Blair Mountain Dates: Mid-to-late AUG to 4 SEP 1921
I try to publish these "battles" pieces in the month they occurred, so Hastings was in October and Antietam was in September.
This one is difficult because to pull it all together spans not days or months but years. The "campaign" that ended on the slopes of Spruce Fork Ridge in early September 1921 could be said to have begun in Matewan, West Virginia in May 1920. Or on the steps of the county courthouse in Welch, WV on 1 AUG 1921.
Certainly the latter date seems to have moved things into fast forward...but the actual "troop movement" doesn't really begin until the third week of August 1921 and the actual shooting starts sometime around 27 AUG, the main engagement doesn't begin until about 28 AUG and lasts about a week. The last shots are fired sometime between 3 SEP and 4 SEP.
The real answer is that I'm retired now and don't really have to watch the clock anymore and I'm idle enough to want to get going on writing this one up, so it's going to be June and you'll have to excuse my ahistoric timing.
Okay.
So.
Forces Engaged: The "Redneck" forces of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and allies -
Somewhere between four and five figures of irregular infantry composed of unhappy coal miners, friends, relatives, and assorted union leaders.
I've seen all kinds of numbers for the pro-union forces that converged around Blair Mountain in August 1921, ranging from something like 7,000 (per the 2002 West Virginia Division of Archives and History highway marker) to as high as 15,000 (cited on the Mine Wars Museum memorial in Clothier, WV)
The honest answer would be "thousands" without a qualifier, simply because the ad-hoc nature of the UMW group defied any real tally. The fighters on the Pro-union side were, like many irregular fighting forces, probably pretty idiosyncratic.
Guys would join up in work gangs, or from mining families, or as individuals, slope off to shoot some of the owners' goons, and then call it a day. Or hang around. They didn't exactly have a PAC section to keep a record of who showed up for morning formation.
Now. That said, it's probably unrealistic to see these guys as some sort of movie mob. A lot of them were WW1 veterans, and to say that the West Virginia mine country was full of weaponry is putting it pretty mildly. Here's an example of the firearms seized from rebellious miners active in the Paint Creek/Cabin Creek "mine war" of 1912-13:
The link at the site above says that the mine owners and their proxies hauled in over 1,800 "high powered" rifles - if you expand the photo above there's a congeries of everything from what look like 1800s-vintage percussion-cap pieces through lever-action Winchester-type 0.30 caliber rifles to 1903 Springfield and the older Krag-Jorgenson service rifles.
The thing on the tripod at right? I'm guessing M1895 Colt-Browning machinegun.
But that would have been it; pistols, rifles, mostly light machineguns (where they could be scrounged) up to the occasional Browning M1917 30-caliber heavy machinegun.
No artillery (or mortars), no air assets.
So somewhere between 7,000 to 15-20,000 irregular light infantry in squad- to company-sized (?) elements under a small group of UMW leaders including Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney, but the individual most commonly named as the actual field commander is a UMW organizer named Bill Blizzard.
The armed force opposing the pro-union miners included a mashup of public and private groups. These included:
Private forces organized by Logan County and county law enforcement: per Shogan (2006) roughly 3,000, including "lawyers, bankers, preachers, doctors, and farmers" as well as impressed strikebreakers from the local mines. This probably includes the county sheriff's deputies, reported in the same source as numbering up to 300 as well as "special constables" raised for what the mine owners and their partisans saw as the "defense" of southwestern WV.
By the end of August 1921 the anti-union forces included:
McDowell County: roughly 600 anti-union volunteers and 250 American Legion ex-servicemen as volunteer infantry.
Mercer County: American Legion: 200 ex-service volunteer infantry from Bluefield
Mingo County: 130 volunteer infantry from Williamson.
West Virginia State Police: Some unknown number of state troopers
Plus various odds and sods from anti-union parts of the state amounting to probably a hundred or two more.
The roughest estimate I can get is about 3,000 active irregular infantry and militarized police in up to battalion-sized elements. No artillery but three aircraft, under the notional command of COL William Eubanks, WVARNG but largely commanded by the sheriff of Logan County, Don Chafin.
United States Army - The final ingredient in the Blair Mountain mix were the armed forces of the US government. These included elements of four infantry regiments: 10th and 19th US Infantry then posted to stations in Ohio (Columbus Barracks for the 10th USI, Camp Sherman for the 19th), 40th US Infantry from Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and 26th US Infantry from Ft. Dix, New Jersey..
Authorized strength of a US Army infantry battalion is listed as about 600 all ranks in the 1917 Table of Organization, and a regiment of three battalions as a little over 2,000. I can't find confirmation of how many troops were assigned to any of the listed units in early September, or how many of those were actually brought to the slopes of Spruce Fork Ridge, but a rough guess of somewhere between 1,800 and 2,400 regular US infantry and internal assets. No artillery or armor.
In addition to the grunts a unit of the then-Army Air Service was deployed. The 88th Air (or "Aero") Squadron had an assigned strength of 17 De Havilland DH-4B heavy fighters when the unit took off from its airbase at Langley Field, Virginia.
Two were scratched before taking off from the unit's refueling stop in Roanoke, VA, leaving 15 to takeoff for the forward airbase at Kanawha City, WV.
One crashed on takeoff. Two more lost contact in bad weather en route, landed somewhere in Tennessee, then proceeded to crash trying to rejoin their unit, leaving eleven aircraft to operate over the engagement area; we'll discuss the actual operations when we get there.
The War Department reinforced the air element with four Martin MB-2 heavy bombers; I can't find a unit linked to these aircraft, but of the four bombardment squadrons at Langley Field only one, the 11th - is described as flying the MB-2 (the other three were assigned the NBS-1 night bomber version, although I am led to understand that this aircraft was commonly referred to as an "MB-2", so that's not definitive).
Let's go with the 11th just for the sake of argument.
I have no evidence that any artillery or armor was mobilized, so on 2 SEP 1921 the federal forces consisted of roughly 2,000 regular infantry, 11 DH-4B fighters, and 4 MB-2 bombers under BG Harry Bandholtz, USA.
The Sources: The events of 1921 were extensively covered in the public press of the time (and, presumably, radio although we have no recorded history of what was broadcast to the best of my knowledge).
The difficulty there is that so far as I can tell there were no reporters "embedded" with the UMW. While the anti-union forces had reporters and official mouthpieces - sheriffs, National Guard officers, mine owners, et cetera - the miners had not much of anyone. The union leaders were either up on Spruce Fork Ridge (Blizzard) or on the run (Keeney, Mooney)
Plus, as we'll get to in the "Campaign" section, the United States was still hard in the grip of the Red Scare of the late Teens. The union guys were easily thrown into the "Red" basket (the red bandanna didn't help, either...) and so it would have been difficult for a Twenties journo to write anything very flattering about the miners or an editor to print it.
