Legendary labor journalist Art Shields’ classic on-the-scene account of the West Virginia murder of pro-miner Matewan police chief Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers. The subsequent ‘March of the Redneck Miners,’ known to us as ‘The Battle of Blair Mountain,’ was the largest armed labor rising in U.S. history. Illustrated by Boardman Robinson. A must-read for all those interesting in United States’ working-class history.

The Battle of Logan County by Art Shields from The Liberator. Vol. 4. No. 10. October, 1921.

“THESE are our hills and we love ’em. We had to fight for them long ago, against the bears and the panthers and the wolves and the rattlesnakes, and now I reckon Don Chafin’s thugs ain’t a-goin’ to scare us out.“

A sturdy old mountaineer of more than three score and ten voiced these sentiments as we stood together on one of the loftiest peaks of Blair Mountain and filled our eyes with the surrounding magnificence of giant shaded valleys and mighty ridges, tossed in forested glory against the sky. It was a garden of towering wonder that blinded my eyes for the moment to the shallow trench at my feet, where thousands of empty shells were ugly reminders that Don Chafin’s machine gunners and automatic rifle men had been nesting there a few days before.

We were tramping over the southern end of the fifteen miles of wilderness where twenty-thousand men had been contesting the right of the thug system to exist in the mining fields of West Virginia. The battle had lasted through an entire week, during the closing days in August and the first ones of September, and it ended with the gunmen giving way along more than half their line after sustaining losses second only to those of the Paint and Cabin Creek campaigns. Two thousand federal troops came none too soon to prevent the miners from sweeping on through the mountain barriers, through the terror-haunted scab lands of Logan county, and on to the protection of their fellow union men under the heel of a bloody state martial law in the Mingo fields beyond.

Ten thousand labor volunteers with high powered rifles leaving work and wives and rushing to the defense of their fellow union men nearly seventy miles away from the scene of mobilization! For an injury to one is an injury to all among the union miners of West Virginia. By their organized solidarity they have pulled themselves out of an industrial tophet that passes description. Mother Jones told me of miners working fourteen hours in the olden days in the state, and my veteran mountaineer friend smiled at this conservative statement, saying it was nearer eighteen. But step by step conditions have been lifted half way out of the mire. Desperate fighting has marked the unionization of each succeeding field of the high grade industrial coal which makes the state so desirable in the eyes of the great steel interests. But slowly and surely the organization has gained ground til today the operators are keeping Logan, McDowell, Mercer and Wyoming counties non-union only by the aid of several thousand deputized thugs, most of them drawn from the Baldwin-Feltz agency. In these counties murders are so common that the formalities of the coroner are seldom attended to.

A year ago the United Mine Workers organized the men of Mingo County, which produces some of the beast coking coal in this country. The operators locked the union men out and dispossessed their families from company houses. A strike was the counter-attack of the union and in the rough and tumble fighting which took place hereabouts between the two sides the thugs fared badly, especially in the battle of Matewan which was graphically described for the Liberator readers a year ago. So the operators called in the state constabulary and state militia and since then, the Mingo miners, still standing by their strike that has crippled production nearly two-thirds, have been living under a murder regime that is excelled only in number of casualties by Logan County itself.

Miners have been shot down and tent colonies have been raided again and again. The United Mine Workers have kept the locked-out miners alive with weekly payments taken from dues and special assessments, but the rank-and-file of the West Virginia miners have been demanding more vigorous action than that given by their purses. “Nothing will do but that we go down there and set that place to rights ourselves,” they said among each other.

But ten thousand armed miners-the number needed to overcome resistance on the way, are not easily pulled away from work and wife for a military campaign. It takes something tremendously dramatic and horror-raising to get such a force moving. The attacks on the Lick Creek Tent Colony and the steadily increasing murders did not have quite the necessary dynamic effect. Had the union officially called for volunteers, or had it sanctioned such a move, the miners might have gone flying; but something terrific that would shock all their working-class love and dignity had to happen before they would start on their own initiative.

