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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 17, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part IV

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part IV of IV.]

On our journey up to Berry, where Mother Jones addressed a mass meeting just at the end of the railroad trestle on this side of Sewell, we saw a man crawl from under the rods of a freight train that had slowed up for water. He was barefooted and his clothes were in tatters. He sat down beside the little spring that bubble up behind the water tank and Mother Jones divided our luncheon with him. He was a miner hunting for work, 43 years  old, with a family back in Alabama, glad to sell himself for the miserable pittance of a West Virginia coal digger. He had traveled all the way from Alabama, sleeping on the rods of freight cars. He was going up Quinnimont on the scent of a job. The whistle blew, he drank another cup of cool water, swallowed the last bite of sandwich and all in the twinkling of an eye swung under the moving train.

We encounter most difficulty when it becomes necessary for Mother Jones to cross the river. Most of the ferries are the property of the companies who control the adjacent mines. Where Mother Jones identity is discovered the ferrymen refuse to carry her. I took a snap shot of an altercation which she had with an operator when she was about to cross to the tipple of the Sunday Creek Coal company of Ohio.

The local ferry had refused to carry her, and she was just about to step into the rowboat of an obliging colored man when the operator of one of the companies rushed up. “I tell you I own half this river, and I dare you to cross,” he shouted.

“Huh, you own half the river, do you?” retorted Mother Jones. “Well, it’s a pretty long river for a man like you to own the half of. However, I believe God Almighty owns the other half, and maybe He has a block or two of stock in your half, so I think I’ll cross, come along, uncle,” to the awe-stricken colored man.

Needless to say Mother Jones crossed the river and talked to the little company of black smeared diggers gathered behind the tipple.

The dignity of this woman is awe-inspiring. When the constable and squire met us at North Caperton the other night she treated them with the indulgence with which a grandmother looks upon the practical jokes of her grandsons. She was not at all nonplussed, but calmly sat on a pile of railroad ties awaiting her time, and after a quarter of an hour’s parley between the squire and the constable (Mother Jones never parleys with a petty law officer) they decided to ride across the mountain to Fayetteville, the county seat, and look up the law.

They have not returned thus far, and Mother Jones held her meeting that night and numerous others since.

Sitting on the river bank near Hawks Nest, Mother Jones computed that every miner in the West Virginia coal fields must dig twenty tons at the very lowest estimate to pay the various company assessments before he has anything for food and clothing and powder. He receives a wage that will average anywhere from $1.00 to $1.80 per day.

Out of this comes house rent of not less than $5 a month, water, $1 per month; squibs, 25 cents per month, two gallons of oil per month at 50 cents per gallon, which can be bought anywhere on open market for 25 cents per gallon; powder, of which he uses between three and four kegs per month in order to mine enough coal to pay him $1.00 per day, at $2.25 per keg….[there continues documentation of expenses for blacksmith, for company doctor, for hospital, whether or not doctor or hospital care are needed].

All he has left he is at liberty to spend for food and clothing at the “pluck me,” the miner’s vernacular for the company store. It is pretty well named. The prices charged for everything are exacerbated in the extreme [examples given of prices for flour and salt at the pluck-me versus at stores in “free” towns-towns not under company control-where the miners are forbidden to shop].

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part IV” →

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Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 16, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part III

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part III of IV.]

But back again to the miners’ shack at St. Clair. The coal digger’s children are restless. They sleep, six of them, in the same tiny, moonlit room where Mother Jones lies and I write. They roll their heat pricked bodies first on one side, then on the other. Little naked legs are thrown out over the counterpane, in the adjoining and smaller room the younger children and their father are trying to sleep, while the mother hushes the fretful baby.

This room, too, is flooded with light. Not moonlight, however, but the fierce glare of the coke ovens.

But there is no rest to the West Virginia coal miner or his helpless children in this valley of dreadful night. I have been in the crowded tenements of New York on nights of record-breaking heat, but even there I have never seen the misery that is here to-night. From Quinnimont in the east to Raymond in the west the New river valley unwinds 137 miles of burning labyrinth.

From its torture none can escape; the long processions of rumbling freight trains, the shrieking of the shift engine whistle, the heat and glare and belchings of the coke ovens.

The valley is a narrow, precipitous gorge, every foot of level surface being occupied by the railroad tracks. In many of the camps that Mother Jones and I traveled through this week these tracks lay but three feet from the doors of the miners’ dwellings. All along the valley the houses on the inner side of the railroad abut against the cliffs, and on the outer side perch upon piles driven into the steep, sloping banks running down to the river. On the inner side of the tracks and between them and the row of houses are the coke ovens.

The shack usually consists of three rooms-two bedrooms and a kitchen The company that employs the coal digger receives from $5 to $8 per month rental for these three rooms, which does not include the additional $1 for water, which they must carry themselves from the company well.

The water supply is the most pitiful of all the tragedies to be found here. The family with whom we are spending the night use the river water, as many others are forced to do who cannot pay the requisite $1 per month.