So much of the "mainstream media" coverage of the time was dominated by the anti-union narrative. There's a nice little site Media Coverage of the Battle of Blair Mountain that summarizes this pretty well.
Mind, there were "alternative" news sources; papers like the International Workers of the World (the IWW or "Wobblies") Solidarity that could be counted on to provide a counter to the conservative/anti-union message..but I find no evidence that any of the IWW organizations sent anyone to cover the fighting.
The other likely supporters of the union side, the Socialist Party, had been decimated by opposition to the US's entry into WW1 and then by the Red Scare. I can't find any record of reportage in Socialist Party papers, many of which had been shuttered by 1920 anyway.
Much of the union side of the story had to be assembled by supplementing the press coverage with interviews of participants on both sides. A recent publication of these primary accounts, On Dark and Bloody Ground (Lawrence, 2021), is in print at the West Virginia University Press and can be ordered here.
Perhaps the single most cited secondary source is The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story Of America's Largest Labor Uprising by Robert Shogan, published in 2006 and cited here as Shogan (2006). I have it in digital form, and agree that it is probably the most comprehensive source for the engagement as well as the larger "Mine Wars" of which Blair Mountain is perhaps the best known.
Supposedly there's an account of the events of Blair Mountain included in On the Battle Lines written by Art Shields, who was a long-time labor activist, IWW organizer, and labor journo who was in West Virginia at the time. In that capacity he is likely to have provided labor-friendly reportage to left-leaning newspapers...so I suspect there was some out there. I just can't find it online.
As for sources on the internet, the starting point is usually Wikipedia, and the Battle of Blair Mountain entry there seems well researched and written. It also appears to be scrupulously neutral on the factions involved, not an easy task for such a contentious subject.
The National Park Service has a compendium of articles at their Blair Mountain site.
There's a fun little webpage called Biplanes over Blair written by Nick Musgrave at the expatalachians website that gives some more detail about the Air Service's role in the fight.
Appalachian History has a good little Blair Mountain summary page, including perhaps the best "battle map" (which I've ruthlessly stolen for this piece).
The Appalachian Voices site discusses not just the historical events but modern attempts to memorialize the battlefield. Worth a moment in itself as well as for the links.
The Cultural Trust site covers the physical locations of the events of 1921.
Other source media: The Wiki site does a nice job breaking down the many ways that Blair Mountain and the "Coal Wars" of which it was only a part have sunk into U.S. culture, including the 1987 film Matewan, as a plot device in fiction, as well as in songs like the UMW anthem "Union Miner".
For that wage I'll lay my life
When I marched down
From Marmet
Armed with my Colt and Winchester
Red bandanna tied 'bout my neck.
I am a Union Miner
And I work all night and day
I am a Union Miner
I'll mine your coal for Union wage.
Before The Campaign, Part 1: Left by the Number Nine Coal. This is bituminous coal:
This is why we're talking about this fight.
The people who met along Spruce Fork Ridge in 1921 were there because of a fundamental argument about this coal; who mined it, who owned it, where, and how, and how much of it would be mined out of the West Virginia ground, and who, where, and how much it would be bought and sold for, and who would get how much of the profit from that sale.
But the West Virginia coal story begins a long, long time before the late summer of 1921.
Three hundred million years before, give or take a year or two, to be precise.
When West Virginia - which today looks like this...
...looked like this:
This is what's often referred to as a "coal swamp", and to talk about it and how it led to a bunch of people shooting at each other in 1921 we've got to take a brief detour into geology and paleontology. I'll be quick.
Promise.
From the formation of the solar system (some time around 4.5 billion years ago or so and change...) to the end of the Devonian Period - about 355 million years before present (let's use the abbreviation "ybp" to keep from having to say that...) - the Earth went from a hot mess to the big blue marble in space we're used to thinking of because we've seen the pictures.
Tectonics moved lithospheric plates around, formed oceans and continents (and broke them up...) and began "geologic processes" like erosion, sediment production, and deposition.
(Told ya I'd be brief...)
Living organisms emerged and developed increased size and complexity.
These included both plant and animal life, but the link was that these were "carbon-based life forms" and the carbon part is important.
Because of the four most common elements on Earth carbon is uniquely volatile.
There's a lot of heat energy stored in carbon.
For those first four-and-a-half billion years (or so...) that didn't mean much. The carbon in that biomass was pretty skimpy because the organisms were few, and small.
Then at the end of the Devonian a couple of things happened to change that.
For one, many of the plant species began to load up something called "lignin". Lignin is basically the structural steel in plant walls; plants without it tend to be small and low, with it they can become "trees".
Weird looking "trees", mind, by our human standards. The iconic tree species of the new geologic time frame - the "Carboniferous" periods - was something called a lepidodendron or "scale tree":
And tectonics - which we'll discuss in just a bit - produced ideal conditions for these suckers to grow.
The formation of a supercontinent ("Gondwana") near the equator formed an immense mountain chain near he center. That, in turn, created a nearly-constant rain that ran off into the lowlands surrounding the mountains. Those hot equatorial floodplains were perfect for growing the new tree-style plants.
And fuck did they.
These plants were 1) huge, and 2) all over the place. Suddenly there was so much plant material that it couldn't be digested and removed from the geologic record. Whole peat beds of these big ol' weird dead plants formed in swampy areas.
During the first part of this bioexplosion (the Mississippian Period), though, most of what is today North America was ocean, so what's left from that is mostly ocean bottom sediments, limestones, shales, sandstones and other inorganic stuff like that...
But in the later part - the Pennsylvanian Period, which starts about 320 mybp - what is today West Virginia was:
1) like I said - near the equator, meaning hot, and,
2) a broad floodplain in the drainage of the honkin' huge Appalachian Mountains, the Himalayas of their time, so perfect for ginormous swamps.
Basically the West Virginia area in the Pennsylvanian was a multi-million-year-long boggy tropical rainforest.
Like the castle in Monty Python, the trees died, fell over, and sank into the swamp.
Over, and over, and over.
The former swamps were buried, and the weight of the sediment overhead and the heat of the surrounding rock then began to squeeze and bake the organics and water out of the swamp.
First the dead plants became peat.
Then lignite, a sort of denser peat.
Then the "coalification" process began, turning the brown into black and the plants into ever more increasingly pure carbon.