It happened on July 31. I will let Mrs. Sid Hatfield tell the story as she told it to me in Matewan, in the little apartment over the jewelry store, where she has been living since Sid was murdered.

She began:

Sid never knew what killed him. Those Baldwin thugs were all hiding up there in wait for him on the top of the court house steps. I had begged Sid to take his guns along, but he said he wouldn’t need them, and it didn’t look nice to carry guns into the court house.

They indicted Sid, you know, for shooting at Mohawk in McDowell County. Sid never knew anything about it. He hadn’t been away from Mingo County or even from Matewan since we were married fifteen months ago, except that time he went to Washington to testify before the Senate Committee. It was just a trick to get him away from his friends and kill him.

I guessed they were fixing to kill him, but the high sheriff of McDowell County, that’s Bill Hatfield, a distant kin of Sid’s, said he’d give him protection if he came on to the other county to answer the indictment. I was still nervous about it, but Sid went, anyhow.

Ed Chambers and his wife Sallie came along with us. We went down on the night train, but the thugs knew all about it, for that fellow Lively got on twenty-five miles this side of Welch, the county seat of McDowell County, where we were going. That is the fellow, you know, that testified against Sid at the other trial. And next morning at breakfast there he was again, sitting next to us in the Busy Bee restaurant in Welch.

Mr. Van Fleet, our lawyer, told Sid to be careful about going to the courthouse, for he didn’t like the idea of this fellow following us, but Sid just laughed. He wouldn’t take his guns but left them in the suit case.

That Welch court house is up two flights of steps. Everything looked all right as we started. Ed Chambers and Sallie in front. Sid had one foot on the second flight and was waving a hello to one of the other defendants in his case, who was standing near by, when a bunch of men stepped out of the doorway and began firing. Sid wheeled around and tumbled, and so did Ed. I ran up the steps, passed eight men shooting from the hip-like this. I don’t know how they missed me. I ran inside calling for the sheriff, but he wasn’t there. Then they told me that Sid wasn’t killed. When I got out Sid had been taken away.

Mrs. Hatfield was devoted to Sid, but she is a mountain girl and knows the uselessness of bewailing the sudden death of her man, so she told the story quietly and without tears. Another witness took up the narrative where she left off and told how Lively had pumped his revolver into the body of Chambers, while most of the others concentrated on Hatfield. The first two shots hit Sid in the arm and a second later a gunman put his revolver to Hatfield’s back and shot three times.

So died these lion-hearted, laughing young men, the salt of the earth. And they died, not fighting as they would have chosen, but murdered in cold blood by sneering deputies, right on the threshold of the mocking temple of the law, and the murderers were allowed to go at large under bail. “Well, I’m glad that’s over now,” a high official of McDowell County is reported to have said that same day. Two practical opponents of the thug system were gone and Tom Feltz stood avenged of the deaths of his brothers Albert and Lee, who fell in the Matewan battle on May, 1920. Shortly after, this same gentleman complacently registered as a candidate for congress on the Republican ticket in Galax in Old Virginia.

Success seemed to be smiling on the dual vested interests of coal operators and gunmen, and the prospects of wiping out all semblance of unionism in the rich coking coal fields of Mingo County, appeared better than ever. And if in Mingo, why not all over West Virginia?

The funeral of Sid Hatfield, held a few days later from Matewan to the old Hatfield cemetery across the Tug River in Kentucky, might have given them pause. They might have noted the delegations that came from far and near while mining camps shut down for the day. They might have seen six hundred railroad shopmen coming from Huntington with an immense bower of flowers sent by their two thousand railroad workers there, who had closed down the shops for the day in memory of the passing of their brave fighter.

“It will blow over,” was the comforting sentiment of the operators when their stools brought them word of the indignation flying like a fiery cross through the central and northern counties of the state. “It will blow over as these things have been blowing over for years,” they reassured themselves.

