The Battle of Blair Mountain

THE MAIN PROBLEM that faced Bandholtz in West Virginia was that too many of the people he had left behind in the state did not really want to make peace. Indeed trouble started, though Bandholtz was unaware of it, even before he left for Washington, on Friday evening, August 26, when a miner known as “Bad Lewis” White led a group of armed miners into a pool hall at Clothier, the same town where the mounted state troopers had caused trouble two weeks earlier. The union leaders had always felt uneasy about the loyalty of Bad Lewis—for one thing his brother was a Logan County sheriff, working under Don Chafin. On this Saturday night his actions would give them more reason for suspicion.

In the pool hall White and his gang found Charles O. Medley, a Norfolk and Western engineer, whose train was laid over for the night in the depot, and whom he then escorted at gunpoint to the train depot. Medley’s brakeman and firemen were already there, having been rounded up by other miners. White gave the crew their orders: Fire up the engine, and head north to Danville, and keep the running lights out. In Danville, White told Medley to unhitch the engine and turn it around so it would push the cars for the return trip they intended to take—back to Blair Mountain and then on to Logan.

Instead they let him be and went to the ballpark, where the miners were still waiting for the trains promised to take them home, which, due either to Governor Morgan’s inefficiency or duplicity, had yet to arrive. White took advantage of the delay to harangue the miners with fearful stories of the mine owners’ thugs firing at helpless women and children at Blair. “To hell with Keeney,” Lewis shouted. “They are killing women and children up at Blair.”

White managed to get a score or so miners to board the train. Then he headed south toward Blair, stopping at every town along the way where White repeated his tirade about the violence being done against innocents in Blair. By the time the train arrived just outside Blair about 300 armed miners were aboard, ready to resume the mission of storming Don Chafin’s redoubt in Logan.

Whether White was, as Mooney suspected, working in cahoots with Chafin or whether he was simply driven by his surpassing hatred of the coal operators, his actions fit in with the sheriff’s overall strategy: to force the arrival of Federal troops whose presence he hoped would crush District 17 hopes of organizing southern West Virginia once and for all. White’s hijacked train was a step in that direction because it provided Chafin with reason enough to once again mobilize his own forces. Earlier on that Friday when the report came from Bandholtz that the miners were disbanding, he had sent word to members of his defense army to stand down. By midnight most were in their homes or on their way there and Chafin had left his office. He was not quite out the door of the building when he heard his phone ring and ran back to take the call. It was Walter Hallinan, the state tax commissioner, phoning from Charleston to tell Chafin of the arrival of White’s contingent in Blair. Chafin ordered Logan’s fire siren to sound again, and by dawn on Saturday August 27 some 800 of his defenders were back at the barricades.

The best they could find out was that the governor’s office, instead of expediting matters as it had pledged, was dragging its feet. In desperation they turned for help to the Associated Press correspondent who was with them. He called the AP bureau in Pittsburgh, and that led to pointed questions being asked in Washington and finally Charleston. By 5 A.M. the trains had arrived, several thousand miners had boarded and the revolution appeared once and for all to be over.

But Chafin was not through stirring the pot. He had an even higher card to play than Bad Lewis White. At about 3 A.M. that Saturday morning Chafin had called Major Davis in Williamson who was in overall charge of enforcing the martial law edict and asked for help to meet the threat to Logan from Lewis White. Davis sent a contingent of state police to Logan headed by Captain Brockus, who had played such a catalytic role in the Three Days’ Battle in May. Brockus arrived there Saturday afternoon, not long after Bandholtz returned to Washington. No sooner did Brockus appear in Logan than Chafin dispatched him and his men to Clothier on what amounted to a mission of revenge. Brockus’s assignment was to arrest the thirty or forty miners who had disarmed and embarrassed the state police on August 12. Later, when asked why he had chosen that particularly inauspicious time to make these arrests, on warrants that had been issued a week or so before, Chafin’s only explanation was that Brockus “was very anxious to get hold of the ones that had disarmed his men.” But it was Chafin’s responsibility to decide when the warrants would be served. Only a fool would not have realized that the decision he made was certain to threaten the shaky truce that had been created in West Virginia only hours before. And whatever else people might think of Chafin, no one considered him a fool.

Whatever Chafin’s motives, he saw to it that Brockus did not lack for manpower to handle the job. He sent 200 sheriff’s deputies to join the ninety troopers under Brockus’s command. They soon found themselves on dangerous ground. The area surrounding Clothier was closely patrolled by union miners, who had ordered local residents to keep their lights out at night, to make it difficult for the mine owners’ “thugs” to find their way. In the gathering darkness, Brockus’s force encountered a group of armed miners and ordered them to give up their weapons. Five miners were arrested and placed at the head of Brockus’s column as the march continued.

