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Blair Mountain Became A Battlefield Again

So it was that the news of Hatfield’s slaying by three Baldwin-Felts men at Welch, preceding by a fortnight fresh rumors of atrocities by Don Chafin and his deputies in Logan, soon whipped the anger of the miners all through the Kanawha Valley into a vengeful frenzy. Calls upon the state authorities, they knew, would be unavailing (Hatfield’s killers were later tried and acquitted), and as they often had done in the past, the miners determined to seek justice on their own harsh terms—to avenge Sid Hatfield’s death, to crush Chafin’s tyranny and liberate their brethren from Chafin’s jail, and to smash the antiunion monopoly in Logan and Mingo counties.

To what extent this warlike spirit was encouraged by the local union leaders is unclear—certainly they were fully aware of it—but spread it did, like fire in dry grass, up and down the desolate creek bottoms and along the winding railroad spurs where the miners’ shanties stood. By Saturday, August 20, 1921, between five and six hundred men had congregated in a sullen, aimless mob in a little meadow on Lens Creek, a few miles out of Charleston and some seventy miles north of where Hatfield lay buried and Chafin held sway.

Over the next few days the miners’ numbers swelled to between four and five thousand. They were a tatterdemalion lot in blue jeans, worn corduroy, bits of army khaki, slouch hats, and miners’ caps. Many brought their women and children along, loaded in ancient jitneys and farm wagons or trudging on foot over the hills from as far as fifty miles away. They cooked beans and fatback over open fires and slept on the ground in a cold drizzle. Most of the men were armed, some with pistols and shotguns, others with high-powered hunting and military rifles. They had gathered through a spontaneous impulse and with but a vague notion of what they were going to do. They were leaderless at the start—Keeney, Fred Mooney, Bill Blizzard, and other UMW officials denied any connection with the mobilization—but out of the turmoil of rumors, gossip, impromptu harangues, and the boredom of inaction a semblance of organization began to assert itself. The miners, many of whom were World War I veterans, divided loosely into companies based on the communities from which they came. Disciplinary details were set up to take care of troublemakers and interlopers (reporters and bootleggers were sent on their way). Armed patrols kept round-the-clock vigil on the roads and mountain trails. A commissary emerged that depleted the food from stores for miles around, and a medical unit of six doctors and eight nurses was set up.

Still, no single leader emerged—none, in fact, has ever been positively identified—but by Tuesday night the mounting tensions spilled over. The men had grown restless and irritable. Wild rumors of atrocities and lynchings by Chafin’s men whipped their passion for revenge. They milled noisily about a dozen bonfires, and their hoarse exhortations and rebel yells, punctuated with the erratic crack of rifles fired into the air, reverberated from the dark surrounding hills. “On to Logan!” they yelled. “Let’s get the dirty thugs!” “Remember Sid Hatfield!”

At two o’clock the next morning the fire sirens in the county seat of Logan roused the startled citizens from their beds. This was the prearranged signal that brought hundreds of Sheriff Chafin’s men to the courthouse, the arsenal from which the dreaded invasion was to be repelled. In Charleston, Governor Morgan was awakened by a call from the night city-editor of the Gazette with the news that the miners from Lens Creek were on the march. The governor telephoned an order for a special detachment of state police to stand by for emergency action after daylight. At the little town of Racine, ten miles down the Logan road from Lens Creek, workmen getting ready for the day shift at the local mines stopped to cheer a plodding file of marchers, three and four abreast, that clogged their main street and stretched out of sight in either direction. All day long they came in a straggling, disorganized procession, hundreds upon hundreds of grimfaced, weary men and excited boys, each with a gun and a sack of provisions slung over his shoulder and, by way of uniform, a red bandana knotted about his neck or right sleeve. The badge gave them the name Red Necks.

A series of high ridges known collectively as Blair Mountain forms the boundary of Logan County where the main road from the north and the Coal River branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad snake in through a narrow defile. To this natural barrier Sheriff Chafin rushed about three hundred of his irregulars, deploying them in a fifteen-mile-long battle line along the crest and commanding the high passes. That night an advance party of the miners’ army several hundred strong—they had commandeered a freight train up the line and pushed on ahead of the main body—tried to make their way over the mountain and ran into a defenders’ patrol near Dingess Run. The two sides dug in behind rocks and trees and banged away furiously at one another in the dark. After a few hours the attackers withdrew to the base of the mountain to await daylight and reinforcements.

News of this ominous but ineffectual encounter threw Charleston into a panic that morning. Governor Morgan dashed off an urgent telegram to Washington saying the state was unable to protect itself and needed federal troops. President Harding held a hurried conference with Secretary of War John W. Weeks and dispatched General J. H. Bandholtz, commander of the Washington Military District, to West Virginia for a firsthand reconnaissance report.

The general and his aides, resplendent in gleaming puttees and Sam Browne belts, arrived in Charleston by train before daybreak. They roused the governor from his bed, summoned Keeney and Mooney from theirs, and got down to business. The minutes of the conference were not preserved, but from available evidence it seems to have gone like this: Bandholtz: He had no concern with the merits of the dispute, but only with the question of whether law and order had broken down and what was needed to restore it and prevent bloodshed. Morgan: The southern counties were at the mercy of an angry mob, and soldiers were needed to protect life and property. Keeney: The mob was out of hand all right, but they probably would disperse peaceably if the request came from federal rather than state authorities and was coupled with a guarantee of future protection against Chafin and his thugs.

