montgomery had hinted broadly at the strategy in his interview with the Intelligencer. “There are about 40,000 idle coal miners in West Virginia and a good big percent of them would just as soon spend a vacation in Mingo County as anywhere else,” he said.

But in the wake of the McDowell County murders, all bets were off. Keeney called off the invasion of Mingo. “My men are willing to go to jail, but I am not willing to have them killed,” he said. He and Mooney were unable even to leave Charleston to attend the funeral of Hatfield and Chambers because of the strictures of martial law. But the anger among union rank and file was hard to contain. Several hundred miners trooped to union headquarters where they descended on Montgomery, fresh from his funeral oration. The lawyer spoke to them for a few minutes, counseled patience, then sent them on their way.

But many union men had lost patience. Something had to be done, they believed. But what? It was at this point that Mother Jones reappeared on the scene. Though the old warrior had remained in West Virginia since her fiery “Clean Up West Virginia” speech in Williamson the previous June, she had been relatively silent. The years had taken their toll on “The Most Dangerous Woman in America,” as her foes branded her, slowing her down physically and throwing her off balance. Her typically free-form oratory became even more rambling than usual, and often lacked coherence. “The boys are good to me,” she wrote a friend of her UMW comrades. “They don’t overwork me, the fact of the matter is they let me come and go as I want to.”

Still no one could predict how she might react on any given occasion. In the wake of Sid Hatfield’s slaying, she took it upon herself to call on Keeney and Mooney at union headquarters in Charleston and demand they convene a mass meeting somewhere in Kanawha County. Keeney and Mooney refused. Any such gathering in the heat of outrage, and in the midst of martial law, could lead only to arrests and bloodshed that would cost the miners more than their foes. Furious, Mother Jones staged a protest meeting of her own. With twenty-five or thirty miners who had gathered at union headquarters on Summers Street as her audience, she berated Keeney and Mooney as if they were scabs. “Keeney and Mooney have lost their nerve,” she announced. “They are spineless and someone must do something to protect the miners.”

A few days later, on Sunday August 7, under pressure from Mother Jones and others, Keeney and Mooney did call a meeting on the grounds of the state capitol in Charleston, across the street from the governor’s mansion, with about 500 miners in attendance. Governor Morgan could hear them plainly from his porch, though he could not make out what they were saying. “They were pretty noisy,” he recalled later. “I didn’t regard it as a menace, but I did think at the time in all probability it had for its object a certain amount of intimidation.”

If that was indeed the purpose of the demonstration it failed. Morgan, a tall, husky figure of a man, whose brown hair was just turning grey, after all had been hardened by service in the First West Virginia Infantry during the war with Spain and was stolid in temperament. He went about his Sabbath routine as usual, teaching Sunday school in the morning, dining with his family at noon and afterward going for an afternoon drive in the country. Told the demonstration leaders wanted to meet with him, he went to his office, where Mooney and Keeney presented a petition asking for a broad range of demands—chiefly for a joint commission of management and labor to adjust wages and mediate disputes, but also for an eight-hour day and the election of checkweighmen at the mines. For good measure the petition also included a statement from the 1920 Republican Party platform pledging “to correct the abuses that have grown up under the so-called private guard or detective system,” a promise the Republican-controlled legislature had notably failed to keep.

Morgan concluded the thirty-minute conference by agreeing to take the union proposals under consideration. But no one in the group that met with him was hopeful he would react positively. Afterward Keeney returned to say a final word to the demonstrators. “We are going to organize Mingo and Logan County,” he vowed, “or fill the jails so full they won’t be able to feed them.” Then he told the miners to go back home and await their marching orders.

