I was tried for murder. Along with the others I was sentenced to serve twenty years in the state penitentiary. I was not sent to prison immediately but held for five weeks in the military camp. I did not know what they were going to do with me. My guards were nice young men, respectful and courteous with the exception of a fellow called Lafferty, and another sewer rat whose name I have not taxed my mind with.
Then from California came aid. The great, lion-hearted editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, Fremont Older, sent his wife across the continent to Washington. She had a talk with Senator Kearns. From Washington she came to see me. She got all the facts in regard to the situation from the beginning of the strike to my unconstitutional arrest and imprisonment. She wrote the story for Collier’s Magazine. She reported conditions to Senator Kearns, who immediately demanded a thorough congressional inquiry.
Some one dropped a Cincinnati Post through my prison window. It contained a story of Wall Street’s efforts to hush up the inquiry. “If Wall Street gets away with this,” I thought, “and the strike is broken, it means industrial bondage for long years to come in the West Virginia mines.”
I decided to send a telegram, via my underground railway, to Senator Kearns. There was a hole in the floor of my prison-cabin. A rug covered the hole. I lifted the rug and rang two beer bottles against one another. A soldier who was my friend came crawling under the house to see “what was up.” He had slipped me little things before, and I had given him what little I had to give—an apple, a magazine. So I gave him the telegram and told him to take it three miles up the road to another office. He said he would. “It’s fine stuff, Mother,” he said.
That night when he was off duty he trudged three miles up the road with the telegram. He sent it.
The next day in Washington, the matter of a congressional inquiry in the West Virginia mines came up for discussion in the Senate.
Senator Goff from Clarksburg, who had stock in the coal mines of West Virginia, got up on the floor and said that West Virginia was a place of peace until the agitators came in. “And the grandmother of agitators in this country,” he went on, “is that old Mother Jones! I learn from the governor that she is not in prison at all but is only detained in a very pleasant boarding house!”
Senator Kearns rose. “I have a telegram from this old women of eighty-four in this very pleasant boarding house,” said he. “I will read it.”
To the astonishment of the senators and the press he then read my telegram. They had supposed the old woman’s voice was in prison with her body.
“From out the military prison walls of Pratt, West Virginia, where I have walked over my eighty-fourth milestone in history, I send you the groans and tears and heartaches of men, women and children as I have heard them in this state. From out these prison walls, I plead with you for the honor of the nation, to push that investigation, and the children yet unborn will rise and call you blessed.”