“Yes, and my mama’s worse’n that!” Suddenly he began screaming, “The gunmen! The gunmen! Mother, when I’m a man I’m going to kill twenty gunmen for hurting my mama! I’m going to kill them dead—all dead!”
I went up to the miners’ camp in Holly Grove where all through the winter, through snow and ice and blizzard, men and women and little children had shuddered in canvas tents that America might be a better country to live in. I listened to their stories. I talked to Mrs. Sevilla whose unborn child had been kicked dead by gunmen while her husband was out looking for work. I talked with widows, whose husbands had been shot by the gunmen; with children whose frightened faces talked more effectively than their baby tongues. I learned how the scabs had been recruited in the cities, locked in boxcars, and delivered to the mines like so much pork.
“I think the strike is lost, Mother,” said an old miner whose son had been killed.
“Lost! Not until your souls are lost!” said I.
I traveled up and down the Creek, holding meetings, rousing the tired spirits of the miners. I got three thousand armed miners to march over the hills secretly to Charleston, where we read a declaration of war to Governor Glasscock who, scared as a rabbit, met us on the steps of the state house. We gave him just twenty-four hours to get rid of the gunmen, promising him that hell would break loose if he didn’t. He did. He sent the state militia in, who at least were responsible to society and not to the operators alone.
One night in July, a young man, Frank Keeney, came to me. “Mother,” he said, “I have been up to Charleston trying to get some one to go up to Cabin Creek, and I can’t get anyone to go. The national officers say they don’t want to get killed. Boswell told me you were over here in the Paint Creek and that perhaps you might come over into the Cabin Creek district.”
“I’ll come up,” said I. “I’ve been thinking of invading that place for some time.”
I knew all about Cabin Creek—old Russia. Labor organizer after organizer had been beaten into insensibility, thrown into the creek, tossed into some desolate ravine. The creek ran with the blood of brave men, of workers who had tried to escape their bondage.