It was ten days later, August 17, when Morgan responded to the petition by flatly rejecting all the union demands. Prior to his election as governor Morgan had run for no other office but that of Marion County judge. Unlike Cornwell he had not even been exposed to the limited give and take of the state legislature, and nothing in his background as a normal school graduate and country lawyer inclined him to consider unions as having a legitimate role to play in the coal economy. Thus he would not appoint the joint commission the miners wanted because, in his view, that would imply official recognition of the UMW as representing the union. This was something the coal operators had refused to do, a position that Morgan believed under Supreme Court rulings they had a perfect right to maintain. Morgan saw things exactly as the operators did. “There is no fight in West Virginia between the operator and the union miners,” as he explained to a friend, since the union had no status under the law, and thus might as well not exist. By the same line of reasoning there was no dispute between the operators and their employees. “All the trouble that has arisen is the result of some agitators and organizers representing the United Mine Workers not resident in the unorganized fields, desiring to organize same.”

What the governor’s legalisms did not take into account was the steadily mounting anger among the miners. While Morgan was drafting his response to the UMW petition, many union miners began to arm themselves, and talk spread of a new protest march, like the abortive uprising of 1919. With groups of armed miners patrolling the roads, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin became increasingly nervous and called for help from the state police. The result was a tragi-comedy of errors. On Friday August 12 a squad of five troopers galloped into the little town of Clothier, about ten miles north and east of Logan and put on a show of force. One of the five rode his horse right into a parked car. The horse stumbled and fell to the ground and his rider was thrown to the ground.

Feeling foolish and frustrated, the troopers vented their anger at the owner of the parked car, pulling him from the vehicle, abusing him and chasing him home. A group of armed miners rushed to the scene, bent on revenge. Mistaking an auto driven by a railroad worker for a police car, the miners opened fire and put six bullet holes in the vehicle. When a state police car sped to the scene, the miners stopped that car, pulled the officers out into the road, took away their weapons and chased them home. By nightfall armed miners in groups of five to ten patrolled all the roads into Clothier, determined to keep the state police at bay. They cut all phone and telegraph wires and in effect took control of the area.

The following week, with news of Morgan’s rejection of the union demands, the contagion of rebellion spread. Morgan’s dismissal of the UMW petition presented to him after the August 7 demonstration fed resentment. So did a state supreme court ruling denying freedom to scores of union men jailed in Mingo for union activity and upholding the governor’s authority under martial law as recast after the court’s June ruling in the Lavinder case. Armed miners began assembling just outside of Charleston, near the town of Marmet, which had been the rallying point for the 1919 march.

By August 20, some 600 were camping out in a hollow a mile away from Marmet station, and hundreds more were on the way. They brought with them a menacing assortment of weaponry—from .22 caliber bird guns to double-barreled shotguns and the Springfield rifles that many had carried in France along with every variety of pistol, revolver and other handgun. Their guards patrolled the roads and shooed away strangers. A journalist who made his way past them was apprehended and escorted from the encampment by two rifle-bearing miners. The miners were circumspect about their intentions, only talking vaguely of “making a demonstration” against Mingo County, as the newspapers reported. But among themselves they spoke freely of marching on Mingo County, freeing the union organizers held in Williamson jail and bringing an effective end to martial law. To get to Mingo they would have to cross Logan County and challenge the power of Sheriff Chafin, and if he got in their way, so be it. But no one was sure how they could accomplish these objectives or if they should even be attempted. For guidance they naturally looked to Keeney and Mooney, but the two officers of District 17 were having difficulty charting a course. Disappointed by the lack of reaction to the Senate hearings and frustrated by the legal system, they had devised a strategy inevitably marked by ambivalence. Their idea was to stage a demonstration that would be strong enough to gain them public sympathy and support yet would avoid bringing down the full force of the political and economic power structure against them and their union. They were operating at great risk and under severe handicaps. “We were worn out,” Mooney said later, “caught between the restlessness of the miners and the insistence of the coal operators that we keep the mines in operation.”

