But for all that a number have been indicted for offenses ranging from common assault to murder. In every case, however, bail has been ready and it is rare that charges against them have been brought to trial. Some of the assault cases in which they have figured have been of great brutality, yet rarely has any serious trouble resulted for the guards. They go about their work in a purely impersonal way. If a worker becomes too inquisitive, if he shows too much independence, or complains too much about his condition, he is beaten up some night as he passes under a coal tipple, but the man who does the beating has no feeling against him personally; it is simply a matter of business to him.

Just what the services of the guards cost the coal companies is difficult to learn. The companies contract with the Baldwin-Felts agency for them and the sum they pay is kept a secret. It is generally understood that the guards get about $5 a day, or between $100 and $125 a month. A man in the mines who knows one of them intimately told me he "picked up his gun" for $105 a month. When a man joins the Baldwins he "picks up his gun," and that stamps him forevermore with his former associates if they were of the laboring class as an enemy and a man who has turned his back on his class and his kind.

Courtesy of the United Mine Workers' Journal
A GROUP OF STRIKERS' CHILDREN

Unless the miners are beaten in this fight, and utterly and completely beaten, there will never be a settlement of the difficulty here until the mine guards are driven from the region. "The mine guards must go," is the slogan of the striking miner everywhere. His going is of more importance than an increase in pay. There will be no lasting peace in the region until they are gone. All over the state when the situation in the Kanawha valley comes up for discussion you are told that the mine guards are at the bottom of the trouble. They are the Ishmaelites of the coal regions for their hands are supposed to be against every miner, and every miner's hand is raised against them. They go about in constant peril—they are paid to face danger and they face it all the time. But they are afraid, for they never know when they may get a charge of buckshot or a bullet from an old Springfield army rifle that will make a hole in a man's body big enough for you to put your fist in. A number of guards have been killed since the trouble began, and it is generally understood that some of these were buried by their fellows and nothing said about it, there being a disposition down in the mines not to let the other side know when either side scores and gets a man.

Beginning of Hostilities

Preparations for the warfare, which began in April of last year, had been going on for months before the actual opening of hostilities. The miners on Paint Creek began buying old Springfield rifles which the government had discarded and which were offered in quantities by junk dealers and department stores in Charleston. There had been rumors of trouble, and the Paint Creek miners who were organized had received intimations that Cabin Creek conditions would be established in their operations. There had been no mine guards on Paint Creek for they are seldom seen in union operations. The miners had received information that the operators would not sign the scale for the new year but would repudiate the union and bring in the guards.

Their information proved correct. When the Kanawha Operators' Association met to consider the scale, the Paint Creek operators declined to sign it and withdrew from the association. The miners struck and the guards appeared over night. A big fight took place at Mucklow when the first blood was spilled in the trouble. It has been spilled in quantities since with more or less regularity.

The companies immediately prepared for a long fight. Miners were evicted from their homes and many of them have since been living in tents furnished by the United Mine Workers. Machine guns were imported and mounted in concrete fortifications that were hurriedly built on the roofs of the company stores and mounted in positions of vantage in the hills. Whisky, cartridges, rifles and machine gun ammunition were brought in in large quantities.

The strike spread at once to Cabin Creek and from the beginning the warfare has been more serious on Cabin Creek than it has been on Paint Creek. More machine guns were established on Cabin Creek than had been planted in Paint Creek. The situation grew so threatening that Governor Glasscock ordered out the militia early last August at the solicitation of the mine owners. By that time almost every man on Cabin Creek had his rifle and ammunition, hidden but where he could get at it without trouble. For the most part the arms were smuggled in over the hills. The mine owners informed Governor Glasscock that the miners were armed and were threatening to wipe out the mine guards, one of the guards, William Stringer, having been slain in a most brutal manner. The miners did not ask for protection, saying they could protect themselves. It is generally believed that they were waiting for some particularly bad move on the part of the guards, when they proposed to exterminate them if possible. The mine owners expected that when the troops came they would disarm the miners but allow the guards to retain their rifles, in other words, and to put it very plainly, they expected that the militia would be used as an additional force against the miners. But when the troops began disarming the guards as well as the miners they protested most vigorously. But for every rifle taken away from a guard in the early days of the trouble, dozens of new ones were brought in.