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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 4, 1920
Robert Minor Arrives in Matewan, Meets Smilin’ Sid Hatfield
From the New York Liberator of August 1920:
III of IV
From the five o’clock morning train I alighted at the little. double row of stores and houses that are called Matewan, and before the town was astir I took a walk to the middle of the bridge over Tug River. There boy asked me, “Is it true they got two more thugs up the road last night?” I turned back to talk with the boy, and then I saw a man on a bench before a building on which was scrawled in red letters, “U. M. W. of A.” This man’s face limbered up when I told him I was a friend of Fred Mooney, Secretary of the Mine Workers at Charleston, and he said, “I sized you up as a friend of the Union and I’m glad you didn’t go further across the bridge, because you might have got shot. That is Pike County, over there.”
Toward nine o’clock I saw, standing near the railroad track, a middle-sized man of age about twenty-two. Although this man was alone, he was continually smiling. When he moved, his vest was displaced and exposed two Smith & Wesson revolvers, one stuck into each side of his trousers; A coal digger introduced him as Chief of Police Sid Hatfield.
Hatfield took me over the ground where the battle had occurred, showing me where Mayor Testaman was killed, where this man fell and that one, and where the detective was killed by a blow on the head with a bottle, explaining it all without losing his smile. We entered a little concrete box of a house that was labelled in the masonry, “Town Lockup,” in which he showed me the two live Baldwin-Felts men he had captured that morning and the weapons he had taken from them-two revolvers and two blackjacks made of iron nuts screwed onto hammer handles.
The story of the battle of Matewan. I got from half a dozen other eye-witnesses as well, and I can best remember it for telling in the words in which it was told me, those words being the language that I knew best in my youth:
Albert and Lee Felts came to the Stone Mountain mine on the morning of May 19th with “Yaller Dog” papers and a right smart number of thugs. They begun throwing coal diggers that had joined the Union out of their houses. They throwed out a couple of families and then they come to some more folks that they had “Yaller Dog” papers for, but them families was McCoys and had guts and says they wasn’t going to get out. Albert seen they was McCoys and left them be and went after others. When the thugs had throwed out five families, somebody run up Tug River to the town and told Chief Hatfield.
Chief Sid Hatfield came down and seen Albert putting some people out. Sid says, “Albert, if what you are doing is according to law you can do it and I won’t interfere, but if what you are doing is not the law you’ve got to stop putting people out of their houses.”
Albert stalled around and says he had the right to throw them out any time the company said, and he didn’t have to go to law to get them out. The two of them argued and then went to the telephone and called up lawyers. Some of the lawyers said Albert did have the right and some of them said no he didn’t. Finally Albert calls his men and they drove away in their automobiles, about noontime.
Everybody reckoned them fellows would come back.
It seemed like the Mayor knew for sure that Albert Felts wasn’t laying down that easy without he had some scheme on.
The Mayor calls Preacher Coombs and told him to go out and find twelve men with high-powered rifles, for him to deputize to defend the town, and Chief Hatfield got out a warrant for the arrest of Albert Felts.
Mayor Testaman seen a miner standing in the street, and he went up and says, “Are you armed?” The miner says, “No, I ain’t.” And the Mayor says, “Well, get armed quick!” and the miner says, “Yes, I am,” and the Mayor deputizes him. Preacher Coombs come back and couldn’t find but six men and only two of them had high-power guns. The Mayor had just deputized the six and sent Coombs out to look for more.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCE & IMAGE
The Liberator
(New York, New York)
-Aug 1920
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1920/08/v3n08-w29-aug-1920-liberator.pdf
See also:
Tag: Sid Hatfield
https://weneverforget.org/tag/sid-hatfield/
Thunder In the Mountains
The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21
-by Lon Savage
University of Pittsburgh Pre, Sep 11, 1990
(search: “battle of matewan”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=u-n7AwAAQBAJ
July 14-Oct 29, 1921 – Senate Investigation
West Virginia Coal Fields
Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor
U.S. Senate, 67th. Congress, First Session pursuant to S. Res. 80
Senator William S Kenyon of Iowa, Chair
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008610716
https://books.google.com/books?id=EQQ9AAAAYAAJ
Volume 1
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=EQQ9AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP5
Saturday July 16, 1921 – WDC
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=EQQ9AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA185
Testimony of Sid Hatfield
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=EQQ9AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA205
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Two-Gun Sid – Dover Mountain
“Two-Gun Sid you got plenty of gall,
Standin’ in the way of the Company Law.”