Art Shields reports on what is now known as the Battle of Blair Mountain in the midst of combat.

‘Miners Arm Themselves When Thugs Kills Workers’ by Arthur Shields from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 4 No. 36. September 9, 1921.

Coal Diggers Demand Protection Against Lawless Company Gang That Shoots Innocent Women and Children

CHARLESTON, W. Va. Ten thousand armed coal miners are at the pass at Dingess Run in Logan county, and a fifteen-mile front southward, against the private of the coal operators. The latter have the decided advantage of machine guns, but the miners have already given good account of themselves. A total of from 25 to 30 men have been killed on both sides, according to the best information here, which, however, has not been officially verified.

Dingess Run connects the ‘‘Forbidden Land,” as the non-union section of Logan county is called, with the small unionized strip in the northeast. In this unionized strip the miners are encamped and they swear they will keep up the fight until the gunmen are driven back, or the United States troopers arrive and guarantee the safety of women and children there. The troops are expected momentarily.

“If we desert this place now we be inviting the gunmen to come again and shoot up the homes here as they did last Saturday,” was the response of the miners when President Harding’s dispersal was brought to them by personal representatives of Wm. M. Retry, vice-president and acting chief of District 17, U.M.W. of A.

The invasion referred to came after the marching miners had gone homes last week at the request of president Frank Keeney and Secretary Fred Mooney of the Mine Workers. At once the gunman of the coal barons took advantage of the situation and swooped through the pass into the little mining camps in northwest Logan county killing two men, wounding two others, and sending countless bullets into the homes of the miners.

This outrage was the spark that set West Virginia aflame again. The miners reformed at once in great numbers and marched back into Logan county, determined to see the thing through this time,

Keeney and Mooney have been indicted as a part of a plan to get them back into Mingo county where, the miners believe, they will be shot down Just as Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were a few weeks ago.

Two thousand United States soldiers arrived at St. Albans, W. Va., Friday night from Camp Sherman and Fort Benjamin Harrison to take their positions on the Little Coal River branch line to the north-eastern strip of Logan County, where the miners are pushing the operators’ forces back slowly.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the I.W.W. leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-I.W.W. raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor J.O. Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the C.P.

Access to full paper: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1921-09-09/ed-1/seq-1