That started the shooting. The miners fired from the doorways and windows of their homes, turning on all the lights in their cabins and in the mine itself. The road on which Brockus’s detachment marched was now bathed in light, like a firing range. As the miners and police fired at each other at point-blank range, Brockus’s men dove for cover in a ravine beside the road. His captives also tried to flee. But three of them were shot in the first volley. William Greer, a Matewan miner, was killed immediately. Another miner was seriously wounded and soon died. Another was shot three times but survived.

But four of the deputies in Brockus’s force lost their way and followed a route that took them into union territory. One of the men, Fulton Mitchell, led them to the cabin of a man known to be vehemently opposed to the union and a great admirer of Sheriff Chafin, who invited them to stay for lunch. Lulled into complacency they stacked their arms on the front porch, where the rifles did not go unnoticed by neighbors who did not share their host’s sympathy for Chafin and the mine owners. Before Mitchell and his comrades finished their meal they found themselves prisoners of the miners who marched them away and held them in secret location safely out of Chafin’s reach.

On Sunday, August 28, news of Brockus’s incursion spread rapidly through southern West Virginia. What had happened was bad enough, but reports of the encounter soon made things seem worse. By some accounts scores of men and women had been killed by Brockus’s forces. James Blount, a miner from Ward, a town near Marmet, was told that “they were shooting the women and children and they needed men over there to help stop it.” Along with other members of his local he got his gun and headed for Marmet.

That Sunday evening Governor Morgan sent his new adjutant general, John Charnock, the commander of the still nonexistent West Virginia National Guard, along with a UMW official, A. C. Porter, to the scene of the previous night’s battle at Sharples to investigate. Charnock called a meeting of union leaders and other townsfolk at which Porter read a letter from Keeney urging them to lay down their arms. The miners were not swayed. In the past, they pointed out, they had been able to avoid harassment by Chafin’s deputies as long as they stayed out of Chafin’s stronghold of Logan. But now, the union men complained, Chafin’s men were invading the union’s own home ground, bringing violence and even death. The discussion became heated, until finally some of the miners threatened to blow up the train that had brought their visitors.

Charnock and Porter realized they were talking to deaf ears. They rushed back to alert Morgan. Echoing the metaphor used by the ACLU’s Jonathan Spivak a year before, Porter likened the Blair area to Belgium at the start of the Great War, describing it as “a monster powder keg awaiting only the smallest of sparks to launch one of the bloodiest industrial wars in the history of the world.” As hyperbolic as that seemed, the signs of an imminent explosion were real enough as the weekend truce negotiated by Bandholtz collapsed and the miners once again were marching to battle.

On their way they looted coal company stores, walking off with guns, ammunition and supplies. In the town of Gallagher, on Cabin Creek, the miners stole a 111 shot Gatling gun from the company. In Fayette County, miners hauled out a machine gun with 10,000 rounds they had pilfered from the Willis Branch mine months before and stored for safekeeping ever since. The miners stopped trucks, autos and trains, took them over at the point of a gun, loaded them with guns and provisions and climbed aboard. If a car or truck broke down, and could not be easily repaired, it was shoved off the side of the road while its passengers waited for another vehicle.

But there were plenty who were eager to join the march. Most of the rebels hailed from the Upper Kanawha Valley, near Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, where the union had fought and won the great battles of a decade ago. But others were from mining towns all around West Virginia, from along the Big Coal River in Boone County, the New River Field in Fayette County and the Winding Gulf Field in Raleigh County. A small number made longer journeys—from northern West Virginia, and a handful from the states of the central competitive field—Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Some came by car and truck, but most reached Marmet by train. The early arrivals bought tickets on regular passenger trains. But when Morgan ordered the Norfolk and Western to shut down, the miners commandeered trains and crews. Many arrived on flat cars that had been used for hauling logs, with no sides on them, just large standards to hold the logs.

Ed Reynolds, the president of local 404 in Raleigh County, led about 600 miners aboard one such “outlaw train,” with a switch engine and eight flat cars bound from Racine in Boone County. They had not gone far when the engineer stopped because the track signals were against them. Reynolds sent two miners with guns to confront the engineer, who finally agreed to take the miners as far as Madison, about fifteen miles from Blair Mountain.

There was no written blueprint for the march, but to the men who joined, their objectives were clear, drawn from the demands they had made on Governor Morgan earlier in the month, and now they made no secret of them. “Some would say they were going to Logan to organize, some would say to kill the sheriff—hang him,” recalled W. F. Harliss, a Clothier physician who watched about 5,000 of the marchers pass through on their way to Blair Mountain, the gateway to Logan. “Some would say they were going to Mingo to do away with martial law and release the prisoners in Mingo jail.”

