Hellraisers Journal: Mary Boyle O’Reilly Interviews Lee Calvin Regarding the Gun Raid on the Holly Grove Miner’s Camp

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Poem for Child of Cesco Estep, Clifford Allan Estep, by Walter Seacrist, wvgw net—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 22, 1913
Miss Mary Boyle O’Reilly Interviews Lee Calvin in West Virginia

From The Day Book of June 21, 1913:

[Lee Calvin stated to Miss O’Reilly that he wanted to tell her about the “Death Special” and the shooting up of “SLEEPING” women and children.

On board the steel armored train were Sheriff Bonner Hill and ten deputies, a machine gun,  a dozen B. & F. mine guards acting as Chesapeake & Ohio detectives, Quinn Morton, millionaire mine owner, and his general manager, M. McClanahan.

Morton armed the men with 30-30’s, Winchester man-killers. Lee Calvin refused the offer of a rifle.]

[Lee Calvin continued…]

With that we came near Holly Grove. Someone turned out the car lights. The engineer gave two short whistles.

Being an old railroad man I knew it for a signal.

And before you could think the maachine gun in the armored car opened a continouous stream of fire on the strikers’ tents near the track.

George A. Lentz, chief detective of the C. & O. detectives, worked the gun.

It was near 11 night. The miners almost to a man, had slipped into the hills. But the moans of women and children were heart-rending.

Esco Estop was shot dead.

Mrs. Hall’s leg was shot off.

Two women gave premature birth to dead children.

Almost at once the town of tents took fire.

That was near midnight of Feb.7. Women and children shrieked all night. God only knows what they thought had come upon them in their sleep!

But Quinn Morton, general manager for the Imperial Colliery Co., to whom all these people must look to live, came running down the car from the rear-cheering-CHEERING!

“Sheriff Hill,” he cried, “let us stop the train, turn on the lights, reload and back up to give them another dose. I guess that will end the strike on Paint Creek.”

[Emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Day Book: Mothers and Babies, Victims of Barbarous West Virginia by Mary Boyle O’Reilly

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Poem for Child of Cesco Estep, Clifford Allan Estep, by Walter Seacrist, wvgw net—————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 18, 1913
Charleston, West Virginia – Wives of Miners Testify before Senate Committee

From the Chicago Day Book of June 17, 1913:
Sen Com 1913, WV Mother and Babies v Gunthugs, DyBk Cv, June 17, 1913

MOTHERS AND BABIES WERE VICTIMS OF THE WAR

IN THE KINGDOM OF WEST VIRGINIA

By Mary Boyle O’Reilly.

Charleston, W. June 17.-The laws of war among all civilized nations and most savage tribes prescribe the removal of all women and children from the peril of the firing line.

For a year West Virginia has been in a state of war, the war of the twentieth century struggle of workers and organized capital.

The U. S. Senate sub-committee on labor, now hearing testimony concerning the Paint Creek coal mine war, sits in a long, low banquet room in the Kanawha Hotel here. Pale blue walls without, decoration, cheap deal tables for the committee and the various counsel, indicate the grim business-like atmosphere of the place.

The room is crowded to suffocation with blue-shirted miners, standing, for once, shoulder to shoulder, with burly railway detectives and rat-faced mine guards whose hunched-up coats indicate the holsters holding loaded arms.

About the tables on either side gather the opposing counsel the sleek, tame solicitors of great coal corporations summery in pale gray and fawn-colored clothes; the half-dozen alert, coatless young lawyers of the United Mine Workers of America whose team-work under their chief, Judge Monnett, former attorney general of Ohio, is the one bright spot in the proceedings.

And at the committee table, facing the room, sit the senators-Martine, the living portrait of a cavalier, whose tongue is a rapier; Swanson, the senator long on corporation concern, but short on human sympathy, and Kenyon of Iowa, on whose calm judgment the troubled citizens of Kanawha county instinctively have their hope.

* * * * * * *

WV Pike Family in Tent Colony, DyBk p12, June 17, 1913

[Friday, June 13th, afternoon session:] The packed hearing room was insufferably hot. Long, familiar evidence dragged. A witness testifying of outrages perpetrated on unoffending strikers by the coal corporations mine-guards used the word, “Thugs.” A florid “company counsel” protested. A junior among the miners’ lawyers seemed to acquiesce. Then-

Mrs. Parker,” he called.

Mrs. Estep-Mrs. Seville.”

They came at once-three miners’ wives, typical women of the coal valleys, arid tidy and self-respecting, in heavy, long-sleeved shirtwaist belted with pleated alpaca skirts.

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