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Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 9, 1912
Kanawha County, West Virginia – Gunthugs Brutalize Women and Children
From the Evansville Press of August 7, 1912:
Small picture at top: Thomas Cairns, president district No. 17, United Mine Workers; James M. Craigo (right), secretary-treasurer, official leaders of the strikers. The larger picture shows four mine guards around the machine gun; militiamen are back of them. Lower picture shows five guards snapped at Mucklow, where big battle was fought. Second man from left is Ernest Goujot (holding hand before his face) leader of guards
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BY E. C. RODGERS.
Staff Special.
CHARLESTON, W. Va., Aug. 7.-The bloody conflict now raging in West Virginia started with the violation by the coal mine operators of an agreement to pay 2 1-2 cents a ton increase to the miners. Today, with dead men’s bodies in the valleys and in the mountains and with thousands of miners thirsting for blood and refusing to be denied, it is as much a war as that which reddens the soil of Mexico or the sands of Tripoli.
Every lead of my investigation of causes leads directly to the guard system, to the conduct of the army of guards the Baldwin-Felts concern of Staunton, Va., put into the field the minute the strike started.
Early one morning in June a company of guards came down on the Italian settlement at Banner. Lining up the ignorant foreigners the leader said: “If you don’t go to work we’ll blow your brains out!”
The guards then began the work of eviction. From house to house they went. “Go to work or get out!” they yelled, and threw furniture and all out of windows and doors.
Half the village was at break fast. Every meal was thrown into the road. To Tony Seviller’s cabin they came. “Get out!” they roared. Mrs. Seviller [Seville] was in bed. Roughly they ordered her out. “
“My God! Can’t you see I am sick, just let us stay here until my baby is born,” she pleaded.
Ernest Goujot was the guard leader. “I don’t give a damn,” he explained. “Get out or I’ll shoot you out!” Mrs. Seviller’s baby was born soon after in a tent furnished by the national mine workers.
Six other babies have been born in those tents down at Holly Grove, the only land not owned by the mine companies, and where several thousand people live in tents.
I have looked up the record of this Goujot, captain of the guards. He was in the West Virginia penitentiary for murder, and was paroled. Then he joined the Baldwin-Felts gang of labor fighters. In the 1902 strike he, with a squad of guards, shot up Stanford. Three women, seven children and a score of men were killed in their beds.
Now he leads the mine guards in the dare-devil campaigns. His men are on the average about like him. Many are proved ex-convicts. Once in a while a respectable man gets to be a mine guard. One such, Davison by name, quit. Handing his guns to Noah Farrell, Mucklow mine storekeeper, he said:
“I got my belly full of this business. I got a mother of my own and I’ll starve before I’ll abuse any woman or kid like you wanted it done here.”
When Mrs. John Robinson of Mucklow died her friends went to the funeral. During the services the guards swooped down and threw the furniture out of the cabins of the mourners, arriving at the cabin next door to the church just as the body was being carried out.
“You won’t have any more funerals here,” a guard shouted, “that church belongs to the company!” And to the tune of the tolling of the bell they finished their job and cleaned out the Robinson cabin thoroughly while the hearse was at the cemetery!
Every miner in the field has been evicted and unlawfully, because not an hour or a single minute’s notice was given. Women and children often were pushed out into rains and into the night, to walk down the creek to the only spot of land not owned by mine companies. Even the roads are owned by the companies, and mine folks have been arrested for walking on them. The miners can’t even swim up the creek without trespassing, for the water belongs to the companies.
In front of one little church, the guards put up their machine gun, pointed toward the church door. That was early one Sunday morning. When the children began coming to Sunday school, they were frightened and ran back home. They went for Miss Katie Winfrey, the teacher and she came with them to the church.
“Please take the gun away until after Sunday school,” she begged of the guards.
“You folks ain’t got any right to come here,” a guard replied.
There haven’t been any services in that church since then.
Why didn’t the miners appeal to the law?
From their mountain tops they can almost see the 18-foot statue of the goddess of justice standing serenely on the top of the courthouse at Charleston. Why not demand their rights?
Well, tomorrow I will tell you how they appealed, and what good it did them.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, Clean Up Baldwin Gunthugs, Speech Aug 4 Montgomery WV
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/92/mode/2up
Evansville Press
(Evansville, Indiana)
–Aug 7, 1912
https://www.newspapers.com/image/137882862/
See also:
Aug 8, 1912, Evansville Press
-E. C. Rodgers re Bloody Revolution Raging in Coal Mining Districts of Kanawha Co, WV
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/107328260/aug-8-1912-evansville-press-bloody/
Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913
(search: “gianiana seville”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=HQM9AAAAYAAJ
Tag: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-1913
https://weneverforget.org/tag/paint-creek-cabin-creek-strike-of-1912-1913/
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Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again? – Hazel Dickens