It is at all seasons of the year thick and muddy as chocolate, and is bad to bathe in, to say nothing of drinking. Mother Jones hired a passing colored woman to walk up to the company well, about a quarter of a mile up the tracks, and bring us a bucket of clear water, for we were very thirsty after our long tramp in the hot sun.

A bucket of clear, pure water, not as cold as can be drawn rom any New York city hydrant, but clear as crystal. The children rushed to it like bees to a clover blossom. They fought for the dinted old dipper. They scrambled for cups and tins, and a neighboring baby came toddling in with an empty the tin can.

It is to better just such conditions as these that Mother Jones has come down into this country. She holds meetings at the coal tipples in the evening at 6 o’clock. Then the men slide down the rails on the incline that leads to the mouth of the mine in the mountain above. She urges them to join the union and preserve their liberties. She tells them of the good times that have come to the miners of Illinois since the awful object lessons at Pana and Virden. How they work eight hours there, instead of ten, as they do here. How there is no dockage there. How they have done away with the company shack, and the company store, and the company blacksmith and church and doctor. How the miners there buy their powder for $1.75 per keg instead of $2.25; how the coal companies are obliged to pay them their wages in cash, without any dockage, and how they enjoy the boon of spending their earnings where they please.

At night she holds meetings, usually aided by some one of the four men organizers who are in that country to help her. Every means possible is used by the coal companies to intimidate those in favor of organization. Immediate discharge is the penalty should an employe be discovered to have joined the United Mine Workers. Of the 28,000 miners in the state only about 3,000 are union men. The companies are very independent, because every incoming freight brings only too many idle men searching for work, who are glad to step into the job left vacant by the union recruit and to move into the shack from which his family was evicted.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part III” →

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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 15, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part II

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part II of IV.]

A week ago last Sunday I met this wonderful woman for the first time. It was in her own room at the Washburn hotel, at Charleston, whence I was to set out with her the next day on her mission up the Kanawha and New River valleys.

I saw a neat, trim, comfortable looking woman of 60 years, just tall enough and stout enough to be motherly in appearance. She wore a black silk gown, her platform dress, never donned, as I afterward discovered except on rare occasions. Mother Jones must have been a handsome young girl. Her skin, even yet, is soft and white, and there are few wrinkles in her broad, thoughtful brow. Her eyes are deep set, clear, shining blue gray, shrewd, alert, tender. While she talks they flash by turns indignation, scorn, surprise, amusement, merriment.

She was engaged in the very prosaic task of putting a new velvet binding upon her walking skirt, but she now dropped her work, laid off her glasses, settled herself comfortably back in her rocking chair, and asked if I had heard any news on my trip down regarding the steel strike.

[She said:]

It means so much to us all. Everything depends upon the success or the failure of the striking steel workers. This great strike is the beginning of the end of the campaign begun at Homestead just nine years ago, and which numbers Lattimer and Hazleton in Pennsylvania and Pana and Virden in Illinois among its blood-stained battlefields. Whatever may be the outcome of this, the greatest strike we have yet instituted, its immediate effects will be but temporary. Won or lost, it means a long step forward in industrial evolution. If the union forces lose their fight it will only precipitate the crisis.

It will take but a spark from the revolutionary torch to start a conflagration that will spread from one end of the country to the other. Ten years ago I found the miners and the mill workers timid and wavering and easily subdued. Now I find them bold and firm and uncompromising. They are becoming educated in economics. While they have been using their muscles for their masters they have been training their brains to think and reason for their own advancement.

The people are patient, infinitely patient. Oppressed people have always been patient until patience ceased to be a virtue. They will sweat at the furnace, they will crawl on their bleeding knees through the dark coal caverns, they will even see their young children broken under the wheel of commercial greed. All this they have borne for a long time, with only occasional mutterings of discontent. It is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The wage slave must be ground down just a little more, his yoke made only a little heavier.

When the cataclysm comes the people of this country cannot expect anything different from what has befallen nations that have allowed the classes to exploit the blood and brawn of the masses. Human nature is not different to-day from the human nature of 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago. In the bosom of the hard oppressed toiler in the mine and the mill and at the furnace there is slumbering a long suppressed vindictiveness. This spirit I find in the workers everywhere.

Mother Jones’ voice, clear and ringing when she addresses a crowd, is soft and low in conversation. It is the voice of the gentle nuns of he Canadian convents where she was educated and whose schools she taught prior to her marriage. While yet a very young women there came the great tragedy of her life. Her husband and four little children were swept away by yellow fever in less than one month’s time.

For more than thirty years Mother Jones has been a student of economics and participator in the leading industrial movements of the nation. She is numbered among the agitators of the famous “Sand Lots Movement, ” in San Francisco many years ago.

She was one of the orators who were wont to address the mobs that gathered about the mint in that city, howling for Chinese exclusion. She has taken and influential part in every great strike within the last decade. Her title was bestowed upon her by the 500,000 American Railway union men during the great railroad strike at Chicago in 1897.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part II” →