All this was too much for Morgan. At midnight on Monday, August 29, the governor once again wired Secretary of War Weeks for help, citing the gun battle with Brockus’s contingent, the capture of the four Logan deputies by the miners and the growing threat from the advancing miners’ army. The forces assembled by Chafin “will be utterly unable to repel the attack,” Morgan warned. To complicate matters for Morgan, Sheriff Chafin called to warn him that unless the miners released the four deputies held captive, Chafin would lead a force to free the men. The miners offered to release their prisoners if Chafin would turn loose ten union men held in Logan County jail for each deputy, a proposition that Chafin scorned. When Secretary Weeks continued to insist, relying on Bandholtz’s advice, that West Virginia had not done enough on its own to control the situation, Morgan sent another telegram on Tuesday August 30 sounding an even louder alarm. “Danger of attack on Logan County by armed insurrections is so imminent that legislature cannot be assembled in time to eliminate probability of clash and bloodshed,” he declared. “Number of insurrections constantly growing and immediate action in my opinion is vital.”

In the face of Morgan’s mounting alarm, Harding took counsel with his advisers. Twice on that Tuesday he conferred with Weeks at the White House, Weeks bringing with him on his second visit a delegation of West Virginians headed by Senator Howard Sutherland and including some of the state’s most prominent bankers and businessmen, who urged the immediate dispatch of troops. Harding still resisted yielding to the governor’s appeal for Federal armed intervention, but recognized that he had to do something. What he finally did late on Tuesday afternoon was issue a proclamation taking note of Morgan’s assertion that his state was gripped by violence that he could not control and ordered “all persons engaged in said unlawful and insurrectionary proceedings to disperse and retire peaceably” by noon on Thursday September 1. It was the first such presidential proclamation issued since the United States entered the Great War.

The president then sent Bandholtz back to West Virginia to judge whether the miners would obey the proclamation. If they did not meet his deadline, it was now clear that Harding would send troops. But if the troops did come, Weeks made clear in a letter to Morgan, that their mission would be limited, simply “to restore peace and order in the most effective and prompt way” and that their role would not be to help solve Morgan’s problems with the United Mine Workers. “The problem will be regarded by the military authorities purely as a tactical one,” the secretary said.

Harding had given the miners two days to abandon their insurgency. As ultimatums go, this seemed reasonable on its face. But given circumstances in West Virginia, the president might have granted the miners two weeks, and still nothing would have come of it. Indeed, even while Harding and Weeks allowed themselves to hope that order could be maintained in West Virginia events were moving swiftly in a direction to dictate otherwise.

On the evening of Tuesday August 30, a few hours after Harding issued his proclamation, a group of about seventy-five miners, led by the Reverend John Wilburn, pastor of the Baptist Church in Blair, heedless of the president’s action, and without giving notice to anyone on either side, began advancing on Blair Mountain. Before they set out, Wilburn, who supplemented his meager clerical pay by working in the mines, gave his men a sort of combination briefing and pep talk. “Come on boys, we will eat dinner in Logan tomorrow,” he told them as they left. He also instructed them not to take prisoners.

Wilburn marched his men up a narrow hollow behind the Blair schoolhouse and after climbing a mile and half reached the ridge of the mountain where they bivouacked for the night. Next morning, Wednesday August 31, as Wilburn’s men were waking up and preparing to break camp, John Gore, Chafin’s chief deputy, and two of his men, John Colfago and Jim Munsie, headed up Blair Mountain from Logan on the other side, in a Model T. They were delayed by a blow-out, greatly irritating Gore. Sipping on a quart of moonshine, while Colfago and Munsie fixed the flat, he told a ten-year-old boy who helped with the task that he intended “to show those redneck SOBs something.” The repair work done, the deputies resumed their journey and soon heard gunshots. They stopped their car and got out to look around.

It would be some time before news of this bloodshed became general knowledge. But even so, forces on both sides had already been gearing up for what they believed would be the forthcoming battle. On August 30 Governor Morgan had appointed Colonel William Eubanks, a National Guard officer, to take command of the volunteer army Chafin had mobilized. Though West Virginia’s National Guard still existed only on paper, Eubanks’s appointment gave Chafin’s troops at least the aura of state authority. Along with his official connection to state government, Eubanks brought with him 250 American Legionnaires, volunteers from Welch, the site of Sid Hatfield’s murder. Indeed, volunteers poured in from all over. More than 600 came from McDowell County in two special trains, led by Sheriff William Hatfield, the man who had conveniently absented himself from Welch on the day Hatfield was slain. Another 200 AEF vets, organized by the American Legion, arrived from Bluefield. And from Williamson came 130 veterans of the Mingo Legion, which had seen service that spring. The representation from Charleston, a union stronghold, was understandably one of the smallest—only about thirty volunteers, and that included ROTC cadets from Charleston High School. Huntington’s former police chief Sam Davis recruited a contingent of twenty-five men described as “prominent” citizens and fifty veterans of the Great War, led by two former officers, ex-captains Ivan G. Hollingsworth and H. L. McNulty. They did not come empty-handed. They brought with them fifty-five high-powered rifles, a machine gun and ammunition. The defenders’ arsenal was bolstered by contributions from Kentucky Governor Edwin P. Morrow, as dedicated a foe of the UMW as was Morgan himself, who sent 40,000 rounds of ammunition, 400 rifles, two machine guns and three airplanes, which Eubanks would soon put to use.

