Chapter 1

Life in the Company Towns

In the early 1900s, much of southern West Virginia was coal country in the most literal sense. Railroads had opened the mountains, and coal companies built whole towns in the hollows to house the men who worked underground.

In many of these coal camps, the company owned nearly everything: the houses, the store, often the church and school buildings, and the land the roads ran across. Many miners were paid partly in scrip, company money that was most easily spent at the company store. Living in a company house usually depended on keeping a company job.

The work itself was dangerous. Roof falls, explosions and accidents killed miners in West Virginia every year. Men argued over pay, over how coal was weighed, and over whether they could join a union without losing their jobs and homes.

Conditions were not identical everywhere. Some camps were better kept than others, and some operators and miners had working relationships that others did not. But across much of the southern coalfield, the question of the union — the United Mine Workers of America — became explosive. For many miners, the union meant a voice and protection. For many operators, it meant losing control of costs in a fiercely competitive market.

To keep unions out, some companies hired armed guards. That decision would shape everything that followed.

Chapter 2

The Detectives

The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, based in Bluefield, West Virginia, supplied armed men to coal and railroad companies. In the coalfields they worked as mine guards: protecting company property, watching for union organizers and, during strikes, carrying out evictions.

Evictions were especially bitter. Because miners lived in company houses, a miner who joined a union or went on strike could see his family and belongings put out on the road. Families who lost their homes often ended up in tent colonies supported by the union.

To the companies, the agents were security in a violent labor fight. To many miners, they were a private army that stood between them and their rights. The agency appears again and again in the story of the Mine Wars.

Chapter 3

Sid Hatfield

In the spring of 1920, miners around Matewan were joining the union, and the Stone Mountain Coal Company responded with evictions. On May 19, a group of Baldwin-Felts agents, including Albert and Lee Felts, brothers of the agency's co-owner, arrived to put union families out of company houses.

Hatfield and Mayor Cable Testerman confronted the agents over their authority to carry out the evictions. As the agents prepared to leave town by train, the argument erupted into gunfire on Matewan's main street. Armed miners and townspeople were part of the fight.

When it ended, ten people were dead: seven detectives, including both Felts brothers, two miners, and Mayor Testerman. It was a street killing in a small town, and it was not heroic for the families who lost someone that day.

Hatfield and others were tried for the killings and acquitted. For many miners, Sid Hatfield became a symbol of resistance to the mine-guard system. For the agency, the matter was not finished.

Chapter 4

The Courthouse Steps

In the summer of 1921, Sid Hatfield and his friend Ed Chambers were due in court in Welch, the McDowell County seat, on a charge connected to an earlier shooting. They walked toward the courthouse with their wives.

Baldwin-Felts agents were waiting at the top of the steps. Hatfield and Chambers were shot and killed there, in front of their wives. Witnesses said the two men were unarmed; the agents claimed self-defense and were never convicted.

To miners who already regarded Hatfield as a hero, his death became a rallying point. Mingo County was under martial law, union miners were sitting in jail there, and now the man who had stood up to the detectives had been killed on a courthouse staircase.

Chapter 5

The Miners Gather

In August 1921, armed miners began gathering at Marmet and along Lens Creek, just south of Charleston. Their stated aim was to march into Mingo County, free the jailed union miners and end martial law there. To get to Mingo, they would have to cross Logan County.

How many came is not known precisely. Contemporary reports and later historians give numbers ranging from several thousand to more than ten thousand, and the total changed from day to day as men joined and left. What is clear is that it was many thousands.

They were coal miners and union supporters, and many were World War I veterans who knew how to move and fight as a unit. They brought hunting rifles, shotguns, military rifles and whatever ammunition they could find.

Around August 24, Mother Jones went to the miners' camp at Marmet and urged them to turn back, warning that they would be slaughtered. She read aloud what she said was a telegram from President Harding promising to end the mine-guard system in West Virginia if they went home.

Union leaders doubted it. When she would not show them the telegram, they checked with the White House, which said no such message had been sent. Many miners felt betrayed, and the march went on. Historians still debate what the telegram was and why she presented it, but her fear of a bloodbath is well documented.

Chapter 6

The Red Bandanas

Many marchers tied red bandanas around their necks. With men arriving from dozens of camps, and no uniforms, the bandanas helped them recognize one another.

That detail has become one of the most repeated parts of the story, because of a word: redneck.

Chapter 7

The Miners' General

Blizzard was not the union's top officer, and much of the march was loosely organized. But witnesses and later testimony placed him at the center of it, moving between camps, relaying orders and keeping men supplied. That is why prosecutors would later single him out.

Chapter 8

The Man Waiting on the Mountain

Logan County had no union. Chafin intended to keep it that way. Organizers who entered the county were known to be beaten, arrested or run out. The National Park Service describes him as the notorious sheriff whose main job was to protect the coal operators' interests.