So far as the outside world was concerned, Keeney and Mooney decided that it would be best for themselves and for the miners if they kept their distance from the protest. Asked about a flier summoning the miners to assemble at Marmet bearing his name and Mooney’s, Keeney called that manifesto a forgery and repeatedly denied that he or any of the other District officials had any connection with the assemblage. “I wash my hands of the whole affair,” Keeney told the New York Times on August 19, as the preparations for the march moved forward. “I’ve interfered time and again to stop such enterprises. I seem to have halted them only temporarily. This time they can march to Mingo, so far as I am concerned.”

Journalists trying to trace the roots of the demonstration were frustrated. After “careful inquiry” failed to identify a leader for the march, one reporter pronounced the issue “a mystery.” But to anyone who understood the mine workers union in West Virginia, the origins of the march were not such a mystery. For years the union leadership had learned to operate much of the time on a sub rosa basis, for the sake of the survival of the union, and of themselves. But the lack of a formal communications structure was more than made up for by a powerful grapevine, guided by the leadership, which spread the word among the rank and file as to when to picket and when to strike, when to work and when to march. After the failed 1919 march, John Spivak, the ACLU’s emissary to the West Virginia UMW, scoffed at the notion that “several thousand miners from dozens of communities had spontaneously taken their guns and marched to a specific spot.” As he pointedly remarked to Keeney and Mooney after they had helped disperse that rebellious gathering: “What I was thinking about is that there is a helluva lot of mental telepathy in these hills.” Both men guffawed and then Mooney threw his arm around Spivak and said: “Yeah, there sure must be.” The same form of telepathy was operating two years later, as the miners once again massed at Marmet, or so Keeney and Mooney wanted the world to believe.

To be sure the telepathy had its guiding instruments, among the most active of them being Savoy Holt, a glib and fiercely aggressive young organizer from Cabin Creek who had been on the committee that met with Morgan at the August 7 demonstration at the Capitol. Holt now traveled the state from one local to another, rousing the men to action. In Ward, in Kanawha County, he told the 700 members of the union local of the demonstration forming at Marmet and called upon them “to gather across the river.” The local voted to give $1,500 to buy supplies for the march and the members themselves chipped in another $1,500. About 250 soon left for Marmet, many of them armed. Race was no bar to participation. If “white people had guns they should not be backward, they ought to get one, too,” Scott Reese, a black official of the local, advised his brothers.

To the east in the town of Boomer, in Fayette County, “Brother Holt from Cabin Creek,” as he was introduced to a union meeting, was forthright and firm. He and others had gone to see “Eph Morgan” and asked that martial law be revoked. The governor had refused. “Now it’s up to us.” Miners were on their way to Marmet, he said. “If you are men you will be there, prepared as instructed.”

It was the same story all over the state as locals sent money and men to back the demonstration. In Mammouth in Boone County local 404 members raised $200 to buy provisions and then headed out to Marmet. In the mining camp of Edwhite in Raleigh County, local 4823 sent eighty men to the demonstration, contributed nearly $600 for provisions and spent another $130 on two high-powered rifles and ammunition. Some wore their old uniforms from the Great War. But most took to wearing blue bib overalls and tying around their necks a red bandanna, which soon became the hallmark of the insurgent army, leading both friends and foes to refer to them as “rednecks,” a term that had not yet achieved its latter-day wide currency as a regional slur.

For Keeney and Mooney to remain in the background while the buildup of the union forces at Marmet continued would have been difficult in any case, but this task was made even harder when a new problem presented itself in the person of Mother Jones. On Wednesday August 24, with the number of miners under arms nearing 10,000, the doyenne of UMW organizers sent word to Mooney and Keeney that she wanted to speak to the miners about a telegram she had received from President Harding.