Those among the defenders who wanted to wear a uniform dressed themselves in khaki and, when they could find them, wore broad-brimmed campaign hats like the state police. The rest wore white armbands, in juxtaposition to the red bandannas worn by the union men, and called themselves “whites.” Their passwords were “Holden,” the name of a so-called model company town near Logan, along with “amen,” the fatal word spoken by John Gore and his deputies when they encountered Wilburn’s force on Blair Mountain.

Trucks were loaded with provisions—clothing, sandwiches, soft drinks, cigarettes and chewing tobacco—and sent off to those manning the breastworks and the trenches. Schoolhouses and company stores near the front were set up as supply stations and bivouacs. From the defense bastion on Blair Mountain, phone wire was strung to the nearby George’s Creek Company store, where a phone provided contact with headquarters in Logan. The state police set up their own headquarters in another company store.

Each local formed its own contingent, generally headed up by the local leaders who served as field commanders. They established two sets of passwords: For one the challenge was “Where are you going?” and the required response was “To Mingo”; for the other the challenge was “How are you coming?” and the response: “I come creeping.” Wives and daughters, wearing the insignia of UMW locals on their nurse’s caps, marched along with the men to tend to the wounded.

Early on they suffered a blow when their leaders, Mooney and Keeney, fled the state. On Wednesday night, August 31, a carload of miners came to Mooney’s home and told him they were determined to march through to Logan, regardless of what Bandholtz said or Mooney and Keeney told them. “The best thing for you two to do is to clear out and stay out until we get through here,” one of his visitors told Mooney, who immediately drove to Keeney’s home to decide what to do.

The two men had already been talking about leaving, and for good reason. Two days earlier a Mingo County grand jury had indicted them both in connection with two killings during the Three Days’ Battle the previous May. Even more ominously they had learned earlier that day that they were about to be indicted in Logan County on five counts ranging from misdemeanor to murder in connection with the killings of Gore, Colfago and Munsie. They remembered all too well Sid Hatfield’s fate when he appeared to answer charges in McDowell County, another stronghold of the coal operators, and decided, as Mooney later put it, “to clear out for a few days.” Just after midnight on September 1 they left Charleston and crossed the Ohio River to Point Pleasant in Ohio. There they were met by a local UMW organizer who took them to Columbus, the state capital and headquarters city for the Ohio UMW, where they were for the time being at least out of reach of the mine owners.

With their departure, the marching miners’ were left without an acknowledged leader. But with Mooney and Keeney gone, the man who more than any other made decisions and took charge was Bill Blizzard, the head of a District 17 subdistrict, a man regarded by Mooney “as all fire and dynamite, hot headed and irresponsible.” As troublesome as he was for the coal operators because of his aggressiveness, he often also got under the skin of his fellow union officials. Indeed he spent much of the time watching these colleagues at their office at Charleston “so they can’t put anything over on us,” as he liked to tell his secretary.

Together with Ed Reynolds, who had commanded the “outlaw train” from Racine, Blizzard developed the march’s strategy of enveloping Logan in a classic pincers movement. The northern arm would assemble at Jeffrey in Boone County and push west and south up Hewett Creek and across Spruce Fork ridge. The southern arm would start at Blair in Logan County and head due west up and over Blair Mountain. If all went well, they would meet in Logan and dance on Don Chafin’s grave.

But in keeping with the ruling principle of warfare, few things went according to plan. Leaders of individual units made up their own minds about when to advance, or retreat, and in what direction and in what force. Moreover the confusion inherent in combat was intensified in the battle for Blair Mountain for both armies by their lack of formal discipline and training and their impromptu organization.

For all the combat experience in French trenches of which many in the miners’ army could boast, it was common sense and the instinct for survival that dictated their tactics. One of the inherent drawbacks in trying to seize a mountain is that the defenders hold the high ground. So it was at the siege of Blair Mountain. Well-armed defenders on the twin crests of the mountain could look down on the graded road following the pass between the crests as it turned sharply west then ran along the face of the north side of the mountain for about a quarter of a mile before dropping down toward Blair. A frontal assault under those conditions would be akin to suicide, as the miners quickly realized. A better prospect was to outflank the defenders by using the thick underbrush along the steep sides of the mountain as cover.

