To the gun-men and the coal barons “Mother” Jones became a pet abomination. The brutal treatment accorded her by the guards has seldom been equaled in the case of a woman. Meanwhile martial law had been declared.
Realizing the necessity of informing and arousing the country on the conditions, “Mother” Jones left for a speaking tour which included the city of Washington. It was unnecessary. The operators had planned something much better for that purpose.
IV
The miners’ tented camp at Holly Grove had become an eyesore to the representatives of feudalism. They determined to wipe it out and thus terrorize the strikers into submission. Their plan was diabolical, medieval in its brutality. An armored train was equipped at Huntington, W. Va., for the purpose. On the night of February 7, 1913, the special crew went aboard.
The miners were peacefully in their tents or houses that night, many asleep, when between ten and eleven o’clock the armored train moved slowly at a speed of about seven miles an hour through Holly Grove pouring a fusillade of bullets upon the unsuspecting and unprepared inhabitants. Cesco Estep, who was sitting with his family by the fire when the shooting began, called upon his family to take refuge in the cellar and led the way. He fell dead a few feet from the cellar door. His wife, who was about to become a mother, fled for her life. One woman was shot in the feet. About fifteen shots passed through the Estep house, which sheltered women and children that night. The woman was shot in her own home. Bullets passed through many houses and tents, setting fire to a store, and the marvel was that many were not murdered. The miners, as quickly as they could recover from their surprise, in a few instances returned the fire, and this was the occasion for much indignation in the capital, where it was understood that the miners had brutally attacked an armored train. The train passed on and was dismounted in the C. & O. shops in Richmond. This incident was something novel in the history of industrial warfare in America.
V
The following evening “Mother” Jones went to Hansford to see what arrangements had been made for the burial of the murdered man and what could be done for the widow and orphans. The miners there, expecting a visit from the train later, had taken precautions to prepare. There was some excitement. Later that evening “Mother” Jones went to Charlestown. Meanwhile troops had been sent into the mining section, martial law had been declared, and miners were being arrested in numbers. Hearing of the intense excitement at a mining camp known as Bloomer, where the majority of the miners were Italians, “Mother” Jones called a meeting there with the view to preventing them from taking extreme measures. The excitement was so intense that she adjourned the meeting until the next morning at Long Acre, a few miles distant. Having impressed them with the thought that lawlessness would be a play into the hands of the enemy, she had them select a committee to call upon the governor with a request for the release of their fellow workers. She paid their fares to Charlestown. When she reached Charlestown she was taken into custody by local officers, taken to a justice of the peace court where a warrant was sworn out against her, conveyed across the river to a C. & O. train, carried twenty-two miles into the martial law zone, and turned over to the military authorities. There this venerable woman was placed in a room in the house of a poor miner where the only furniture in the room was a small lounge, on which she slept, a small table and two rocking chairs, with no wash bowl. For eight weeks, day and night, two or three militiamen marched around the house keeping guard. No one was permitted to see her. Newspaper men were especially taboo.
And she was to be tried before a drumhead courtmartial, with all the civil courts open, on a charge of murder! Others were included in the charge. The miners who had fled from Holly Grove to Hansford after the attack, had set out to capture a machine gun near Mucklow, and in the pitched battle the bookkeeper of a coal company was killed. There was no concern over the murder of Estep. The killing of the bookkeeper was followed by the arrest of more than a hundred miners—and “Mother” Jones.
VI
We now enter upon the most startling feature of the feudalism of West Virginia in the coal districts. It was soon made evident to the thoughtful that the system was in position to enforce darkness. With pitched battles, armored trains, murdered women, there was little or nothing about it in the press of the country. But when the story that a woman of the celebrity of “Mother” Jones, loved by millions among the toilers, was to be tried for her life before a drumhead courtmartial was told in less than a dozen lines, the system made a fatal blunder. That little light illumined the darkness. Senator Kern, reading these few lines in the Washington Post, expressed his amazement to those in his office that so little information was furnished. Far out in San Francisco, Fremont Older, the fighting editor of The Bulletin, who had been one of the leaders in the movement that destroyed the Schmitz boodle brigade and sent Abe Reuf to the penitentiary, talked it over with his clever wife and decided that she should go at once to West Virginia and ascertain by personal observation the occasion for the silence. The story of Mrs. Older was soon told in Collier’s Weekly—a brief, gripping, startling story of an unthinkable situation for America.