They had better reason than they then knew to be suspicious. As the union would later learn, Mother Jones had been in frequent touch with Governor Morgan, who had managed to convince her that she should persuade the miners to turn back to avoid a bloody and losing battle. Jones’s friendship with Morgan, whom she considered “a good Christian man,” was typical of her contacts with powerful men such as John D. Rockefeller and former UMW President John Mitchell, whom she sought to manipulate but to whose flattery she was susceptible. At any rate Keeney and Mooney had little choice except to arrange for her to address the miners as she asked. Mounting an impromptu platform, Mother Jones read from a piece of paper that she claimed to be the message from Harding. She quoted the president as urging the miners to abandon the march in return for which he purportedly promised “that my good offices will be used to forever eliminate the gunmen system from the state of West Virginia.”

Viewed in retrospect, Mother Jones’s position was not unreasonable. It was a case that she might well have argued to the miners in a straightforward fashion. But her deceit smacked of arrogance and betrayal. The miners were furious with Jones and spoke of her as a “sellout” and “traitor,” and her ill-advised gambit would mark her last involvement with the UMW’s cause in West Virginia. More important for the present, the net result of the fake telegram was to make the miners even more determined to go on with the march.

No sooner had the miners begun to mobilize at Marmet than Sheriff Chafin started to ready his own defenses. Though he was only thirty-four years old, and short and stocky in build, Chafin had long been a towering figure in Logan County, as accustomed to power and its uses as if it were his birthright. It was easy to understand why he would feel that way. When he was seven years old, in 1894, his father was elected county sheriff and that office, along with just about every other public position of consequence in Logan County, had been exclusively occupied either by Chafin family members or their business cronies ever since. Chafin himself had spent most of his adult life in office—four years as county assessor, four years as sheriff, then four years as county clerk while his brother-in-law, Frank P. Hearst, held down the post of sheriff, who, under West Virginia law, could not succeed himself. In 1920 Hearst found another position while Chafin persuaded the voters to return him to his family’s customary habitat in the sheriff’s office.

During his first campaign for sheriff in 1912, Chafin had promised to rid the county of the mine guards who were much despised throughout the state as a result of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike already raging in full fury. He was as good as his word to outward appearances. But in actuality, what Chafin did was to replace the old mine guard system with an ingenious scheme that proved to be just as insidious. Under the arrangement devised by Chafin, the coal companies no longer had to pay the Baldwin-Felts agency to protect them against the union; they simply paid Sheriff Don Chafin’s deputies. According to the inquiry conducted by Governor Cornwell after the failed 1919 miners’ march, payments to Chafin were based on production and ranged from half a cent to one cent a ton. This amounted to significant money in those times and parts—$46,630 in 1920, and in the first nine months of 1921, a period marked by unending labor unrest, another $61,500.

No one in county government audited Chafin’s books. But it was widely understood that Chafin collected a certain amount for each deputy, paid the deputies from that amount and held something back for his own future. This arrangement apparently worked very well for Chafin. The office of sheriff paid only $3,500 a year and he had earned comparable sums in the other county positions he had held. Yet by 1921 he owned up to Senator Kenyon’s committee investigating conditions in West Virginia that his net worth was about $350,000.

No one doubted that the coal companies got their money’s worth. Chafin expanded his reach by having justices of the peace appoint scores of “special constables,” to whom he duly issued badges and guns. Together with the regular deputies, who at times numbered more than 300, Chafin’s “Standing Army of Logan,” as the miners called it, maintained a tight cordon around his county. He deployed his troops at the depot in the town of Logan where they met every train and screened the arriving passengers. Those who gave any reason to suspect they might be in Chafin’s town on UMW business were given a choice of leaving on the next train or spending the night in jail.

Sometimes Chafin’s border patrol displayed more zeal than common sense. When J. L. Heiser, the clerk of the State Department of Mines, who happened also to be grand chancellor of the West Virginia Knights of Pythias, arrived in town to conduct the initiation of new members of that fraternal order, the deputies who greeted him somehow became convinced that he was really a union organizer. That night he was hauled out of his room, shoved into a car and soundly beaten. Word of this outrage got out, leading to newspaper editorials denouncing Chafin’s oligarchical rule and a storm of other unfavorable publicity. Chafin was discomfited enough to send an emissary with an apology and a check to cover Heiser’s hospital bill. But he did not loosen his grip on Logan.