This was the course followed by several groups of miners who made up the southern arm of the pincers anchored in Blair. Starting on Wednesday August 31, they began inching their way up the side of the mountain, slipping behind rocks and trees as they made their way on a route that would eventually take them to Logan. But the going was slow, the defense fire was unrelenting and they made little headway.

More promising was the assault staged from their base in Jeffrey by the miners making up the northern arm of the pincers, who launched a major attack on Crooked Creek Gap, marching along the hollow from Hewett Creek. They advanced about five miles to the Baldwin Fork, where Hewett Creek split, with Baldwin Fork itself flowing westward toward Logan while the other branch of Hewett Creek meandered south to Crooked Creek Gap. There a narrow trail would take them to Crooked Creek and then on to Logan.

The defending force on the northern front had two main strong points. At Mill Creek, which runs into the Guyandotte River west of Baldwin Fork, Sheriff Bill Hatfield commanded 600 McDowell County volunteers, supplemented by 300 Logan Deputies. At Crooked Creek Gap, the erstwhile AEF captain Ivan Hollingsworth headed a force of 300 Logan Deputies, backed up by two machine guns. One of these was operated by “Tough Tony” Gaujot, who had fired the same gun in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek violence. The miners at first made little headway at Mill Creek, where the defenders were too many and too well armed. But then they found a more promising target along a branch of the Mill Creek called Craddock Fork. On the morning of Thursday, September 1, about 500 miners led by Ed Reynolds, pulling the Gatling gun they had taken from the Gallagher company store, assaulted Hollingsworth’s forces along Craddock Fork. After three hours of battle, Tony Gaujot’s machine gun jammed and the miners broke through, advancing as far as the left fork of Crooked Creek, less than four miles from Logan itself.

It was Hollingsworth who staved off disaster for the defenders. He pulled back about half a mile, had his men put up new breastworks and mounted the one operating machine gun overlooking the approach trail. The miners pressed on, but the going was slow and bloody. “Time and again they tried to accomplish their purpose, but at each attempt machine gun and rifle fire drove them back,” an Associated Press reporter who looked down on the battlefield from a defense observation post reported. He saw two of the attackers fall, and others try to rescue them. Machine gun slugs, which clipped the dust in front and behind, forced them back. At one point about fifty miners charged straight ahead, attempting to overrun the ridge. But heavy fire drove them back, carrying five of their wounded comrades.

Though the attackers appeared to have been stalled, their closeness to Logan triggered near panic in Chafin’s stronghold. That afternoon Walter R. Thurmond, president of the Logan Coal Operators Association, wired Congressman Goodykoontz that “Unless troops sent by midnight tonight the Town of Logan will be attacked by an army of from four to eight thousand Reds and great loss of life and property sustained.” Goodykoontz reacted by telegraphing Harding, “Your proclamation is being contemptuously ignored,” and appealing for Federal troops.

But Chafin did not limit himself to ground warfare. He had earlier rented three biplanes supposedly only for reconnaissance. On Wednesday August 31 the planes had dropped copies of Harding’s proclamation ordering the miners’ army to disperse. The next day, Thursday, September 1, though, they took off with a more menacing cargo—tear gas and pipe bombs. The gas cylinders were dropped at Blair and at Bald Knob in Boone County, where the miners were believed to be massing for another attack, but fell wide of the mark and had no discernible effect. One of the pipe bombs, about six inches long and filled with black powder, nuts and bolts, exploded near a miners’ command post house, leaving a small crater but causing no other harm. Another dropped above the miners’ encampment at Jeffrey, landed near two women washing clothes, but turned out to be a dud.

Morgan, who on August 31 had sent yet another telegram to Harding, warning that armed men were “commandeering automobiles and conveying dynamite and other explosives up Lens Creek to the trouble zone,” on that same day took a more constructive step in his own interest. He finally re-established West Virginia’s National Guard. Following Morgan’s orders, Adjutant General Charnock issued a call for volunteers for temporary duty with the Guard and began organizing the first companies.

While Morgan waited for Harding to act, Harding waited for word from Bandholtz, who had returned to Charleston on the afternoon of September 1. By the time he arrived, private airplanes had dropped copies of Harding’s proclamation all through the Sharples area. Harding’s words seemed to matter little because the noon deadline he had set expired with little response. Nevertheless, Bandholtz decided to make one final effort to bring peace without Federal troops. He sent Colonel Ford and Major Thompson to the Sharples area to see what hope, if any, there was of the miners giving up the fight. To aid their case, they had a letter from Morgan promising the miners that they “would not be molested by state or county authorities while making a sincere effort to return to their homes in compliance with the proclamation of the President.”

