II
An hour’s ride from Charlestown, in the Kanawa mountain, are two ragged gulches eight miles apart and divided by a sharp ridge. One is the Cabin Creek mining settlement, and the other the Paint Creek settlement. A decade or more before the trouble of 1912 the miners along Cabin Creek had, after much travail, been organized, but an ill-advised strike had wrought their ruin and resulted in the restoration of the old non-union conditions aggravated now by the hate born of the victory over them. This settlement had come to be known as “Russia.” The mine owners had here established an ideal feudalism. They owned everything in sight but the country road, which was the bed of a creek. Thus it was practically impossible to visit Cabin Creek without trespassing on company ground and being roughly handled by the whisky-crazed gun-men called “guards.” A miner or his family could only call at the shack of a neighbor by suffrance, since he could not reach the neighbor’s house without trespassing on company property. Here the gun-men were supreme. The men were slaves in all but name. They submitted to being robbed of the fruit of their labor, to extortion in the matter of rental and in the purchase of food in the company stores, and organizers of the miners understood that he who ventured into Cabin Creek would probably be carried out upon a stretcher.
The miners of Paint Creek had been organized, but in the spring of 1912 the coal barons determined to extend the feudalism of Cabin Creek across the ridge. The opportunity came when the time for the signing of a new contract was reached. In the conference between the miners and the operators at Charlestown the miners submitted many demands, all of a kind conceded in other mining states such as Indiana and Illinois, but after more than a week the operators refused to sign. In the interest of industrial peace the miners thereupon agreed to continue under the old contract with the old prices and conditions, provided the operators would agree to the full recognition of the union. This, too, was refused, and a strike was ordered. Within ten days the miners were asked to meet with representatives of the coal companies in an effort to adjust the difference, and this, agreed to by the miners, resulted in a further compromise and the signing of a contract by the operators and the miners. The operators almost immediately broke faith, the strike was renewed and the fight was on. The issue was clear from the beginning—whether or not the conditions in Cabin Creek domineered over by drunken gun-men, should be established in Paint Creek.
The representatives of feudalism acted quickly. Almost immediately Paint Creek was invaded by the gun-men, headed by the infamous and murderous Ernest Gaujot, the “King Guard,” a man with a criminal record, with machine guns, plenty of ammunition and searchlights. Thugs, gun-men and thieves were hastily scoured from the scums of the cities, supplied with whisky and guns and turned loose upon the miners and their families. The program was to terrorize the miners into surrender. In the darkness of the night the gun-men fired the Gatling guns for practice. They swaggered in their drunken insolence into the homes of the unarmed miners, leeringly speculated aloud on what a good target the master of the house would make, turned everything upside down, kicked and cuffed the children, ordered drink and food, and let loose the flood gates of profanity and vulgarity in the presence of the women and babes. Nothing so nearly resembling anarchy has ever been seen on American soil. These drunken brutes invaded the home of a miner by the name of Frank Russe, and finding no one at home but the wife, who was about to become a mother, they slapped her face and drove her from the house. But the crime of that time that cries to heaven and curses the civilization that permitted the criminal to live, was committed at the home of Tony Sevilla, who was in Ohio at the time in search of work. The unspeakable Gaujot and his gang searched the house, and after they had gone a neighboring woman, knowing that Mrs. Sevilla was in a delicate condition, hurried over to find her on her knees, an expression of agony upon her face, making the sign of the cross. Pointing to her side, where one of the gun-men protectors of feudalism had kicked her, she moaned in broken English: “I don’t hear my baby calling me now.”
They had murdered the unborn babe and mother and were permitted to go on with their murderous work. No one was arrested for that! No one was molested for that! That was two hundred miles from the capital of the republic, in the county of the capital of an American state, and in the twentieth century of Christian civilization.
And the barons were satisfied. They wanted quick action. The guards were instructed to throw the miners out of their homes without mercy. Women about to become mothers, the sick, the babes, were driven shelterless into the fields. The miners established a tented camp at Holly Grove at the mouth of the creek and another at Mossey, near its headwaters. At Mucklow, near by, the guards—Gaujot’s men—were established. And when the miners, driven to desperation by the prodding of the guards, twice attacked the Mucklow camp, the papers of Charlestown contained lurid accounts of the brutal and bloodthirsty attacks of the anarchistic miners upon the representatives of law and order personified by Gaujot. There was much sympathy for the operators. It looked as though the miners were whipped—that America would be driven out of Paint Creek and Russia established.