The real culmination of this is "anthracite" coal, which is typically 85-95% carbon and less than 10% water. This is "hard" coal, the shiny black stuff, that burns hot and as "clean" - meaning few volitiles like sulfur - as coal can burn.
The coal in West Virginia didn't make it that far.
Most of the West Virginia coal beds are the next-lowest grade, the "bituminous" coal we looked at up top.
This stuff is softer than the hard black anthracite. It's also often "dirtier"; containing more organics, more water, more sulfur and other volitiles that produce some nasty compounds in the coal smoke as well as leaving some pretty scungy residues in the ash.
But. There's a shit-ton of it - bituminous coal is the most common variety of coal both found and mined - and it still burns hot enough to use for a bunch of domestic and industrial uses.
So by the time human beings came along...and invented stuff like shovels...and steam engines...and West Virginia...the Pennsylvanian coal swamps were coal beds just begging to be mined.
Before the Campaign, Part 2: Traveling down that Coaltown Road.
There are written records from China as old as 6,000 ybp, and shaft and gallery mining - as shown in the illustration to the left - as early as a millennium after that.
Coal was mined in Roman Britain, but coal ash has been found in human settlements earlier, some much earlier, than that. The first coal burned was undoubtedly picked up below or scratched out from coal beds exposed by natural processes such as erosion.
My guess is that fairly early in human history someone or someones found that the weird black rock would burn hotter and less smoky than wood.
However the real revolution of coal came because of another revolution, the Industrial one.
The original carbon fuel - wood - wasn't ideal for the large-scale, high-heat steam engines of the industries of the 18th Century. Coal, which burned hotter and cleaner, was ideal, and after the 1700s coal mining became an obsession in Europe; the engines of industry were insatiable coal burners.
When industry came to the new United States, coal mining came with it.
The official West Virginia website says that the first mine in the state was opened near Wheeling in 1810.
Interestingly, though, it sounds like coal was not a boom business in the Appalachian hills of what was the hinterlands of the state of Virginia. Instead coal was mined for...wait for it; salt
The e-WV site says that:
"The erection of salt furnaces in Kanawha County beginning in 1797 provided the initial stimulus to coal mining. By 1840, 90 furnaces produced a million bushels of salt annually and consumed 200,000 tons of coal. More than 900 salt workers, many of them enslaved, mined coal to fire the salt evaporation furnaces."
This weird Salt Rush played out in the 1850s, the Civil War kept the new state unindustrialized, and the mountainous terrain meant that getting people and equipment in and coal out ranged from difficult to impossible, so coal mining in West Virginia was pretty small time for the first hundred years of U.S. history.
The change came in the 1870s and 1880s with the same steel rails that industrialized much of the rest of the nation. The same w-WV site describes how the rail barons helped set up the coal barons:
"Growth was especially dramatic in southern West Virginia, where the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railway wended its way through the New and Kanawha coalfields and connected Richmond and the new city of Huntington in 1873. The Pocahontas and Flat Top coalfields were linked to the national markets by the Norfolk & Western (N&W) Railway in the 1880s, when the line was completed from the port of Norfolk, reaching the Ohio River near Huntington in 1892.
The C&O did not attempt to control the land along its tracks, so the mineral lands in the New and Kanawha valleys were taken up by independent speculators or mining companies during the 1870s and 1880s."
These "independent speculators or mining companies" weren't in business to make nice little communities of happy miners. They had bills to pay - and if you know anything about the Gilded Age you'll know that everyone involved had their fucking hand out, and the railroads were the worst - and a grueling cycle of booms and "panics" as the recessions and depressions of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were called.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the coal barons. They were as shitty as every other Gilded Age industrial plutocrat. But...they also had a pretty shitty system to work with; every coal company would happily cut the throats of their competitors, and wages were an expense that could be leveraged, unlike railroad fees and timber cribbing costs.
One thing I didn't know before researching this piece was that to get that stuff out of the ground the coal kings didn't just go roust the hillbillies out of the hollers. I've always thought that the typical West Virginia miner was a Hatfield or a McCoy, a backwoods hillbilly come down out of the mountains because squirrel hunting and 'shine didn't feed the brats.
Nope. The mountains of West Virginia didn't support enough farms (or stills...) to recruit men to mine coal. The mine owners had to bring in people from the outside; recent immigrants, Black refugees from the Deep South, Italians and Poles and Slovaks...all mingled with the old hill people to go down into the new mine pits.
And get hurt, sick, and die there.
In our comfortable chairs and well-lit desks it's tempting for a lot if us 21st Century Americans to romanticize about the hard men mining the hard coal.
But mining was - still is, in a lot of places - a dirty, dangerous, physically brutal way to earn a living.
And that's without even thinking about things like sucking in coal dust for decades until the inside of your lungs look like the filter of a butt-smoked Pall Mall.
The miners (and loggers, and steelworkers, and stevedores...) lived at the sufferance of their companies. Their pay was as low as the company could make it, and depended on their being able to work.
Get sick? Get hurt? Too bad for you.
Get killed? Too bad for your wife and kids.
Things were especially bad in West Virginia. Remember how the owners had to yard in people to mine? Well, they didn't have towns or homes to move into; those weren't there in the mountain country, either.
So the mine companies built "company towns", and if you worked in the Smith Mine you lived in a Smith Company house and had to get your food and clothes at the Smith Company Store. If Mr. Smith had a tough month and wanted to make up some losses by raising the price of flour at the store? And you couldn't afford it because he'd cut your pay?
Tough fucking titty.
And dangerous?
"West Virginia fell far behind other major coal-producing states in regulating mining conditions. Between 1890 and 1912, West Virginia had a higher mine death rate than any other state. West Virginia was the site of numerous deadly coal mining accidents, including the nation's worst coal disaster. On December 6, 1907, an explosion at a mine owned by the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah, Marion County, killed 361. One historian has suggested that during World War I, a U.S. soldier had a better statistical chance of surviving in battle than did a West Virginian working in the coal mines."So it's not surprising that the miners and the mine owners didn't get along all that great.
And that's where we're going to start; in the so-called "Mine Wars".
The Campaign: So far as I can tell there had been pretty bad blood between miner and mine owner damn near since the beginning of major commercial mining in the 1870s. But the real head-butting started with the emergence of the United Mine Workers union in the 1890s.
The UMW fought - literally fought - with mine owners and their private forces, police, and soldiers...