Not surprisingly, as the officers learned, Morgan’s assurances carried little weight with the union folks, for whom the memories of the Sharples raid were still fresh. During their visit, Bandholtz’s emissaries encountered Philip Murray, vice president of the UMW and years later president of the CIO, who had been dispatched by John L. Lewis on a peacekeeping mission of his own. Colonel Ford talked to Murray, who was accompanied by a UMW organizer, David Fowler, but found that the union official had made little progress. In his desperation, Murray had sought the advice of William Wiley, general manager of the Boone County Coal Corp., to ask his assessment.

That was enough for Murray. He gave up and returned to Charleston. By midnight on September 1, twelve hours after Harding’s deadline, Bandholtz, having heard the glum news from Thompson, also abandoned his peacemaking efforts. It was after midnight when he sent for Governor Morgan and told him he believed he had no choice but to send for troops. Bandholtz, clad in his pajamas, summoned reporters and gave them the news. Immensely relieved, Morgan left Bandholtz’s hotel room and told reporters: “I have nothing to say. I am through.”

And so the orders went out from Major General Harbord in the nation’s capital to Camp Sherman and Columbus Barracks, Ohio, home of two crack infantry regiments—the 19th and the 10th, to Camp Knox, Kentucky, base of the 40th infantry, and to Camp Dix, New Jersey, where the 26th infantry was stationed. From Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, Harbord summoned a Chemical Warfare unit equipped with “a large quantity” of 150-pound teargas bombs, “guaranteed to incapacitate any person within 300 yards,” according to the Army. Harbord also ordered Major General Charles T. Menoher, chief of the Army Air Service, to send twenty-one aircraft from the 88th Aero Squadron to Kanawha Field. This was Billy Mitchell’s outfit. But Harbord and the Army evidently had had enough of Mitchell’s cowboy rhetoric in West Virginia. Harbord’s orders were clear. Mitchell’s planes were to go. Mitchell was to stay home. Major Davenport Johnson would command the squadron when it arrived in West Virginia.

But Bandholtz’s reproach, as pointed as it was, did nothing to alter the realities that faced the union rebels. Time was running out on their uprising. Mindful that Federal troops were on the way, on Thursday September 1 the miners launched one last desperate effort to break through the defenders’ lines and reach Logan. In preparation for their attack, the insurgents dispatched a patrol to destroy a railroad bridge on the Guyandotte line of the Norfolk and Western, hoping to keep reinforcements from reaching the defenders’ positions. The bridge was set on fire, but a sentry who extinguished the blaze discovered a charge of dynamite and saved it from being blown up. But the miners went ahead with their planned assault anyway that same morning.

The attack began with a feint at the center of the defense lines at Blair Mountain. The miners opened up on an outpost manned by the “Bluefield Boys,” a volunteer contingent from that town, with machine-gun and rifle fire. Having gained the attention of the defenders, the miners sent their main force against the left and right flanks of the defenders. “Attack was pushed desperately,” reported one local journalist from his vantage point in a machine-gun nest on the defense ramparts. “The enemy seemed to have no sense of fear whatever and advanced over the crest of the hill in the face of machine gun and rifle fire.” But in reality the defenders gave as good as they got. “We couldn’t fire a shot but what they would rake our line from top to bottom,” one of the miners told reporters. To this beleaguered insurgent the defenders seemed able to volley back 100 rounds for every shot fired at them.

And when it came to devious tactics, the defenders were at least a match for the attackers. At one point the defenders in the first line of trenches abandoned their posts, seemingly driven off by the force of the attack. The advancing miners promptly occupied the trench, exulting in the ground they had gained. But they had little time to celebrate. A hidden machine gun located barely fifty yards away raked the position and drove them back. Another machine-gun nest, protected by a rock cliff and barricades of timber and stones, kept up a steady fire. Fortunately for the miners it could only fire in one direction, but it was enough to help repel several assaults.

For the miners it was their last gasp of rebellion. By the time the Blair Mountain force of insurgents had abandoned their assault and fallen back on their own lines, the U.S. military presence had arrived in the form of the Army Air Service. By late Thursday afternoon September 1, fourteen twin-engined De Haviland and Martin bombers had landed at Kanawha field. Though the planes were fully armed for combat, they would perform only a limited mission. “You will under no circumstances drop any bombs or fire any machine guns,” Bandholtz instructed squadron commander Johnson. Eager to avoid spilling blood unnecessarily, Bandholtz wanted the planes to scout the two opposing armies, thus providing him with his own source of intelligence.

