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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.
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