(The first union miners killed in a major strike were shot by National Guard troops in Morewood , Pennsylvania in 1891 at a coke plant owned by the loathsome Henry Ford Frick, who, if he didn't, should have been the guy who said that he could hire half the workingmen to shoot the other half...).
...all across the United States, from the coal hills of Pennsylvania to the silver lodes of Colorado. The UMWA Wiki page has a good list of the strikes and labor actions the union fought across the country in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s.
The thing is that the UMW really struggled in West Virginia. Between the union founding in 1890 and the turn of the 20th Century the UNW organized locals at coal mines in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Union organization drives in West Virginia were tried in 1892, 1894, 1895, and 1897.
All failed.
Here's where we need to stop for a bit and discuss what a GI would call the AO; the "area of operations".
The Southern Coalfields: Here's what the e-WV site says about West Virginia coal:
"Coal beds of the southern coalfield are generally older (Lower and Middle Pennsylvanian), higher in rank, lower in sulfur content and ash yield, and generally of better quality than those of the younger (Middle and Upper Pennsylvanian) northern coalfield. Generally, southern West Virginia mines produce clean-burning ‘‘compliance’’ steam coal for power generation, and much also is used for coke production for steel making; northern coal is also used for power generation, although these mines rarely produce compliance coal. There is more minable coal in the south."
These fields were the big prizes; the Kanawha/New River field (in Boone and Kanawha Counties), the Logan field (mostly in Logan County), the Williamson field (in Logan and Mingo Counties) and the FlatTop/Pocahontas/Two River Field (mostly in McDowell County)
The Kanawha fields were, frustratingly for the union men, their first real gain...and then their first reverse. By 1902 the first locals were organized in the Kanawha field. As the e-WV site details, the mine owners weren't having any of that Red shit:
"Following the union successes, coal operators had formed the Kanawha County Coal Operators Association in 1903, the first such organization in the state. It hired private detectives from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency in Bluefield as mine guards to harass union organizers."
Times were hard enough for the union men when the owners had just the local coppers to bust heads for them. These Baldwin-Felts jokers were the same breed as the better-known Pinkerton "detectives", and just as busy breaking strikes and strikers.
Within ten years the Kanahwa field was damn near back where it had started, and the Kanahwa miners so pissed off that when the owners of the Paint Creek mine told their workers to fuck off when they struck for a raise in April 1912 the whole thing exploded.
The Coal Wars: Paint Creek/Cabin Creek - The Paint Creek (and the conjoined actions at nearby Cabin Creek) "strike" was effectively a rehearsal for Blair Mountain, lasted into July 1913, and it could easily take just as long to recount. For the sake of brevity let's just summarize the tale.
The owners "won" and the union lost, after a vicious war that left both sides with hatred more bitter than before.
The fires of Paint Creek raised a new generation of UMW leaders - including the men mentioned already, Blizzard, Keeney, and Mooney, - as officers of the UMW district that covered the Kanawha field and infused them with a fine hate of the mine owners and their Baldwin-Felt soldiers.
Then came the Great War.
The war needed industry and industry needed coal, so when the US entered the war the government went to the mines and the miners.
Normally an increase in demand would have raised prices and - at least in theory - wages. Trying to keep war expenses down the War Department insisted on - and got - a deal. The miners hauled out more coal and didn't try for more pay...but the government had, in effect, written a check.
When the war ended the miners and their union came to collect, and that didn't happen.
So the UMW called a massive strike across the coalfields in 1919.
Again, to make a long story short:
The union "won" this one; President Wilson's Secretary of Labor sided with the new UMW president John Lewis. Wilson's Attorney General - who was a massive Red-baiter who saw commies everywhere, especially in the union shops full of dirty foreigners and socialists and radicals - had slammed the strike with something called the Lever Act, one of those appalling WW1 gimmicks like the Espionage Act that made looking sideways at God, the flag, and motherhood a crime.
The Secretary of Labor (who confusingly was also named Wilson) worked out a settlement that won the miners a raise.
This win encouraged the UMW to try and organize more of the coalfields.
The Coal Wars: Mingo and Matewan - So the UMW started recruiting in the violently anti-union areas at the southwestern end of West Virginia, places like McDowell, Mingo, and Logan Counties.
Among the union organizers were the three veterans of the Paint Creek war we've mentioned as well as one of the icons of American labor, Mary "Mother" Jones.
The usual ensued. The organizers talked and speechified. The miners, many of them, signed union cards. The mine owners, when they found out, fired the union men, and their Baldwin-Felts mosstroopers showed up to kick the fired miners and their families out of their company shacks and towns.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Until a group of Baldwin-Felts agents showed up in the town of Matewan, in Mingo County, in May of 1920.
For the Baldwin-Felts guys 19 MAY was just another day in the coalfields; working for the Stone Mountain Coal Company they kicked some union families out into the rain, had dinner at the hotel, and went to get back on the train.
The difference in Matewan was wrapped around two interesting guys; the mayor of Matewan, Cabell Testerman, and the local police chief, Sid Hatfield.
Both were pro-union men, and both showed up, Hatfield with a warrant for some of the Baldwin Felts gang.
The "detectives" - who were led by two brothers of the "Felts", Tommy, who was half-owner of the agency - laid their own warrant on Hatfield. The Felts brothers, Hatfield, Mayor Testerman, and Mingo County sheriff's deputy Fred Burgraff, met on the porch of the hardware store and that's where the shooting started.
There seem to be differing accounts of what happened then.
What the Baldwin-Felts guys didn't know was that there were a bunch of pissed-off - and armed - union men around them. When someone - supposedly either Hatfield shot Testerman (and boy howdy will we get to that..!) first, or Albert Felts shot Testerman and then Hatfield killed Felts - started shooting both the miners and the detectives opened up.
When the last rounds went downrange seven of the thirteen Baldwin-Felts people were dead, including both Felts brothers, as well as two of the union miners, and Mayor Testerman was dying.
 |
| Not exactly snipers; stray bullets in the old hardware store wall... |
The "Matewan Massacre" is the proximal event that kicked this whole Blair Mountain business off, because:
1) Though the West Virginia governor came down hard - as in martial law hard - on Matewan, the union men felt like they'd won a round. A July 1920 strike roiled Mingo County to the point where the Wilson Administration thought about the usual Gilded Age solution, sending in the infantrymen. It didn't, this time, and the union organizers felt like they'd made some good trouble.
2) The union kept pushing organization and the owners - especially the Logan County owners - kept pushing back. And "pushing", by this time, was pretty much a brief stop on the way to shooting war.
3) The owners, and especially the Baldwin-Felts people, were infuriated when Hatfield (and other Matewan defendants) got off a state murder charge in January 1921.