But the workers were shaking with fury that was boiling and not blowing over.

The murder of Hatfield and Chambers in that premeditated fashion on the court house steps was the dramatic event that focused their eyes on the crisis before the whole labor movement of West Virginia. It was now or never for the cleaning up of Mingo County.

Up and down a hundred mountains where men delve deep for coal and even in the black diamond fields of Kentucky and Virginia, men began reaching for their high power rifles for the big hunt again, as in Cabin Creek days. Organization for the purpose was hastily improvised, outside of the United Mine Workers, which did not allow its district machinery to be used, and shortly after the middle of the month thousands of men began to move for the gathering place of Marmet. They came by train or car to this little town and its surrounding fields, there on the border of Boone and Kanawha counties, just sixty-five miles, as the bird flies, or more than a hundred by road, to the Mingo coal fields. The route led straight across the union grounds of Boone County and the thug-ridden lands of Logan.

Thousands of miners, black and white, came at the call: railroad men were there, atoning for the stain cast by the men who were transporting machine guns and thugs into Sheriff Don Chafin’s Logan County lands; building trades men came who knew that the powerful miners’ union held up all organized labor in West Virginia, and machinists and farmers’ boys gathered with the rest. Among the lot were more than two thousand who had taken post graduate lessons in shooting “over there.”

They moved on from Marmet on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of August, some six thousand strong, with thousands more coming on behind. Auto trucks loaded with provisions went on ahead and came behind. They were a formidable force when they arrived in the little Coal River Valley town of Madison in Boone County near Logan on the twenty-sixth. But here like a wet blanket on their enthusiasm fell the discipline of the United Mine Workers. President Frank Keeney of District Seventeen, with a record of consistent hard fighting, economic and otherwise, nevertheless ordered them to go back. What President Harding’s ultimatum could not accomplish the hand of their union did.

They slowly started back, but they had not scattered far when the murderous Chafin’s forces galvanized them into a return charge that no mere orders or persuasions could have halted, had they been attempted. Four hundred Baldwin-Feltz thugs had dashed into the little mining town of Sharples, seventeen miles up the valley from Madison, Saturday night, and killed two miners, wounded two others, generally shot up the town and gotten away with four prisoners before the miners, taken by surprise, could come together from the neighboring hamlets.

The miners tumbled back into the Coal River Valley, thousands of reinforcements coming to avenge this latest insult, and the battle of Logan County began. Fighters rushed up to the front on each side, miners taking special trains on the little Coal River Railroad line and Chafin rushing in hundreds of state troopers, a thousand “killers” from McDowell County with Sheriff Bill Hatfield, recruits from Mercer and Wyoming, a few Legionaires and other volunteers from elsewhere, and two or three thousand Logan people, volunteering through fear of submitting to a conscription that was enforced with threats of death, threats backed up by at least one jail murder.

It was a battle on the miners’ part to break through the hills that cut off Boone County and the little unionized strip, from Logan, from the domain of the Baldwin-Feltz that was to furnish highway on their march to Mingo.

Machine gun nests guarded the fifteen miles of serrated mountain, and outposts of riflemen and automatic riflemen flanked out to protect the artillerymen. During the delay in the miners’ march the other side had had time to dig themselves in and set their guns to command the mountain passes.

Cleaning out these machine gun nests and dislodging snipers was the imperative job of the miners’ forces from the, start. Out of the ten thousand men the best shots were picked for long distance elimination work while telescopes, searched out the machine gun centers.

