Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 31, 1921 Mingo County, West Virginia – Union Miner Dead After Battle Near Nolan -Senate Committe to Investigate Conditions Along the Tug
From The New York Herald of May 27, 1921:
THIRD VICTIM DEAD AFTER MINGO FIGHT ———- George Crum in Ante-Mortem Statement Denies Attempt to Start Trouble. ———-
Wheeling Intelligencer May 26, 1921
WILLIAMSON, W. Va., May 26.-George Crum who was shot in a fight between a detail of State police and Kentucky National Guardsmen on one side and a party of men they encountered in a road near Nolan, W. Va., last night, died in a hospital here this afternoon. A State policeman and a Guardsman were killed in the encounter.
Gov. Morgan in Charleston to-day announced that ten thousand rifle cartridges shipped from St. Louis and consigned to Sid Hatfield, feudist, at Matewan, W. Va., are being held in the office of the American Railway Express at Bluefield.
The cartridges are being held at the request of Gov. Morgan, made to the president of the Norfolk and Western Railroad. An embargo was placed on the shipment of arms and munitions into Mingo county last week.
State and county authorities to-night watched with extreme caution the situation along the West Virginia-Kentucky border after the events of last night at Nolan. Capt. Brockus of the State police, reported that the region was quiet. A similar report came from Sheriff A. C. Pinson of Mingo county.
Soon after Crum was admitted to the hospital he told the authorities that he had done nothing to excite the trouble at the Nolan ferry, where the fight started, and during which Private Charles Kackley of the West Virginia State police and Private Manley Vaughan of the Kentucky National Guard, were killed.
An arrest under Gov. Morgan’s proclamation of martial law for Mingo was reported to-night. Sheriff Pinson announced that Ross Perry was arrested by deputy sheriffs near Gilbert, W. Va., and charged with having ammunition in his possession. He was held without bail.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 21, 1920 Mingo County, West Virginia – “Civil War Has Become a Fact”
From The Literary Digest of December 18, 1920:
WEST VIRGINIA’S WAR
THE BIGGEST AND BLOODIEST FEUD in the history of West Virginia, say special correspondents on the ground, continues in the vicinity of Williamson, in the bituminous coal-mining district [note: photo above incorrectly states “anthracite field”]. With the private feud on a gigantic scale is combined an industrial war-a strike and lockout. “The issue of the open versus the closed shop is being put to the acid test,” says John J. Leary, Jr., in the New York World, and the scene of the battle between coal-operators and miners is said to be just across the river from the county in which the McCoy-Hatfield feud was waged a generation ago. The strike in the Williamson coal-field began in May with an attempt of the United Mine Workers to unionize the men, we are told by the New York Herald, and the death-toll since that time is thirty-nine. Six hundred men have been wounded. Mine-workers, on one hand, and mine-guards, private detectives, and deputy sheriffs, on the other, have staged a civil war, during which time the estimated loss in production of coal has been 5,000,000 tons and the loss to the miners $3,500,000 in wages, according to the figures of The Herald. Many coal-plants and at least one power-house have been dynamited, declares the New York World, while Mr. Leary continues in that paper:
Murders and killings on both sides have been frequent; hundreds of families have been driven from their poor homes; civil war has become a fact. Back of the mountaineers are the 400,000 union coal-miners of the country. Back of them the sympathy, and, if necessary, the support of the other 3,600,000 members of the American Federation of Labor.
Back of the operators are the open-shop interests. Quietly, but none the less effectively, they are protecting and sustaining the smaller operators who have small resources. They are assisting with advice and with experts in such matters. Likewise they are assisting in Charleston, the capital of the State.
Meantime, the deadlock.
At any time it may flare up again with heavy loss of life on one side or the other, or both.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 14, 1920 Mingo County, West Virginia – Report from Miners’ Tent Colonies
From The Nation of December 8, 1920:
Labor’s Valley Forge
By NEIL BURKINSHAW
DRIVEN from their homes at the point of a gun for the crime of joining the union , more than four hundred miners and their families are camping in tents on the snow-covered mountains in Mingo County, West Virginia. To add to their difficulties federal troops have been summoned to play the ancient game of keeping “law and order.” But it will take more than the cold clutch of winter and the presence of soldiers to make the miners surrender in their fight for recognition of their right to unionize.
Across the Tug River, a narrow stream dividing Mingo County from Kentucky, is the union workers’ “No Man’s Land” held by the gunmen of the Kentucky coal operators who waylay, beat, and sometimes kill anyone even suspected of union affiliations. The same condition obtains in McDowell County of West Virginia just south of Mingo. The region was settled in pre-Revolutionary days by pioneers who crossed the mountains from Virginia and North Carolina, a hardy stock of Welsh, English, and Scotch from whom the miners are descended. One rarely encounters a foreigner there so that the industrial war now raging can not be ascribed-as is the convenient practice-to the agitation of the foreign element .
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 8, 1920
Matewan, West Virginia – Miners and Citizens Battle Company Gunthugs
From the United Mine Workers Journal of June 1, 1920:
Ten or twelve men were killed in a battle between Baldwin-Felts gunmen and citizens of the town of Matewan, W. Va., on May 19. The exact number of deaths has not been learned, because it is said that one or more bodies were lost in the Tug river when some of the men attempted to swim across. The battle was the result of activities of the gunmen who were in the employ of the Stone Mountain Coal Company. It has been impossible also to obtain a correct list of the names of the dead.
Matewan is in the very heart of the Tug river field, one of the most notorious hotbeds of nonunionism in West Virginia. Coal operators in that field have for years resisted with all of their power the efforts of the miners to organize and join the United Mine Workers of America. They have employed all of the bloody tactics that have prevailed in such fields for many years, including the use of gunmen and thugs, the blackjack and other methods of repression.
A short time ago the miners employed at a mine owned by the Stone Mountain Company undertook to form an organization. The company immediately applied the usual remedy. It discharged the men from its employ. Then the company decided to evict the men and their families from the houses in which they lived and which were owned by the company. It was the thought of the company that this would help to break up the movement for the organization of a local union.
A large force of “detectives” was hired from the Baldwin-Felts agency at Bluefield, W. Va., and sent to Matewan to evict the miners and their families. An Associated Press dispatch from Matewan told the story of the battle as follows:
The shooting, in which Baldwin-Felts detectives clashed with citizens and the police, followed the eviction of a number of miners from Stone Mountain Coal Company houses yesterday, according to the authorities. Two mines were closed recently when it became known that an effort was being made to unionize them. The miners claim that the detectives were sent to dispossess families of workers who had been discharged.
A shot, said by the authorities to have been fired from the coat pocket of Albert Felts, a detective, and which ended the life of Mayor Cabell Testerman, started the battle. An instant later Felts, according to authorities, was killed by “Sid” Hatfield, chief of police. The shooting then became general, and when the battle ended seven detectives, the mayor, and four miners were dead and three other persons badly wounded. Felts, it is said, had a warrant for the arrest of Chief Hatfield on a charge that he had taken a prisoner from detectives some time ago. The mayor was reading the warrant when he was killed.
It was said that the gunmen wore badges as deputy sheriff’s of Harlan county, Ky., and that they had been imported from there to Matewan.
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[There follows a long account of the Battle of Matewan.]
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