4) So Thomas Felts engineered a "conspiracy" charge for a different shootout that claimed that Hatfield (and his assistant chief, a guy named Chambers) had been involved in a brawl near the town of Mohawk in southernmost McDowell County (some time in August 1920 - I can't find the actual date for the Mohawk thing).
The conspiracy trial was set for 1 AUG at the McDowell county courthouse in Welch.
5) When Hatfield and Chambers (and their wives) showed up at the courthouse...
...a posse of Baldwin-Felts guys ventilated them.
The Engagement: Well, having their guys murdered in broad daylight (and a McDowell County jury acquitted the Baldwin-Felts assassination squad) pretty much got up the union guys' last hair.
At the eulogy for Hatfield and Chambers, one Sam Montgomery said that the murders were because:
"Sleek, dignified churchgoing gentlemen, who would rather pay fabulous sums to their hired gunmen to slay and kill men for joining a union than to like or less amounts to men to delve into the subterranean depths of the earth and produce their wealth for them."(Shogan, 2006)
On 7 AUG 1921 a deputation from the UMW met with West Virginia governor Ephram Morgan - that's him, and a sleek, tax-fattened hyena he looks, doesn't he? - and handed him a list of their objectives, including things we now take for granted, like an eight-hour workday and a standard regulation of weights and measures...
(Brief explanation here; so at the time miners were paid by quantity of coal produced. The ideal was that the miner would load a car with coal and a company official called a "checkweighman" would, as the name implies, check the weight (and the amount of coal versus unsaleable dross like slate) and that would be your pay. But apparently and unsurprisingly these jokers had all sorts of gimmicks and cheats to short the miners, so coming up with a way to regulate these checkweighmen was pretty critical.)
Ten days later Morgan turned the union down flat.
All through August both sides got madder and more tooled up.
In Kanawha County armed miners patrolled the roads. In Logan County anti-union Sheriff Chafin called in the state police (who proceeded to do what state cops often do, fuck up and make things worse...)
By 20 AUG over 500 angry union miners were encamped near the town of Marmet in Kanawha County.
The talk of the camp was of breaking jailed union men out of the jail in Mingo County. That would mean crossing Logan County and Sheriff Chafin, and both the union men and Chafin knew that. Basically the AO looked like this in August 1921; union miners in blue anti-union forces in red:
The UMW leaders had to be circumspect; they would be immediate targets for law enforcement if anything happened, so the "official" story is that all this gathering and planning were just spontaneous and haphazard. But the union men knew what they were about.
The Boone County local in Mammoth raised $200 and 400 men. Eight volunteers and $600 came from the Edwhite Camp in Raleigh County.
The union faction needed something to identify themselves, and chose a red bandanna - perhaps not the most felicitous color choice in the Red Scare America of 1921 - and were quickly tagged the "rednecks".
By 24 AUG as many as 7,000 to 10,000 pro-union volunteers had assembled around Marmet.
That same day "Mother" Jones got caught up in a very odd bit of business.
Jones was strongly against the proposed march to Mingo and through Logan County. Not because of the politics, but because she suspected (and was correct) that the anti-union forces would shoot, and would have the backing of the state and federal governments.
So she claimed to have a telegram from the new U.S. president, Harding, promising federal help for the union. She met with Keeney and Mooney and the assembled redneck miners, but refused to show them the actual telegram.
Because it was fake.
The attempted forgery destroyed Jones in West Virginia; she was never again able to work for the union there. The betrayal by one of their own just made the rednecks more determined to force the issue.
Down in Logan County Dan Chafin was just as determined to meet force with force.
Hither and Thither: Everyone Dithers - So while the stagehands had already knocked together the sets for the battle, before we get to the shooting there were a whole bunch of cross-bollocking and nattering backstage.
While the miners milled about smartly and Sheriff Chafin's boys started digging trenches and felling abatis the Thrones and Dominations in West Virginia and D.C. started getting nervous.
Governor Morgan, for one in particular.
Having told the union to go pound sand now he had the jitters about angry union miners with bangsticks. On 23 AUG he wired the US Secretary of War asking for federal troops. Secretary Weeks told Morgan to go pound sand so two days later Morgan went over Weeks' head to Warren Harding.
Now President Harding may have been a sleazy dope with a wandering penis that would have embarrassed Bill Clinton, but he knew something about politics.
So he leaned on Weeks and Weeks, in turn, whistled up this guy; BG Harry Bandholtz, USA.
Bandholtz, by the way, was a classic Old Army officer. WooPoo Class of 1890. Thirteen years service in the Philippines. Provost Marshal of the AEF in France.
Possibly his most intriguing job of work was in post war Hungary, where he seems to have been a sort of Civil Power sorting out pissing contests between the new Hungarian authorities and the vengeful Romanians and Serbians.
The Hungarians liked him so much they built a statue of him after he left.
Bandholtz met with the governor and both union leaders Keeney and Mooney on 27 AUG; he didn't promise the governor the soldiers Morgan wanted, and he told the UMW guys that they needed to tell their rednecks to stand down.
Mooney said that he wasn't sure they could unless he gave them something, so Bandholtz wrote out a note saying that the U.S. government wanted the miners to sit the fuck down.
One thing that played into all this is that West Virginia hadn't bothered to reassemble the National Guard after the state troops had been federalized for (and then, presumably, disbanded after) the war.
Bandholtz made some preliminary coordination - sent a premobilization order to the units in Ohio and talked to the Air Service about a forward airbase at Kanawha Field - and that, in turn, popped up Billy Mitchell like the Devil in pantomine.
Gas, gas, gas: A Brief Visit with Billy Mitchell - One of the most fascinating individuals - in a "who is this fucking trainwreck?" kind of way - to ever spend a day in the uniformed services of the United States was this joker, COL (later BG) William Lendrum Mitchell, USA.
In military history there have always been people who had a particular interest, ranging from curiosity to avocation to expertise, that they bring to their profession.
Mitchell's interest in military aviation pretty much leaped over all those straight to "obsession".
Mitchell was, frankly, an air nut. There was no military problem (and I'll bet he thought political and maybe even personal) Mitchell didn't think couldn't be solved by throwing aircraft at it.
Here's how Shogan (2006) describes his arrival on the West Virginia scene:
"Mitchell was strutting around Kanawha Field wearing a pistol, spurs, and his row of combat ribbons, and discoursing on how air power could be could be a potent weapon for suppressing civil disturbances.
How would Mitchell handle masses of men under cover in gullies, a reporter wanted to know.