Like many men of his age and station, Chafin was known to take a drink. On one occasion, in September of 1919 when he evidently had one or so too many, he sauntered into UMW headquarters in Charleston, brandishing a pistol and claiming he had a Logan County warrant for a union staffer. Though Chafin was then simply the county clerk, not the sheriff, brother-in-law Hearst had thoughtfully appointed him a deputy. Still he was outside his bailiwick in Kanawha County, where he had no authority to arrest anyone.

This was barely two weeks since the forced disbandment of the miners’ army that had massed at Marmet to march on Chafin’s fiefdom, and feelings toward Chafin in the union’s offices were not cordial. Chafin’s bellicosity did not improve the atmosphere. One word led to many more, and William Petry, vice president of District 17, ordered Chafin to leave. In response Chafin waved his revolver in the air, whereupon Petry shot him through the chest with his 22-caliber pistol. Chafin recovered, and Petry, who was cleared when the local authorities accepted his claim of self-defense, said his only regret was that he had not used a larger-caliber gun.

But that was two years past. Now Chafin was cold sober and determined to back up his boast that no “armed mob” would cross into Logan County. He got on the phone to the governor, who complained that he was handicapped because he had not time to muster the state militia, and asked Chafin to step into the breach. Do what you can to protect the county, Morgan told the sheriff.

The “best information” Chafin could get was that the miners’ army was now 9,000 strong, and growing. Drastic measures seemed required. Chafin called for volunteers, and scores of Logan’s solid citizens responded, just as the law-and-order vigilantes had answered the call to arms in Mingo County the previous May. “Lawyers, bankers, preachers, doctors and farmers” was the way the sheriff described them. To bolster their ranks, Chafin’s deputies descended upon the camps of strikebreakers. “Anyone who doesn’t come fight is fired,” was the rallying cry. Those inured to the threat of losing their jobs were warned they faced jail. Hundreds were pressed into service, bringing the total strength of the defenders to nearly 3,000. To equip his forces, Chafin stripped the county armory and local hardware stories clean of weaponry, turning Logan into a sort of arsenal of free enterprise, which boasted not only machine guns and rifles but also a squadron of three biplanes parked on Logan’s baseball field. Wasting no time, under the direction of the deputies, the volunteers felled trees and hauled lumber to erect breastworks and dug trenches and blocked roads.

The perimeter Chafin established was in a sense two years in the making, its origins going back to the miners’ march of 1919, when Chafin had first begun to plan to beat back a union assault. The defense lines extended for about fifteen miles along the Spruce Fork Ridge, near the border of Logan and Boone Counties, which marked the rough separation of union from non-union territory. Chafin’s idea was to shield the town of Logan from attack both from the northeast, in Boone County where the main union force was assembled, and the southeast, where miners advancing from Raleigh County posed another threat. Defenders massed their forces at gaps along the ridge, particularly Blair Mountain Gap, a pass between the two 1,800-foot peaks that make up Blair Mountain. A dirt road ran through the pass, providing a natural avenue to the town of Logan. But defenders positioned on the crest of the mountain peaks could command the approaches to the pass and the mountain, and make any invading force pay a heavy price.

Chafin’s preparations however were by no means sufficient to relieve Governor Morgan’s anxiety, which increased with each new report of the progress of the union army. The governor had already sounded the alarm earlier in the week, on Tuesday August 23, by appealing to Secretary of War John W. Weeks, as he had done the previous spring. But he got much the same reaction.

That certainly did not satisfy Morgan. On Thursday August 25, as the New York Times reported that an “army of malcontents, among whom were union miners, radical organizers and not a few ex servicemen,” was marching on Mingo, the governor appealed directly to Harding, asking for 1,000 men, and military aircraft, armed with machine guns. To underline the urgency of his state’s predicament, Morgan issued a public statement declaring that the miners had been “inflamed and irritated by speeches of radical officers and leaders.”

