The Deadliest Gunfight In American History

On May 19, 1920 ten people were killed at Matewan in the deadliest gunfight in American history. The battle of Matewan was an integral part of the fight for industrial democracy and workers' rights that was sweeping the country. People in Matewan still argue about who fired the first shot. It lasted about a minute, but hundreds of shots were fired. Al Felts and Testerman fell in the first volley. When it was over, seven detectives, including both Al and Lee Felts, Mayor Testerman, and two miners were dead or dying.

The battle made Sid Hatfield a folk hero for miners throughout the nation. Fifteen months later, the Baldwin-Felts detectives retaliated by killing Hatfield on the McDowell County courthouse steps at Welch, in a murder so brutal that it touched off an armed rebellion of 10,000 West Virginia coal miners in the largest insurrection this country has had since the Civil War.

Blood flowed in the perennially troublesome coalfields in 1921, when thousands of miners decided their right to organize was worth fighting for. On the morning of August 1, 1921, the Gazette of Charleston, West Virginia, carried under an eight-column banner on its front page the following dispatch from the city of Bluefield: “Sid Hatfield lies in the morgue at Welch tonight, a smile frozen on his lips, eyes wide open and five bullet holes in his head and chest. On the slab next to him lies the body of his friend and bodyguard, Ed Chambers. They were shot down as they mounted the steps of the McDowell County Court House this morning, where they were scheduled to go on trial. Their wives, who were with them, ran screaming into the doorway of the building. Who started the shooting nobody seems to know. The true story of how the men met their death will, in all probability, always remain a secret.…”

On this grim note opened the final chapter in one of the most protracted and violent episodes of civil strife and armed insurrection in this country’s history since the Civil War. The scene was the desolate, rugged terrain of the southern West Virginia coalfields, and the issue was the right of the miners to belong to a union.

The conflict had raged intermittently for ten years, with murder, arson, sabotage, and brutality on both sides. In its final, climactic phase thousands of armed miners, organized into squads and companies and with commissary and medical units, marched nearly seventy miles through the mountain wilderness to the relief of fellow unionists in Logan and “Bloody Mingo” counties. At Blair Mountain they locked in a week-long battle with a defending force of two thousand hastily recruited sheriffs’ deputies and state militia. The stalemate was broken only by the arrival of several infantry battalions and a fleet of Army bombers.

That a man of such primitive scruples and dubious attainments as Sid Hatfield should be the martyr who set in train the miners’ march is ironic. He was a lanky, rawboned, semiliterate mountaineer with the high cheekbones and cold, close-set eyes that marked him as a member of the clan of old “Devil Anse” Hatfield, whose feud with the McCoys raged along the West Virginia-Kentucky border before the turn of the century. He had been born to the mines, but by the time he was twenty-six he had become police chief of Matewan, a rough-and-tumble coal town in Mingo County, not far from his birthplace. With a silver badge on his shirt and a pair of six-guns slung around his waist, Sid Hatfield found that the life of the law suited him perfectly.

Mingo and its neighboring counties were used to violence. Though the American frontier had all but vanished by the time the twentieth century began, the code of the frontier still prevailed in this rugged, isolated mountain enclave. Fierce pride, quick suspicions, and short tempers called for the settlement of disputes on a personal basis, and human life was held to be much less dear than a mountain man’s sense of his own independence and dignity. “Bloody Mingo” earned its name before the miners’ union was ever heard of, but the coming of the union added a new dimension to the area’s tradition of violence.

The westward thrust of empire in the fifty years between the Civil War and the First World War was powered by coal. The vast subterranean basin of “black gold” that stretched westward from the Appalachians almost to the Mississippi was sought nearly as eagerly as the yellow gold of California and the Klondike, and it inspired as much villainy, broke as many lives, and made as many fortunes. In the wake of the speculators and the engineers came the agents of the United Mine Workers of America to create a proletarian counterforce against the monopoly power of the coal barons of Pittsburgh and Wall Street. Unionization spread by a sort of slow and bloody osmosis from Pennsylvania into Indiana and Illinois, but the farther south it reached, the heavier the opposition it met. In West Virginia, by 1917, a sort of Mason-Dixon line had been established roughly along the valley of the Kanawha River: coalfields in the counties to the north were generally unionized, those to the south were not. This gave the southern operators an economic whip hand over their northern competitors; they paid lower wages, and they were immune to the shutdowns frequently enforced by the UMW in the other fields. For good reason, then, the northern operators were almost as eager as the unionists to have the rich coal lands south of the Kanawha organized, and they secretly conspired to that end. For equally good reasons the southern operators were determined to keep the organizers out, and they had public opinion, which had just discovered the Bolshevik menace, in their favor.