"Gas" said the general..."(W)e 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."
I have No. Fucking. Words.
Well.
We're gonna leave Billy The Fucking Lunatic Mitchell strutting around the flightline and catch up with our Union Label guys Keeney and Mooney headed for Marmet with the General's note.
Peace, peace, but there is no peace - Shogan (2006) says that the two leaders ran across groups of rednecks "...organized in companies under the direction of an ex-soldier" along the roads leading from Marmet to Logan. They showed the general's note around. The reaction of one miner seems to have been pretty typical:
"Boys, we can't fight Uncle Sam, you know that as well as I do."
By afternoon on 27 AUG it seems like most of the redneck force had turned back towards Marmet or, at least, halted in place. It looked like the Big Push had been stopped.
Then the news came in from Clothier.
In Clothier Brockus' coppers walked into an ambush. They beat cheeks with five prisoners, left behind four of their own to be grabbed by the rednecks, and managed to shoot three of their ambushers, killing two.
Immediately the word got out that the damn mine thugs and their police stooges were gunning down women and kiddies. To arms!
The deal that Bandholtz, Mooney and Keeney had made fell apart, and by Sunday 28 AUG the Rednecks had got back on the road to Logan.
There were still attempts to head off the collision. On 29 AUG the Adjutant General of the still-nonexistent WVARNG and a UMW officer tried to convince the miners to knock it off.
Fuck that noise, the rednecks replied. Until now if they had stayed out of Chafin's way he stayed in his patch down in Logan. Now his goons are coming after them in Boone and Kanawha County, so they might as well go dig him out of his hole.
By now Governor Morgan was running around like his hair was on fire. He kept badgering Harding and Weeks. Finally on 30 AUG the President released a sort of "cease and desist" order with a deadline of 1 SEP.
To late.
The first shots along Spruce Fork Ridge had been fired that same day.
The Attack and Defense Plans: Verdun on Spruce Fork Ridge - So as far as I can tell the Logan County forces moved out to the high ground northeast of Logan some time in the middle of August. The defenses were, as you'd expect from a bunch of guys many of whom had just been around (or in) the First World War, trenches and gunpits dug in on the high ridge and set up to overlook the passes with fire.
The passes, and the creek valleys in general, were the primary avenues of approach. The mountainsides were too steep, and too overgrown, to permit any sort of troop unit to advance over the ridges themselves. Movement, and most attacks, were channelized down the creek valleys - "water gaps" - and the "wind gaps", low dry passes in the mountains.
Based on Shogan (2006) the defenses shook out like this:
Blue blocks mark the main defense positions, the dashed line follows where I presume the defenders had some sort of outpost line or screening LPs/OPs.
That's pure conjecture, mind.
The north end, anchored on the Guyandotte River near the Mill Creek valley, was held by about 900 odd bodies; 600 McDowell county volunteers and another 300 Logan County "deputies" under Sheriff Bill Hatfield.
Presumably a thin line of posts connected Mill Creek with the next gap at Crooked Creek, defended by 300 Logan County deputies under a former AEF captain named Hollingsworth. This outfit had a couple of heavy machineguns dug in to cover the gap, as well.
Shogan (2006) - and I have no other source for even this level of detail - fails to break down the defenses further to the southeast; somewhere between the three gaps between Crooked Creek and Blair Mountain - the Main and Left Forks of Beech Creek, and the Blair Mountain pass near Dingess Creek - were posted by the remainder of the roughly 1,500-man defense under Sheriff Chafin himself.
How did the Redneck forces plan to attack this?
Well...I'm not sure of that, either.
Shogan (2006) suggests that Bill Blizzard's general idea was to divide his attack into two main efforts and go at the Logan County defenses straight on rather than try anything tricky.
A "northern" axis would attack Crooked Creek Gap and Mill Creek. A "southern" axis would follow the rail line through Blair to the Blair Mountain gap. Something like this.
Obviously to go hey-diddle-diddle right up the pass roads was suicide. The redneck fighters didn't have mortars or artillery to shoot in an assault or to smoke their objectives to blind the defenders.
At best the rednecks could try and work along the forward slopes and find holes in the defenses away from the gaps and then from there try and flank down the ridgecrests to the primary positions.
The problem? Without radio, there was no way to figure out where those defensive holes were except by literally walking into them and then sending your survivors back to bring up more bodies.
And if you walking into someone's range fan, instead, and there were no survivors..? Sod THAT for a game of soldiers.
A lot of these guys were supposed to have fought in France. You'd think they'd have some better ideas that just wander around getting shot.
What the hell DID all these people do up on Spruce Fork Ridge back in 1921?
A Note on Sources and Tactics: Tactics? What Tactics? - Since we're speaking of stumbling around the battlefield, one of the first things I noticed when I started researching this engagement is how the secondary source descriptions get reeeeeal vague just as the two sides get within maximum effective range of each other.
Perfect example; here's Shogan (2006) on the actions around Crooked Creek Gap on 31 AUG:
"After three hours of battle, (wait...what? We've been fighting for three hours? How? Series of deliberate attacks? Infiltration in small groups? Long range firefights?) Tony Gaujat's machinegun jammed and the miners broke through..."
So that was it? A machinegun? That was what was holding things up for three fucking hours? A single machinegun? The redneck miners didn't try and work around it? Or they tried and couldn't...because the defenders had strong supporting positions? Because the terrain was impossible and the gun's beaten zone was the only possible avenue of approach?
That little paragraph gives us no fucking idea.
Typically in an account of a military action there's some sense of the physical actions of the people on both sides. Even in an unconventional war, like the "Battle of Crossbarry" that we looked at back in March of 2020, the accounts of the fight describe what individuals and units - sections, companies, officers and soldiers - were doing, and in ways that make military sense.
I didn't get much of anything from any of the sources for Blair Mountain beyond a sort of general "well, this big bunch of people went there and fought...and then this stuff kinda happened".
So what was going on at the individual all the way up to groups of some hundreds of combatants?
I'm really unsure.
The anecdotal accounts of Lawrence (2021) do give us some tiny sense of the tactics and the soldiering going on:
John Wilburn (p.40): "We was all just leaders...most of the time it was just sniping at each other from a distance, with you never really knowing where your enemy was."
Frank Blizzard (p. 43) ...because of his age, he wasn't allowed to go up on the ridges of Blair Mountain where the active sharpshooting was going on.
Camden McDornan (p.51): He never made it to the top of the Blair Mountain ridge and he's not sure that any of the other miners did, either. The men were never too sure, as he remembers it, what they were supposed to be doing. "We were all pretty nervous, you know. We'd just shoot at anything that moved." At night the men camped out in the woods in small groups.