As Morgan intended, that increased the pressure on Washington to act. If the Harding Administration was not yet ready to give all the help Morgan sought, at least it was ready to do more than it had been doing. On Friday August 26, Secretary Weeks dispatched Brigadier General Harry Bandholtz, who had been General Pershing’s provost marshal general in the AEF, to Charleston. Summoning Bandholtz to his office, Weeks gave him his orders, which, he made clear, came directly from the president himself: Make the miners go home.

If anyone in the U.S. Army high command could be said to be suited for such an assignment, it was probably Harry Hill Bandholtz. In distinguishing himself in both wars that his country had waged against foreign foes during his lifetime, Bandholtz had displayed a notable combination of soldierly courage and discipline with diplomatic tact and negotiating skill. Born in Michigan the year before the Civil War ended, he gained his commission at West Point in 1890. Major Bandholtz won the Silver Star leading troops against the Spanish in Cuba in 1898 and spent the next few years in the Philippines as a colonel, first battling Aguinaldo’s guerrillas then as a provincial governor and ultimately as head of the Philippine Constabulary. Appointed a brigadier general at the onset of World War I, he led troops against the Kaiser’s army in the Meuse-Argonne before Pershing promoted him to provost marshal. His performance in that post earned him the Distinguished Service Medal and impressed Army brass enough so that Bandholtz was dispatched to Hungary as U.S. commissioner, in effect ambassador, to that defeated former enemy nation. His main responsibility was to protect Hungarians from the excesses of the Rumanian army of occupation and oversee the departure of this troublesome force. He earned the lasting gratitude of the Hungarians when, armed only with a riding crop, he drove away a mob of Rumanian troopers intent on looting the national museum of its Transylvanian treasures and sealed its entrance. The Magyars came to regard the American mission as “a Mecca for suffering Hungarian pilgrims” and after Bandholtz left erected a statue of him in the park facing the embassy with his own parting words inscribed in English: “I simply carried out the instructions of my Government as I understood them, as an officer and a gentleman.”

That was much the same dictum Bandholtz sought to follow in West Virginia, though dealing with the mine operators and the miners must at times have made him yearn to be back in Budapest. Arriving in Charleston from Washington about 3 A.M. on Saturday August 27, Bandholtz and his aide Colonel Stanley Ford immediately headed for the state capitol, where Major Thompson briefed them on what he had learned. Bandholtz then sent for Morgan, who responded eagerly, repeating to the officers what he had said in his telegram to Weeks.

It was close to 5 A.M. Bandholtz called Keeney and Mooney, rousting them both out of bed, and ordered them to meet him at the governor’s office. They did not dally, pausing only to phone their lawyer, Harold Houston, to get him to accompany them. Bandholtz went directly to the point. According to a statement issued by War Secretary Weeks, the labor leaders were “briefly and courteously informed” that the condition was due “to the action of members” of the district miners union, “that leadership entailed responsibility as well as prerogatives” and that in the event the president proclaimed a state of Federal martial law, the leaders would be held strictly accountable.

In Mooney’s account of the story, Bandholtz was even blunter. “You two are the officers of this organization and these are your people,” the general told Mooney and Keeney. “I am going to give you a chance to save them, and if you cannot turn them back we are going to snuff this out just like that.” For emphasis, he snapped his fingers right in Mooney’s face. Much of the country was suffering through hard times, as Bandholtz and the union leaders well knew. The general was concerned that given this widespread adversity, the disorder in West Virginia might spread. “This will never do,” he told the union leaders. “There are several million unemployed in this country now and this thing might assume proportions that would be difficult to handle.”