The confrontation was a classic example of the industrial conflict that reverberated across the nation in the early decades of the century. For West Virginia the issue erupted in riots on Cabin Creek in 1912. There was a brief armistice while the war with Germany was being fought, but when it was over, the union had gained its first precarious beachhead south of the Kanawha, and over the next few years it continued to inch slowly and painfully forward.

Although they were fighting a losing battle, the southern operators, closely linked financially with the big steel and railroad empires, had the statehouse at Charleston and most of the law on their side. Their principal weapon was a hiring contract that forbade workers to join a union (miners called this a yellow-dog contract), and its validity was repeatedly upheld by the state courts. So was the operators’ contention that anyone soliciting membership in a union was guilty of trespass. And so was their contention that miners living in company-owned houses could be evicted without notice or legal redress. This last was an impressive power, since the entire town around a mine property, including the streets, stores, and churches, if any, was usually owned by the operator. To enforce these rights the mineowners put as many deputy sheriffs on their payrolls as they felt they needed. And in times of particular stress they called on the services of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a nationwide firm of professional strong-arm men and strikebreakers, for extra brawn and firepower.

The hired mine guards—“thugs” in the local vernacular—epitomized the miners’ grievances, but the substantive issues went much deeper. The miners demanded the right to belong to a union and the right to bargain with their employers through that union. They wanted an eight-hour day instead of the prevalent ten-hour one, weekly instead of monthly paydays, and payment in cash instead of the local scrip that was widely employed. They demanded the establishment of two thousand pounds as the standard ton on which their pay should be based. Many companies paid by the car, the capacities of which might vary by several hundred pounds. The miners also sought the right to pick their own checkweighman to keep tabs on the company scale operator. Above all they demanded that the hated “thugs” be stripped of their power to make arrests and to ransack homes and meeting places under search warrants issued by justices of the peace who often were also in the pay of the mine-owners.

The miners’ leader was Frank Keeney, president of UMW District 17, whose jurisdiction covered the coalfields in the central and southern part of the state. Unlike the lank, hollow-eyed rustics and inarticulate immigrants who made up the rank and file of his following, Keeney in his mid-thirties was squat, muscular, square-jawed, and aflame with the pugnacity and accumulated resentments of his Irish forebears. He had been born and reared in these hills and spent his early years digging coal. He had a sharp, eager mind and a fierce determination to do something about his and the other miners’ plight. On the stump he was a fiery, persuasive rabble-rouser, and sitting across the table from a governor or a committee of legislators or a group of mineowners he was a shrewd, confident, resourceful negotiator. Inevitably, in the supercharged atmosphere of the time, he was a man with a double profile: a fearless and incorruptible Spartacus in one view, a dangerous troublemaker in another.

The issue of whether the miners in adjoining Logan and Mingo counties could join the union was being pushed toward an explosive climax as the igao’s arrived. Hundreds had signed up, and as promptly as they were discovered they were fired from their jobs and put out of their houses. Organizers and union representatives were clapped into jail in Williamson, the town of Logan itself, and other coal centers as soon as they stepped off the trains. The operators refused to meet with the union, and as their mines were shut down one by one they brought in strikebreakers and added more deputies and mine guards to their payrolls. Bands of miners were accused of roaming the hills at night, dynamiting coal tipples and firing at company buildings with rifles. The deputies struck back by swooping down on the tent colonies in which some fifteen hundred dispossessed mine families were living. They slashed the tents, threw the contents about, and arrested all the boys and men they could run down. A sense of panic spread from Logan and Mingo counties to the statehouse in Charleston. Governor Ephraim F. Morgan declared martial law in the area and authorized Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan County to muster his deputies and any other recruits available into a makeshift state militia, providing them with arms and ammunition.

To the miners and their backers Chafin was the most feared and hated man in the southern coalfields. He was in a quite literal sense the law in Logan County, fully backed with money and authority by the coal operators, who, in turn, controlled most other facets of the county’s life. His principal mission was to keep the union out, with no questions asked about the means employed. His large corps of deputies, which included most of the Baldwin-Felts mine guards, were openly carried on the companies’ payrolls. Tales of Chafin’s arrogance and brutality were legion, and in that hot, turbulent summer of 1921 the jail at Logan was jammed with more than two hundred men whose only offense was joining or talking up the union.

Sid Hatfield, the dead police chief of Matewan, had been cut from the same rough cloth, but there was a difference: he had generally used his muscle in the miners’ behalf. He had attained a hero’s stature among them when, on a day in May, 1920, he shot up a band of Baldwin-Felts men who had come to town to put a group of miners’ families out of their homes. Seven of the “thugs,” along with two bystanders, were killed, leaving behind a legacy of hate that would cost Hatfield his life a year later. But the Matewan Massacre, as it promptly came to be called, was a triumph the miners would long remember.

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