But the Federal force that mattered most were the infantry units that began arriving Friday night September 2, some 2,100 strong. Now Bandholtz set about his appointed task. Washington had given him as much leeway as any commander could want, or expect under the circumstances. To be sure some restraints were imposed in keeping with the fundamental resolve of the president and his secretary of war to keep the Federal involvement as limited as possible. Accordingly, Harding and Weeks had both decided against declaring Federal martial law, in keeping with the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in ex parte Milligan, handed down in 1866. In that case the high court reversed the court martial conviction of an Indiana civilian, Landon Milligan, accused of aiding the Confederate cause and sentenced to death. Even though the United States was at war, the justices held that Milligan’s constitutional rights had been violated. “The constitution . . . is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace,” Justice David Davis wrote in a long-remembered opinion. Its provisions, he added, cannot “be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. . . . Martial law can never exist where the courts are open.” That meant that in order to declare martial law, Harding would need to ask Morgan to close the West Virginia courts, a step this president, so devoted to establishing normalcy, wanted at all costs to avoid.

For all of its difficulties, Bandholtz’s task offered one positive aspect. Each side eagerly welcomed the troops as helpful to its cause. Obviously they both could not be correct in their assessments, and it was the union leaders who turned out to be grievously mistaken. The union and its supporters viewed the arrival of the troops as a chance for vindication. Now they believed, very naïvely as it turned out, that their cause would get the attention they sought. “The only way we can be assured of a square deal is by the presence of federal troops,” a miner identified only as a leader of the march told a local reporter. On Saturday September 3, as they waited for the troops, union leaders sent out word that “not a single shot will be fired on Federal troops coming up from the rear of the miners’ line.” William Petry, Chafin’s erstwhile antagonist, said the union forces had promised “they would submit without objection to rules and regulations that might be laid down by Federal authorities.”

But whatever benefits the union thought to reap from the arrival of the troops, Governor Morgan and his allies, the coal mine owners, expected that the Army’s intervention would mean the beginning of the end of their troubles with the union. Accordingly Morgan sent out word to all state officials civilian and military to cooperate with the troops and to “obey the direction” of Bandholtz and his aides.

In Washington, for the first time in a month, Federal officials could get through the day without facing a fresh crisis in West Virginia. Taking advantage of the lull, and of the Labor Day holiday, President Harding and the First Lady left for a three-day cruise on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Elsewhere the observation of the holiday was dimmed by the parlous economic conditions to which Bandholtz had adverted in his initial meeting with Keeney and Mooney. In New York the Central Trades and Labor Council called off the traditional Labor Day parade because unions had been spending so much on aid to their unemployed members that there was not enough left over to pay for marching bands and uniforms.

In West Virginia, there was still plenty of work to do. On Saturday September 3 Bandholtz decreed an immediate ceasefire and then gave orders to his troops to stage a broad enveloping movement, surrounding both armies. He sent the 19th infantry, from Camp Sherman along with some units of the 26th, from Fort Dix, east by train along the Coal River, moving to the rear of the miners’ army. The 40th infantry moved into positions behind the forces commanded by Chafin on Blair Mountain.

The 19th, two companies of combat veterans under the command of Captain John Wilson, boarded a train that took them through the Coal River valley from St. Albans, just outside of Charleston, to Madison, in the heart of the Kanawha Valley. In Madison, Wilson soon encountered William Blizzard, the supposed commander of the rebel army. Renowned for his cantankerousness, Blizzard in this case promised to cooperate with the captain, though in their dealings he never let down his guard. He agreed to Wilson’s request to try to persuade the miners to come down out of the hills, if Wilson would assign a squad of soldiers to accompany him.

A few hours later, just before daybreak, another troop train arrived, bringing more men from the 19th, horses, howitzers and the regimental commander Colonel C. A. Martin. By this time Blizzard had returned to Madison and reported that the miners had pulled out and were on their way home. Soon after both trains rolled on toward Jeffrey, about five miles from Blair Mountain. On their way they encountered scores of miners headed back, “simply a swarm of stubbly faced men getting out of the hills and back to their homes as fast and as quickly as flivvers could take them,” Sparkes reported. What was notable about these retreating miners was they had no guns.

About that, Blizzard told Martin and Wilson what they had already surmised. When he spread the word among the miners to call off their insurrection, he also warned them that the Army would only take the guns from men who had no permits—the miners—but not from the members of Chafin’s army. “That’s why you don’t see the guns,” Blizzard told Martin candidly enough. “When we need ’em again, we’ll know where to look for ’em.”