Elbert Gore (note that Elbert is the son of John Gore, Dan Chafin's deputy sheriff - p.61): "I guess that was the closest the two sides every got together, was when my father was killed. Mostly they just fired at each other from long range."
George Swain (Another participant from the Logan side of the ridge - p.72): "They had boys all over that mountain that had no idea how to handle a gun, and actually you were more likely to be shot in the back by your own troops than you were by the opposition."
Josh Chafin (drafted to fight for the anti-union force - p.81): "I wasn't so green myself, because I'd just gotten back from the First World War. (W)e topped up at the top of the mountains. I said, 'Look, we're running into a hornet's nest we are, and let us stick together and hang back about fifty yards.'
But them asses just topped up all together in a bunch, and they come over the hill, and them union men was waiting for them on the other side and shot them down all at once.
Now we was smart, and had fallen back behind some, and we just laid down. Pretty soon, they (the union miners) come over the mountain, and some went this way, and some went that way, and meantimes we's just hiding out there in them bushes, me and my buddy.
Yes, I was in it, but I never fired a shot. My theory, and what I told my buddy, was this: if you shoot, they'll hear you, and locate you, and they'll shoot back at you. So the best policy is just to keep quiet about the whole thing."
Spencer Brinegar (p.94): One day, he was on his way home from work when (he met with)...(a) young man had been issued an army rifle...and didn't know how to handle it properly. The thing exploded when the boy was out taking his sweetheart for a walk...(blew) out a huge cavity in the sidewalk, and...torn the girl's silk stockings to shreds and left her legs bleeding."
(FDChief here - What the fuck? How does a bolt-action rifle "explode"? Did he have a rifle or a rocket-propelled grenade..?)
From all this these guys don't exactly sound like Delta Force.
My guess is that, like a lot of irregular and partially- or un-trained outfits, most of these guys weren't worth much of a lick, militarily. There was probably a lot of random shooting, and I'll bet that a big part of the fight was like an old-fashioned tribal war, where one tribe's tough guy made things happen and most of the other jokers were just kinda there and let off a round every so often for shits and giggles.
But the jokers were there, so let's try and make out what they were doing.
31 AUG 1921: Shogan (2006) says that there were two separate actions on the left end of the defensive lines.
The union men took a slap at the McDowell/Logan deputy force near Mill Creek, but Shogan (2006) reports that the miners made "...little headway...the defenders were too many and too well armed."
To the southeast "...500 miners led by Ed Reynolds, pulling the Gatling gun they had taken from the Gallagher company store (wait, they sold gatling guns at the company store? That's pretty cool! How much scrip did they cost?) assaulted Hollingsworth's forces along Crooked Fork."
This is where the first Shogan (2006) bit quoted above took place; the Crooked Creek HMG jammed and the miners were able to push through.
How, though?
Morale failure on the part of the Logan deputies when they lost their gun? Didn't they have two? What happened to the other? Tactical cleverness by the rednecks?
Whatever happened, the deputies fallback position held; the second machinegun was positioned to cover the avenue of approach ('the approach trail" is how Shogan (2006) describes it). The miners don't seem to have had any ideas other than to try and rush the position where, not surprisingly, the rifle and machinegun fire stopped the attacks, such as they were.
Shogan (2006) reports that the Logan County defenders - now officially under the command of the West Virginia Guard and COL Eubanks - pushed up reinforcements to the Hollingsworth unit at Crooked Creek Gap, including additional machineguns and ammunition.
Nothing is mentioned in Shogan (2006) about actions at the Beech Creek or Blair Mountain gaps; from this lack and the interviews we can safely conclude that much of the activity there was the "sniping at each other from a distance" mentioned by Wilburn.
Three "biplanes" of unknown type rented by the Logan County Sheriff dropped what amounted to leaflets - copies of the presidential "cease and desist" order - on the union side of the ridge.
1 SEP 1921: Shogan (2006) reports the redneck forces tried a sort of "fire and maneuver" attack at the Blair Mountain gap.
There the miner force hit a position held by a group of volunteers from Bluefield that (per Shogan 2006) seems to have been near or on the trail through the gap itself, the center of that defense, and then sent units of undefined size and strength to the left and right of that post.
The actual attack seems to have been the same "shoot and rush" style as the others, though. A newspaper account quoted in Shogan (2006) says:
"The enemy seemed to have no sense of fear whatever and advanced over the crest of the hill in the face of machinegun and rifle fire."
Mind you, without any sort of heavy weapons and given the terrain and the mission, I'm not sure what alternative the miners had. Whatever the reasons, the tactics had a limited value for the cost. Shogan (2006) reports that this attack did succeed in overrunning the forward defenses, but that the first line trenches were overwatched by a machinegun position to one flank that could rake the entire position with enfilade fire and kill or drive off the attackers and did.
Shogan (2006) also reports another attack at the far northwestern end of the defense near Mill Creek. Somehow the miners managed to get onto a railroad bridge somewhere near or over the Guyandotte River and set it afire, but the demo charges they left behind were torn off by the defending firefighting party and the fire put out before it did much damage.
A "planned assault" at the Mill Creek location is also reported but not the outcome. Presumably no better success for the miners there than at the Blair Gap attack.
During the day the rental biplanes overflew the redneck positions and dropped "tear gas and pipe bombs". The targeting seems to have been pretty random; Shogan (2006) says that:
"The gas cylinders were dropped at Blair (presumably the town of Blair itself and not the engagement area at the Blair Mountain gap) and Bald Knob in Boone County...but fell wide of the mark and had no discernible effect."
One of the pipe bombs - targeting at a house supposedly occupied by a miner command and control party - exploded harmlessly. Another landed neat a couple of miner women doing laundry but was a dud.
So much for Victory Through Air Power.
Seeing that the miners seemed intent on forcing the issue, Harding's injunction be damned, BG Burgholtz issued movement orders to the infantry units he'd alerted the week before, and sent orders to the Air Service; send airplanes, do NOT send Billy Mitchell.
The fliers were happy to comply with both.
2 SEP 1921: Still no tactical movement along Spruce Creek Ridge; unsurprisingly the redneck miners had had a bellyful the day before; Shogan (2006) reports that the miners had "fallen back on their own lines".
The 88th Air Squadron's DH-4 fighters and the four Martin bombers arrived that day; BG Burgholtz ordered the aircraft disarmed, presumably in case some Billy Mitchell-wannabe had any nutty ideas.
