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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday June 16, 1921
Lick Creek Tent Colony of Mingo County – Striker Alex Breedlove Shot Down
From The New York Herald of June 15, 1921:
ONE KILLED, TWO HURT IN NEW MINGO FIGHT
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47 in Tent Colony of Idle Miners Are Arrested.
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WILLIAMSON, W. Va., June 14.-One men was killed, two others were wounded and forty-seven residents of the Lick Creek tent colony of idle miners near Williamson are held in the county jail as the result of the fight to-day at Lick Creek between authorities and the colonists.
Alex Breedlove is dead, while James A. Bowles, State trooper, was wounded and Martin Justice, in charge of the colony, received wounds in the cheek and leg.
The fight started after Major Tom Davis, commanding Mingo under martial law proclamation, had returned to Lick Creek with reinforcements of citizen State troopers to arrest about two-score of the idle miners, as his forces had been fired on in the vicinity earlier in the day. Trooper Bowles, in charge of a party of citizen State police [deputized company gunthugs], encountered several men near the colony. Orders from Bowles to throw up their hands brought shots, it was said, resulting in Breedlove’s death and in the wounding of Bowles.
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[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Ab Chp 6, 1925
https://www.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/6
The New York Herald
(New York, New York)
-June 15, 1921
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045774/1921-06-15/ed-1/seq-1/
IMAGE
Mingo Co WV, Tent Colony, Map, WVgn p1, May 19, 1921
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86072054/1921-05-19/ed-1/seq-1/
See also:
June 15, 1921, New York Times-Striking Miner Breedlove Killed in Raid on Lick Creek Tent Colony
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/79666147/june-15-1921-new-york-times-striking/
Tag: Lick Creek Tent Colony WV
https://weneverforget.org/tag/lick-creek-tent-colony-wv/
Tag: Mingo County Coal Miners Strike of 1920-1922
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mingo-county-coal-miners-strike-of-1920-1922/
Note: as unusual, the Ruling Class is the first to tell the story of the raid on Lick Creek, only later are the miners and their families able to tell of the terror and murder unleashed against them by state police in behalf of the coal operators.
Current History, Volume 15, Issue 2
New York Times Company, 1922
https://books.google.com/books?id=I1MwAQAAMAAJ
-March 1922
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=I1MwAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA883
-pages 960-968: “Wrongs of the Soft-Coal Miners” (with photos)
by Ellis Searles, Editor of United Mine Workers Journal
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=I1MwAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA960
-page 964 re murder of Alex Breedlove
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=I1MwAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA964
There was a tent colony at Lick Creek last summer in which the families of a large number of miners were obliged to live after they had been evicted from company houses because of the union activities of the men. There was no other place for them to go to, and the union supplied the tents and leased the ground upon which the tent colony could be established. Coal companies were opposed event to the tent plan of living, and, as they had done many times before, they determined to drive out the tent dwellers. As I said before, they completely control every public activity in the State. They boast their control of the judicial system, the administration, the civil authorities, the military establishment and everything else, including the right of men to work and earn a living.
The State police is a part of the whole system that is controlled by coal companies. One day last summer the State police raided the Lick Creek tent colony. A State trooper ordered Alex Breedlove, a union miner, to throw up his hands, and when Breedlove complied with the order the trooper shot him dead in his tracks. Then the State troopers cut and slashed the tents of the colony, broke up the furniture, destroyed the food supplies of the families living in the tents, poured coal oil in milk that was to feed the babies of the tent colony, and marched a number of men off to jail for no reason whatever. Every constitutional right of the mine workers was violated by these troopers in behalf of the coal companies.
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[Emphasis added.]
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The Red Flag – Socialist Victory Choir