Whatever the understanding may have been, by eight o’clock that morning—Friday—the two union officials were bouncing down the Logan road as fast as their four-cylinder Dodge would take them. As they passed groups of stragglers heading south they shouted: “Go back home; the march is over!” About noon they caught up with the main body of marchers at the little town of Madison. Two or three thousand men sprawled about the streets and the town square eating their midday meal out of cans and tin plates. Keeney herded them into the ball park, mounted the hood of his Dodge, and tore into them in some such words as these (he paraphrased his speech for me as best he could from memory in an interview in the early 1960’s):

I’ve told you men God knows how many times that any time you want to do battle against Don Chafin and his thugs I’ll be right there in the front lines with you. I’ve been there before and you know it. But this time you’ve got more than Don Chafin against you. You’ve got more than the governor of West Virginia against you [boos]. You’ve got the government of the United States against you!

Governor Morgan hasn’t got the guts to enforce the laws of this state that protect your rights. Instead of standing up to the operators he runs crying to the federal government.

President Harding has sent an Army general down here to see what the trouble is, and I have just come from a conference with him in Charleston. He wants you to break off this march and go home. He promised me that if you do it, you won’t be troubled by the constabulary. And he has promised to get trains in here today to take you home.

Now I’m telling you for your own good and for the good of the cause, you’ve got to do it. Break up this march. Go home. Get back to your jobs. You’ve got Uncle Sam on your side now, and he won’t let you down. You can fight the government of West Virginia, but by God you can’t fight the government of the United States.”

Keeney’s appeal worked. There was grumbling among some of the hotheads who still wanted to storm the ramparts of Logan, but by late afternoon one group after another turned homeward, and the next morning trains began coming in to pick up the rest. Keeney called General Bandholtz in Charleston to tell him the men had turned back, and the general verified this by reports from his own scouts. At the same time Sheriff Chafin called in his defenders, and the town of Logan that night held a “peace” celebration. The general telegraphed a reassuring “all clear” to his chiefs in the White House and War Department, then stepped into a warplane with no less a pilot than General “Billy” Mitchell (who had been sent out by the Air Corps to assess the situation) to return to Washington.

The peace, however, was shortlived. In the predawn hours of Sunday the miners’ grapevine brought a new message: They are shooting women and children at Sharples! Hundreds of armed men, many still on their way home from the dispersal at Madison, turned and stormed back down the Logan road. In Logan itself the sirens shrieked again, and the defenders set up their machine guns and went scurrying back to their positions atop Blair Mountain.

What had happened, as nearly as it can be pieced together from many conflicting reports, is this: in spite of whatever armistice terms had been set by the governor and General Bandholtz, Chafin and Captain J. R. Brockus of the state police planned to round up a group of men who they decided were ringleaders of the miners’ march. With a force of several hundred deputies they crept across the mountain trails that night to the little town of Sharpies. On a ridge just above the town they came upon a force of miners. Chafin demanded that they lay down their arms and submit to arrest. The miners answered with gunfire. For an hour there was a wild melee of shooting and hand-to-hand combat in the darkness. At last the deputies retreated in disorder over the mountain, but the miners counted five of their own dead or wounded, and many houses in the town had been peppered by stray bullets.

Blair Mountain became a battlefield again as thousands of miners poured into the region and scaled its northern slopes. On the opposite slope, and holding advantageous positions on the ridge, were hundreds of deputies and volunteer militia. The battle line extended some twenty miles along the serpentine crest of the ridge, from Buffalo Creek on the east to Mill Creek on the west. Throughout the day and night there were erratic bursts of riHe fire and occasionally the chatter of a machine gun. The outside world could learn little of what was going on, for telegraph wires had been cut, trains suspended, and traffic on the roadways blocked by armed patrols. An airplane from Logan, on a scouting mission of the attackers’ positions, was riddled by rifle fire from the ground and forced to retire. One eyewitness report published by the Associated Press on Tuesday depicted the scene from the miners’ front: With all males from the age of 15 to 60 under arms; children and women fleeing in panic over the line into Boone County; armed patrols arriving and departing, and every available conveyance carrying supplies to the picket posts in the hills, the Sharples-Blair sector may well be compared to Belgium in the early days of the World War.

The following day a dispatch from Logan described the situation inside the town: This city was thrown into a frenzy shortly after dark last night when reports from men returning from the fighting at Crooked Creek said that the miners’ forces had broken through at an important point and forced a retreat by the Logan deputies. Logan County deputies were driven down thd hillside in a skirmish with an armed force from the other side of Spruce Fork Ridge, Captain I. G. Hollingsworth reported at 7 o’clock. Heavy fighting continued on two other sectors of the line during the afternoon and evening. ‘We intend to hold our lines with all the power at our command,’ Colonel W. E. Eubanks [commanding officer of the militia] said. ‘We have 1,200 men in the line and fighting is continuing in the Blair sector and along Crooked Creek.’

For a week the battle of Blair Mountain raged furiously, not in a single, momentous clash but in a series of uncoordinated skirmishes, hit-and-run raids, and individual gun duels up and down the length of the thirty-mile front. The deaths on both sides have been variously estimated at from ten to thirty, but there were hundreds of lesser casualties, including Boyden Sparks, a famed war correspondent for the New York Tribune, who ventured into the region and was nicked in the leg by a bullet. Probably ten thousand men were engaged in the conflict at its height, from seven to eight thousand on the miners’ side and from two to three thousand on the other. The defenders were under pseudomilitary command of the state adjutant general and were supplied with government-issue arms, ammunition, and some communications equipment. But they were barely able to hold their own against the numerical superiority of the attackers. The miners fought under a loose form of military command (whose leadership was never fully determined) and seemed plentifully supplied with rifles and bullets. Had either side concentrated its forces for a breakthrough at one point, the consequences would have been even more bloody and disastrous. But before this could happen, the federal government moved in.

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