Mooney and Keeney did not argue the merits of Bandholtz’s case with the general. They simply told him that they did not think they could do the job, but they agreed to try. When they asked Bandholtz for a statement they could use to convince the miners to give up their effort, Bandholtz at first refused. But when the two union leaders, remembering the episode of Mother Jones’s phony telegram, insisted they would be unable to accomplish anything without some endorsement from him, Bandholtz yielded and gave them a brief memo confirming he had dispatched them to bring the march to an end. Afterwards he wired Washington: “I told the union leaders that a crisis had now arisen in the state of affairs, that they as leaders must be considered responsible to a great extent for the present situation and that in any event I should be reluctantly obliged to hold them responsible in case it might become necessary to resort to the drastic extreme required by my instructions.”

But Wainright and Harbord had doubts about that. They decided not to rely entirely on Keeney and Mooney carrying off their peacemaking mission. Get Morgan to redo the request for troops he had sent to Washington the day before, Harbord instructed Bandholtz. But this time, Harbord urged, Morgan should include the steps he would take to assume state responsibility including expediting mobilization of the National Guard. The West Virginia legislature that year had approved reestablishment of the national guard, effective July 1, but here it was late August and no follow-up action had been taken except to appoint an adjutant general, John Charnock, as guard commander.

In this same precautionary mode, Harbord ordered General Read to have a detachment at Camp Sherman in instant readiness. He also instructed Major General Charles T. Menoher, chief of the Army Air Service, to arrange for Kanawha Field, outside of Charleston, to serve as a base for air operations, either reconnaissance or tactical air support. That was all it took to bring Brigadier General William Mitchell, commander of the First Provisional Air Brigade, to the scene.

By the time he arrived at Kanawha Field, Billy Mitchell was forty-two years old, had been in the Army twenty-three years and had a well-earned reputation for making headlines and enemies. The son of U.S. Senator John Lendrum Mitchell from Wisconsin, he enlisted as a private at the start of the war with Spain, rose rapidly through the ranks and in 1912, at age thirty-three, became the youngest officer ever named to the general staff. Early on he saw the potential of aviation, and in 1916 he took private flying lessons.

No sooner did the United States enter the Great War than Mitchell managed to get himself seconded to France, where he worked closely with French and British air commanders and soon was established as the premier American military aviator in Europe. Correctly assessing the European War as “only the kindergarten of aviation,” Mitchell’s chief concern after the Allied victory was that unless the United States established a dominant air force when the next war came, “we would start out again by making terrible mistakes and perhaps be defeated before we began.”

On his return to the United States he was named deputy chief of the Air Service and soon became embroiled in bitter feuds with his superiors, who failed to agree with him on the immediate importance of developing airpower. To drive his point home, and win public support, Mitchell staged a series of dramatic experiments in which his aircraft sank various warships, starting with submarines then working their way up to a destroyer and ultimately to capital ships. Each such test, as Mitchell foresaw, attracted public attention but also antagonized senior officers in both the Army and the Navy. In July 1921, when he hastened to West Virginia, he had just successfully completed the latest of his demonstrations by sinking the battleship Ostfriesland, a relic of the Imperial German Navy, off the Virginia Capes, thus arousing even more irritation in the upper echelons of the military. His life was further complicated by the fact that his wealthy wife, Caroline, had left him in the midst of his experiments, confirming widespread Washington gossip about his marital difficulties and threatening a major scandal.

But none of this could diminish Mitchell’s enthusiasm for the opportunity that he saw offered him by the miners’ uprising in Appalachia. Only a few hours after Bandholtz had arrived in Charleston, Mitchell was strutting around the Kanawha Field wearing a pistol, spurs and his row of combat ribbons, and discoursing on how air power could be a potent weapon for suppressing civil disturbances.

“Gas,” said the general, perhaps recalling Allied plans that had been made but never fulfilled for a 1919 offensive against Germans, which would have relied on airplanes using poison gas. “You understand we wouldn’t try to kill people at first. We’d drop gas all over the place. If they refused to disperse then we’d open up with artillery preparation and everything.”