The federal infantry arrived late that day, the 40th US Infantry behind the anti-union lines in Logan County, the 19th US Infantry (and several companies of the 26th) behind the redneck miners in Kanawha County.
3-4 SEP 1921: The commander the 40th Infantry, COL Thompson, met with COL Eubanks, the notional "commander" of the defending melange (now notionally the "West Virginia National Guard") the evening of 2 SEP:
"...Eubanks...and most of his staff were several sheets to the wind. This was not entirely a surprise to Thompson...(who) found Eubanks and his aides 'so unmistakably under the influence of liquor as to render them unfit...'" (Shogan 2006)
As recounted in Shogan (2006) Thompson pretty much assessed the Logan County mob as a bunch of randos, including drunks, vagrants, and whackos, people wandering about, firing at random, showing up and taking off as they pleased.
COL Thompson took this into account as his unit deployed around Logan through 3 SEP.
Sunday morning, 4 SEP, the 40th Infantry GIs humped up Spruce Fork Ridge and herded the Logan County "National Guard" mob back down the hill and posted regulars along the defense lines.
On the other side of the mountain the 19th and 26th Infantry guys kept an eye on the redneck miners filtering back up northeast into Boone and Kanawha Counties.
Where they could the troopers relieved the miners of their weapons...but the word had got out early and a lot of the rednecks had taken the time to cache their rifles; about 1,000 miners "surrendered" to the Army, but the GIs only collected about 400 weapons.
The Battle of Blair Mountain was over.
The Outcome: Tactical Anti-Union Victory (with long-term economic consequences)
The Impact: Blair Mountain and the defeat of the Redneck Army more-or-less crushed the UMW in the West Virginia hills for a decade.
Not until the Depression, and the election of a more labor-friendly U.S. government in 1932 were the miners able to unionize and extract from the owners the sorts of wage and working conditions they'd fought for in 1921.
Ironically, at the time of the Blair Mountain fight the miners seem to have felt they'd made their point instead of taking it in the shorts.
Shogan (2006) writes of a train carrying surrendered rednecks:
"...the once-defiant rebels leaned out the windows, laughing and shouting...some waving American flags. Many seemed to take satisfaction that they had not yielded to the mine 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."
While the Feds tried to back away from the West Virginia mess, the state government, led by a vengeful Governor Morgan, had no such hesitation.
About twenty-odd individuals, including UMW officers Mooney, Keeney, and Blizzard, were charged with "treason against the state of West Virginia".
At this point let me say how freakish I think the idea of "treason" against a U.S. state even is, but there was such a law on the West Virginia books and Morgan slammed the miners with it. The three union officers were also charged with murder for the deaths of several Logan County sheriff's deputies during the fight.
The prosecution didn't go well for Morgan.
One miner was convicted of treason, released on bail pending appeal, and promptly disappeared into the mountains. The charges against the other twenty were dropped.
Two of the the union officers who were tried for murder (Mooney, who along with Keeney had been out of state during the fight, was never charged) were acquitted.
Meanwhile, however, the UMW was shooting itself in the foot.
The huge demand for coal during the Great War ended with the war, but the mines opened to supply that demand were still there; there was more production than demand, and coal prices were nose-diving.
Seemingly ignoring this the UMW called for a national mine strike just when the nation needed fewer mines and fewer miners. It cratered, as did union membership - the UMW lost millions of miners including in the West Virginia fields.
The Roaring Twenties was a bad time for unions all across the U.S., and West Virginia was no exception.
In the aftermath of the redneck rebellion the Feds hunted everywhere for Reds under the miners' beds.
They found nothing.
Indeed, the utter lack of any sort of real revolutionary fervor is central to the story of the Redneck Rebellion. The miners didn't accept that their struggle was against the economic and political system they lived in. Indeed; they expected - naively, in my opinion - that economic system to respond favorably to their struggle and the political system to act, if not in their favor, at least as a neutral arbiter of their grievances.
Of course neither happened. The economic and political powers responded exactly as designed, to protect the interests of the wealthy propertied people who'd been in charge of the country since before the founding.
In a sort of bitter irony, many of the descendants of the Blair Mountain miners have become the most violent and dogmatic believers in the sort of purblind "patriotism" that links the interest of the fifteen-dollar-an-hour workers to the interests of multibillionaire owners.
I'm sure those owners find that deeply amusing.
For all it's futility Blair Mountain remains the single largest "labor uprising" in U.S. history.
Touchline Tattles: The most intriguing characters in this whole Redneck Army nutroll are Sid Hatfield, the union copper from Matewan, and Jessie Lee Maynard, the widow of Matewan Mayor Sid Testerman.
That's Jessie Lee on the left, and you'd never guess from her cutely dimpled look that she was the Femme Fatale of the Mine Wars.
Remember back in May 1920, when the shooting started in Matewan, and there seems to have been some confusion as to exactly who shot who?
Well, that's because the then-Jessie Testerman and Police Chief Hatfield had a mad thing going on.
There was a great deal of skepticism at the time about the story that the Baldwin-Felts guys had plugged the mayor because it wouldn't have made Hatfield mope for a moment had his side-piece's hubby gone down for a dirt nap.
Whoever actually put a slug into Mayor Testerman, eleven days later - 1 JUN 1920 - Sheriff Hatfield and Widow Testerman were caught mussing the Matewan Hotel sheets.
They were hauled in front of the local JP where Sid was put up on charges of "improper relations".
He solved that by marrying Jessie the next day.
The happy couple had, as we've already discussed, just a little over a year to be happy. In August 1921 Widow Testerman was now also Widow Hatfield.
But Jessie was just the marrying kind.
In January 1922 - less than half a year after Hatfield was shot down - Jessie walked down the aisle a third time, with a state police sergeant named Pettry.
That lasted about six years; the next time we run across Jessie Lee-nee-Maynard-nee-Testerman-nee- Hatfield-nee-Pettry she's getting hitched again, to one W.R. Jennings in Ohio, safely far from the Mingo County coalfields.
Which is where she died, in 1980, at the age of 86, having outlived all four husbands.
So perhaps that's where we should leave the dark and bloody ground; with the tapping heels of the Merry Gun-widow, bride-grooming her way out of the hills and hollows of West Virginia and the long-time labor and strife of the coalfields.
"Someday when I die and go
To Heaven, the land of my dreams,
I won't have to worry on losin' my job
To hard times and big machines.
I ain't gonna pay my money away
On dues and hospital plans.
I'm gonna pick coal while the blue heavens roll
And sing in the angel band."