Sometimes one of the rapid fire mechanisms was placed so carefully that snipers had no chance to get results, and the gun had to be taken by storm, or not at all. If you will climb the mountains some miles from Sharples you will come across a small field of corn that has been mowed, as, by a scythe, by machine gun fire. A squad of volunteers from the labor army dashing up the hill found that the gunner was unable to depress his weapon below a certain angle, and by bending double the shot went over their heads, harmless to everything except the mountaineer’s corn patch. This machine gun and four others near by were captured and two more elsewhere. Others were dragged back to second bases as the fire became too hot in the last days of the battle. All along the line, from Hewitt Creek at the lower end of the valley, up through the mountains till within a few miles of the extreme end line, the workers’ forces crowded their enemy back. Whenever the holding of the line depended on the conscript forces that line was not held, as in the midsection of the line where fifty conscripts with a few Baldwin men mixed in hurriedly deserted an abandoned house in which they were camping for the night, at the rumor that the miners were coming. When the miners came they found a medley of trousers and socks and shirts left behind by some who fled too hastily to dress.

But it must not be supposed that most of the regular gunmen and the state troopers were of such weak kidney, “Give the devil his due,” said one of the worker-fighters in telling me of their desperate resistance. “Our boys got within twenty yards of a trench near George’s Creek there, and those thugs stood their ground. Some of them couldn’t shoot well, or our men wouldn’t be alive, but they were game all right.”

Some of them could shoot, too. I saw a tall tree whence a sniper had done execution till a rifle bullet tumbled him ninety feet to the ground.

Sheriff Chafin lost one of his chief aides in the fighting near Blair, a veteran gunman named John Gore, who earned several paragraphs of eulogy from the newspapers when his death was announced. Gore fell with a bullet in his head while he was leading an outpost near George’s Creek behind Blair Mountain, just after he had sent a ball through a chestnut tree killing a Negro.

In the same section of the fighting zone another bullet nearly clipped that very C.E. Lively who murdered Ed Chambers on the court house steps, if the eyes of a miner who knew him well did not deceive him. This miner was in charge of a body of men that had just fallen back to shelter after an attack on a trench, when he suddenly shouted, “There’s that scoundrel” and drove a chunk of lead through the bark of a tree behind which a man was operating with an automatic gun.

The Chafin forces were about as numerous as the miners, but composed of assorted gunmen, volunteers and conscripts, they were not nearly as effective as the miners, in spite of superior equipment. Consequently they lost many times more men. The miners have a record of eight known dead and several missing on their side, whereas the reports of refugees from Logan who counted stacks of dead brought back in truck loads from the front, make it evident that one to three hundred lives were lost on the other side.

Apparently it was the disaster that was overtaking his forces that caused Chafin to loose his two borrowed planes as bomb droppers. For the first few days they had been doing scout duty only, but Thursday, September 1, hastily constructed bombs, made of powder and iron nuts stuffed into thirty inches of six-inch gas piping were supplied to the aviators. Bottles with chlorine gas were carried in addition and the mechanical hawks shot over the hills to the mining villages. The first bomb, dropped near Jeffrey, fell between two women washing their clothes, Mrs. Sallie Polly and Mrs. Lizzie Oxley, her married daughter. Like most of the others it was made so clumsily that it struck wrong and failed to explode. For three days bombs dropped on all the little mining towns in the valley, from Jeffrey, south to Blair. Mrs. Dula Chambers, the wife of the village blacksmith of Jeffrey, was gassed by a bursting bottle as she was rushing on a Red Cross automobile to the emergency hospital in a school house six miles up Hewit Creek from Jeffrey, and she was sick for two days. But for the most part the bombs represented only the most futile bungling as well as brutality of intention.

The arrival of the federal troops, whom they summoned saved these latter day West Virginia beasts from the hands of the men they had wronged. Don Chafin still rules and lives by murder in his stronghold in Logan and the coal operators of the southwest counties are getting out their non-union coal at half wages and without the usual safety appliances. Nevertheless all is not well with them. The effect of the battle of Logan County has been to inspire the miners of the union counties with greater spirit and determination and it is tending to bring the whole labor movement of the state into closer co-operation.

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. Max Eastman would sell the paper to the Party and In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1921/10/v04n10-w43-oct-1921-liberator.pdf