Hellraisers Journal: From The Nation: “Labor’s Valley Forge” by Neil Burkinshaw -Life in Tent Colonies of Mingo County

Quote Fred Mooney, Mingo Co Gunthugs, UMWJ p15, Dec 1, 1920 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 14, 1920
Mingo County, West Virginia – Report from Miners’ Tent Colonies

From The Nation of December 8, 1920:

Labor’s Valley Forge

By NEIL BURKINSHAW

DRIVEN from their homes at the point of a gun for the crime of joining the union , more than four hundred miners and their families are camping in tents on the snow-covered mountains in Mingo County, West Virginia. To add to their difficulties federal troops have been summoned to play the ancient game of keeping “law and order.” But it will take more than the cold clutch of winter and the presence of soldiers to make the miners surrender in their fight for recognition of their right to unionize.

Across the Tug River, a narrow stream dividing Mingo County from Kentucky, is the union workers’ “No Man’s Land” held by the gunmen of the Kentucky coal operators who waylay, beat, and sometimes kill anyone even suspected of union affiliations. The same condition obtains in McDowell County of West Virginia just south of Mingo. The region was settled in pre-Revolutionary days by pioneers who crossed the mountains from Virginia and North Carolina, a hardy stock of Welsh, English, and Scotch from whom the miners are descended. One rarely encounters a foreigner there so that the industrial war now raging can not be ascribed-as is the convenient practice-to the agitation of the foreign element .

The press alludes always to the affair as a strike. But strictly speaking this is a lock-out. The miners were discharged and evicted from their homes for joining the union. A strike was called on the first of July-a month and a half after the men were driven from their jobs—but only to keep the ranks intact until recognition of the union was granted. More than ten thousand men, women, and children are now affected. Some have been able to live on in the rude company shacks—of course, upon prompt payment of the rent which the union provides—but many of these have been served notice to vacate and will soon be trekking across the ridges with their few household possessions to take their chances with the rest.

In the tent colonies the destitution and hardship has become appalling. Huddled under canvas that flapped and strained at the guy-ropes in the high winds, I found hundreds of families gathered about pitifully small fires. In most cases the tent-dwellers were living on the bare, frozen earth, the most fortunate having simply a strip of oil-cloth or carpet as floor covering. Several children have died of pneumonia and it was pitiful to see any number of new-born babies there-and worst, many women pregnant. But on the whole the health of the tent-dwellers is good. I saw scores of bare-footed children whose only garment was a thin calico or gingham dress. Not a dozen men possessed overcoats, and most of them had nothing but thin overall suits. The women almost invariably wore gingham-a lucky few having sweaters or cheap coats.

However the United Mine Workers organization is meeting the clothing shortage and doing the best it can to relieve the hardship of the tents. More than $150,000 worth of clothing was ordered recently and arrangements have been made to provide lumber for flooring. The union has made an allowance for food-five dollars a week for each man, two for each woman, and one for each child.

Many of the families camped on Mate Creek were driven from Mohawk, McDowell County. They were not given time to remove their household effects and they cannot go back even for their own personal property as the penalty is brutal assault or possibly death. Lee Perdew, an independent storekeeper at Mohawk who dared the wrath of the coal operators by handling grocery orders for the miners, was besieged in his store by company gunmen who fired more than a thousand bullets through the building. At Lick Creek, I found Oscar Alliff who, awakened after midnight by a party of armed men come to turn him out of doors, had pleaded in vain for his sick wife. With three little children, all under five, they were driven from their home, shots flew over their heads as they went, and they were forced to sit up all night in the tent of a colored miner who hospitably welcomed them to his rude shelter. The plight of the Acadians was no more terrible.

There is no doubt about Mingo County being on a war footing. The region is wild and has been a “gun-toting” country from time immemorial. Since last May forty-five men have been killed and several hundred wounded, which is of course all ascribed to “union agitators”–unfairly. Miners have shot-and will shoot-in self-defense, but on the whole they show the most amazing patience and seem to realize that a resort to primitive justice can only injure their cause. Until the federal troops arrived the police duty has been in the hands of the state constabulary and the sheriff’s large force of deputies.*

Little need be said of the necessity that impelled the miners of Mingo County to organize-it is too obvious to anyone familiar with industrial conditions. But in addition to the usual inability to gain ground economically while treating with their employers as individuals, the miners have been subjected to vicious abuses-the black-list, eviction from their homes, and compulsory dealing with the company store where prices were higher than at the independent shops. A wage increase was invariably accompanied by higher prices at the company store. As a result the miners will endure a dozen winters in camp rather than return to non-union conditions. I talked with the mother of six barefoot children in the colony at Nolan and, to draw her out, spoke of the suffering of her children. Had the coal operators made any overtures to her husband to return to work?

“What yo’ mean?” she asked somewhat belligerently-“Ma ole man a’ talkin’ about scabbin’ hit? Why I’d a’ take the children and leave him tomorrar ef he even talked of a’ goin’ back to wuk.”

The “ole man” dimmed a glowing coal in the fire with a long distance shot of tobacco juice.

“Yo’ see,” he observed smiling, “I couldn’t think a’ losin’ mah ole woman-even ef I wanted to go back.”

The miners of Mingo County are fighting one of the gamest fights in the history of industrial war, fighting for a principle—the emancipation of themselves and their children from the worst economic serfdom in America. Nearly all labor will be fighting the same fight this winter, fighting out in the cold as it were and struggling grimly to preserve the most elementary of their hard-won rights. Mingo County is the scene of labor’s Valley Forge.

———-

* In Logan County the sheriff is paid $32,700 a year by the coal operators and most of the armed guards at the mines are deputy sheriffs, also paid by the coal companies, but appointed by the County Court. See Private Ownership of Public Officials by Arthur Gleason in The Nation, May 29.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]