While Mitchell, anticipating World War II tactics by eighteen years, ruminated on the uses of airpower, Keeney and Mooney were struggling to carry out Bandholtz’s orders to make peace. Fully conscious of their burden after being lectured by the general, they left the state house, picked up another union official, hired a taxi and headed south toward Marmet and the rebellion.

On the way they passed several groups of miners encamped for the night or moving up to join the main body. But they did not stop till they reached Hernshaw, about four miles below Marmet, where they met up with a group of about eighty miners, carrying small arms but no rifles. They paused long enough to relay the message from Bandholtz. The miners did not respond directly, but they did not seem favorably impressed; as the leaders left, the miners fired several hundred shots in the air.

Discouraged but still determined, Keeney and Mooney drove on nearly half a mile when they spotted a truckload of provisions standing on the road, with no driver or passengers in sight. Mooney suspected that trouble waited. He shouted out his own name and Keeney’s into the early morning air. Whereupon a dozen men came out from behind trees and rocks, letting down the hammers of their rifles. “Boys, boys,” one of them shouted in relief. “In two more seconds we would have fired on you.”

The union leaders pressed on until they encountered the main body of the insurgent force. Several hundred of the marchers were strung out along a stream called Drawdy Creek, organized in companies each under the direction of an ex-soldier. Most were veterans of the Great War, but there were some who had served in the war against Spain, too. Many wore regular Army uniforms, and some even carried gas masks. A miner named Harvey Dillon, who lived in Winifrede, in Boone County, recognized the union leaders and ordered his troops to make a path for them to pass, then walked to the cab.

Mooney handed over the memo. History is riddled with coincidences large and small, and this encounter would now provide another example. Two decades earlier the rebel Dillon had been an American soldier battling other rebels in the Philippines, where he had served as an orderly to then-Colonel Bandholtz. Glancing at the memo, Dillon was immediately convinced of its credibility.

Mooney advised them to head north about ten miles to Danville, a rail junction in Boone County, about halfway between Marmet, their rallying point, and Logan, their destination, and to wait there until special trains could be arranged to take them out. For Dillon and his comrades this was not an easy order to carry out. As Dillon talked to the union leaders and his men he was fighting back tears and many of his men were weeping openly.

Sweltering in the bright sunshine, the rebels, several hundred strong, listened intently while Mooney once more read Bandholtz’s message and the grumbling lessened. Keeney, as he had earlier, warned the miners that they would be foolhardy to continue the march. Bandholtz was not in West Virginia on a personal whim. He was acting on the orders of the president of the United States. If the miners ignored his command they would be facing the full power of the Federal government.

Their final orders were for the miners to wait while the leaders arranged for special trains to take them away from Blair Mountain, Logan County and Don Chafin’s eager defenders. Mooney and Keeney sent word back of what they had accomplished to Bandholtz, who all day long had been receiving encouraging reports that the miners, in response to the pleas of their leaders, were turning back and abandoning their march.

Early on the afternoon of Saturday, August 27, Bandholtz, Ford and Thompson set out to see for themselves. They drove all the way to Marmet, about fifteen miles, and everywhere they went they saw miners headed back. And at the railroad towns they encountered groups of miners waiting for the special trains, which Governor Morgan had supposedly agreed to get the railroad to send, that would take them back to their homes.

Bandholtz sent the good news back to Washington. As near as he could tell, he informed the War Department, the troops would not be needed. But he urged that they be kept in readiness. And even as he boarded the train back to Washington, Bandholtz could not stop worrying. He now trusted Mooney and Keeney to keep their word. His anxiety had more to do with the other side in the conflict. As he had warned the War Department, he had little confidence in Morgan’s ability to keep order, adding that “the state had made only a feeble attempt to check the growth of the insurgent movement or to keep reasonable touch with its progress.” Events would soon make clear how well founded were these concerns and how fragile was the hastily made peace in West Virginia.