There was enough shooting so that Boyden Sparkes, and three other correspondents, decided to see the action firsthand and hired a car to take them to the front. When their car could go no further on the primitive rural roads, they set out on foot. Within fifty feet of the summit of Blair Mountain, they came under fire from state police. Sparkes was hit twice: One bullet went through his right leg, another creased his scalp. All in the party threw themselves to the ground. As the shooting continued, they shouted, “friends” and “unarmed” in the direction of the gunfire.

Back in Logan the reporters were first taken to the county jail, then released once they had established their identity. When Sparkes, whose wounds turned out not to be serious, sought to write about his experience, Colonel Eubanks allowed him to use an office typewriter, but to the correspondent’s indignation insisted that he submit his copy for censorship. “I was amazed by this frank announcement of an intention to nullify an article of the Constitution,” Sparkes wrote later.

His indignation only increased when he had to deal with the censor. He turned out to be “Tough Tony” Gaujot, who held the rank of major in Eubanks’s defense forces. Glancing at Sparkes’s story, he quickly crossed out a line describing the Army’s arriving that read, “Gaunt faced women, barefooted and expressionless watched the troops pass. Some of them waved half-heartedly.”

While the 19th Infantry was preoccupied disarming the miners, the 40th undertook what was presumed to be the easier task of dealing with Chafin’s defenders. The first train of its troops pulled into Logan on Saturday afternoon September 3 in the midst of a rainstorm. If in Madison the troops were greeted by the union miners with a mixture of anxiety and relief, in beleaguered Logan, the stronghold of Don Chafin’s and of the anti-union forces, the mood was downright joyous.

Despite the warmth of this greeting, Colonel C. F. Thompson commanding the troops soon encountered a problem—Colonel Eubanks, the National Guard Officer whom Morgan had put in command of the defense forces, and most of his staff were several sheets to the wind. This was not entirely a surprise to Thompson, whose previous conversations with Eubanks had led him to conclude that the Guard officer resorted to the bottle to ease the tensions of his job.

Indeed, given the confused state of the leadership of the defensive army, Thompson concluded that “there had been dissension among the leaders, lack of a carefully organized plan of defense and that the state of intoxication found upon our arrival had endured for at least most of the proceeding 24 hours.” Many persons joined the defenders in search of adventure and then disappeared, Thompson noted. Boys in their early teens manned positions with high-powered rifles. Many fired their weapons for no apparent reason.

Despite this disarray, Thompson carried out his assignment. In the early hours of Sunday morning, his men awakened the defenders at their barricades and trenches and sent them back to Logan, while the soldiers, traveling by car, by mule and on foot moved into positions on Blair Mountain and Crooked Creek. These movements went without mishap, except for a volunteer who shot himself in the foot in the lobby of the Aracoma Hotel, the place he chose to unload his rifle.

Those who surrendered were taken by train to St. Albans, just outside of Charleston, loaded onto street-car trains and shuttled through the capital. While thousands of curious citizens lined the streets, the once defiant rebels leaned out the windows, laughing and shouting at the crowd, some waving American flags. Many seemed to take satisfaction that they had not yielded to the coal operators and their local allies, but instead the Federal government had intervened to put down their rebellion. “It was Uncle Sam that did it,” one shouted.

Mindful of stories that scores had been killed, their bodies still lying in the woods, Colonel Martin sent a company of troops with miners and guides and stretcher bearers to search the area but found no corpses. Reporters covering the battle were told that the miners “carried their dead and wounded away with them.” But no one has ever proved or disproved this contention. The precise death toll was never established, but estimates range from fewer than twenty to more than fifty. In any case this was a much lower figure than was feared would be produced by the size of the forces involved. Chafin had been informed at one point that the miners’ army numbered 9,000; his own forces he put at about 2,500. Other estimates went even higher. The official Army history of the Federal role in domestic disorders put the total on both sides between 10,000 to 20,000.

Both the miners and the defenders were well armed and had plenty of ammunition, which they fired freely. The roar of the guns became a steady pounding in the ears of men on both sides. “You could hear it, it seemed like for miles along the river,” Ira Wilson, one of the miners, testified later. “It would echo and roll around so much sometimes you would think they was right down in Blair. Machine guns cracked up there so you would think the whole place was coming down on you.”

The casualty figures seemed to belie the reputation of West Virginians for marksmanship. But combatants had to reckon with the thick late summer underbrush that clogged the hills and hollows that made up the battlefield. Many often fired without knowing exactly what they were shooting at. As one Bluefield volunteer described it to his local paper: “Someone spies the dark shadow of an armed man stealing along the road and lets go at it.”

But even in conventional military engagements, the number of dead and wounded on each side is not necessarily the best gauge of their results. This was particularly true of the Battle of Blair Mountain. Its real significance is best reckoned not by the blood shed by the opposing forces but rather by its economic and political consequences. By these measurements it soon became clear that the union miners of West Virginia had suffered a staggering defeat.