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.
III
On July 6 an old woman alighted from the train in Charlestown. She had now reached her eighty-third year and during the greater part of her life she had been the heart and center of the great industrial battles of the country. The country had come to know her as “the angel of the miners,” and her boys, as she called the miners, as “Mother” Jones. For years she had gone where men had not dared to venture. She had faced guns, thwarted conspiracies, partaken of bull-pen fare, but, as this gray-haired old woman with a grandmotherly face, she was planning for the greatest battle of her life. She knew the West Virginia coal fields and the conditions. She had been there before. And she realized that the representatives of feudalism were preparing to exterminate unionism and establish gun-men rule in Paint Creek as across the ridge. She was a strategist. She had no faith in defensive warfare. She proposed to force the fighting, to sustain unionism in Paint Creek and carry it across the ridge.
Having decided upon this counter movement she quietly arranged for an initial demonstration that would awaken the public to what was going on. One day the city of Charlestown was startled to see an old woman leading three thousand miners through the streets to the state house, and bearing banners to the effect that the gun-men had to go. The men were sober and orderly—she had seen to that. Governor Glasscock saw her. She served notice upon him. Calling attention to the inscription in front of the state house, “Mountaineers are Always Free,” she told the governor, that the boast would be made to stand the test of reality. And she gave the governor twenty-four hours to get rid of the gun-men. And if the state failed to rid the mining region of these guards she told him boldly that the miners would. The gun-men did not go in twenty-four hours. It was now evident that the state, organized for the protection of society, would not intervene and rid the commonwealth of these ruffian mercenaries. The miners determined that they would no longer be terrorized, beaten, robbed, their wives and daughters should no longer be insulted and cuffed about, their constitutional rights no longer disregarded. And while they had no thought in the beginning of civil war they now proceeded to arm themselves—to do for themselves what the state had refused to do for them. In less than three weeks after “Mother” Jones had served notice on the governor, the miners, infuriated at the prodding of the gun-men, entrenched at Mucklow, moved upon the stronghold of the enemy with such fury that the pitched battle resulting left the guards in danger of annihilation. The state now became alarmed. This was serious. And the governor hurried the state militia to the scene in special trains. The militia now proceeded to disarm both sides.
During the first week in August, “Mother” Jones, taking her life in her hands, invaded Cabin Creek, and in the early afternoon called a meeting of the miners at Eskdale.
And that afternoon she organized them into the union and swore them to the oath of the United Mine Workers. The men were instantly discharged and told to “go to ‘Mother’ Jones for work.” A week later another meeting was held at Eskdale and when eighty Baldwins attempted to prevent the meeting they were put to flight by five hundred armed miners. This was followed by evictions, and West Virginia was in a state of civil war.