When word came that thousands of armed miners were marching his way, Chafin assembled an armed force of his own: deputies, mine guards, state police and civilian volunteers, with a commonly cited total of around 3,000. Coal operators helped pay for it. His men dug in along the ridgeline of Blair Mountain with rifles and machine guns, and they had access to airplanes.

To union miners, Chafin was a sheriff who had turned the law into a tool of the coal companies. To operators and many of his supporters, he was defending the county against an armed invasion by men who had no right to cross its line. Both views were held strongly in 1921.

Chapter 9

The March

1. 1

   Marmet

   Gathering point on the Kanawha River near Charleston.

2. 2

   Lens Creek

   The route south out of Marmet.

3. 3

   Madison

   Boone County seat, on the road toward Logan.

4. 4

   Blair

   The town where marchers camped below the mountain.

5. 5

   Blair Mountain

   The ridge between the marchers and Logan County.

6. 6

   Logan

   Chafin's county seat, on the far side of the ridge.

7. 7

   Mingo County

   The marchers' destination, where union miners were jailed.

Geography decided the battle. Blair Mountain is part of a long ridgeline that separates the valleys where the marchers gathered from Logan County and, beyond it, Mingo. The roads crossed the ridge at a few gaps. Whoever held the high ground could fire down on anyone coming up.

Chafin's forces held it.

Chapter 10

Blair Mountain

In the last days of August, the marchers made camp around the town of Blair, below the mountain. Above them, Chafin's men waited behind breastworks and in trenches along the ridge.

The terrain was brutal. Dense forest covered steep slopes cut by creeks and narrow hollows. Men climbing from below could barely see who was shooting at them. Men on the ridge had cleared fields of fire and knew exactly where the paths came up.

Chapter 11

The Preacher with a Rifle

According to the National Park Service, on the night of August 30 Wilburn led about 70 miners, including two of his sons, up the mountain. On a dawn patrol, Wilburn and four other men met three of Chafin's deputies, including John Gore, a well-known Logan County mine guard.

Shots were fired. The miners wounded Gore, who then shot and killed a miner named Eli Kemp. Wilburn shot Gore dead. Two men from two sides of the same mountain lay dead in the woods.

The Park Service identifies this confrontation as the beginning of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Chapter 12

The Mountain Erupts

For roughly the next three days, fighting ran along miles of ridgeline. Marchers pushed up through the gaps and hollows; the defenders answered with rifle fire and machine guns from fortified positions. The Park Service account mentions Gatling guns as well as rifles and other firearms.

Much of the fighting was long-range and scattered, fought among trees by men who often could not see their targets. Small groups advanced, fell back and advanced again.

Nobody knows exactly how many died. Figures in historical accounts vary widely, from a handful on the defenders' side to many more among the miners, whose dead may not all have been counted. Any single precise number should be treated with caution.

Chapter 13

Bombs over West Virginia

During the fighting, Chafin had privately hired aircraft fly over the miners' positions. According to the National Park Service, they dropped two nausea-inducing gas bombs and two homemade bombs filled with gunpowder, nuts and bolts.

“American citizens were being subjected to aerial bombardment on their own soil.”

The bombs appear to have done little physical damage. Later retellings sometimes describe much larger bombing raids; the documented record supports a small number of crude bombs.

Chapter 14

Washington Responds

West Virginia's governor asked for federal help. On August 30, Harding issued a proclamation ordering the armed marchers to disperse and go home. The fighting continued.

The federal government then sent troops. West Virginia State Police historical records put the Army deployment at about 2,100 soldiers. Army Air Service planes were also sent into the state for reconnaissance and support.

Chapter 15

The Army Arrives

Many of the marchers had worn the same uniform a few years earlier in France. When federal troops arrived in early September, the miners generally chose not to fight them. The Park Service notes that they were not rebelling against the federal government, but against local and state authorities they believed served the coal companies.

Some men surrendered their rifles. Others hid or discarded them and walked home over the hills. By about September 4, the fighting was over.

Chapter 16

The Aftermath

The miners did not reach Mingo County. They did not free the jailed union men, and they did not remove Don Chafin.

In the months that followed, Logan County grand juries indicted hundreds of participants, with commonly cited totals above 500. Charges included murder, conspiracy and treason against the state of West Virginia.

Union strength in the southern coalfields weakened sharply in the years afterward, as legal costs mounted and membership fell.

Chapter 17

The State of West Virginia vs. Bill Blizzard

In 1922, the trials were moved to Charles Town, in Jefferson County, at the other end of the state. Bill Blizzard was tried there for treason, in the same courthouse where John Brown had been tried for treason against Virginia in 1859.

The idea of an American labor organizer on trial for treason against a state drew national attention. Prosecutors had to prove he had waged war against West Virginia itself.

The jury acquitted Blizzard.

Other cases ended differently. At least one man, Walter Allen, was convicted of treason and disappeared while free on bail. John Wilburn and one of his sons were convicted of murder in John Gore's death. Many other charges were eventually dropped. Together, the trials drained the union's money and attention at a time when it was already losing ground.

Chapter 18

Did the Miners Lose?

In 1921, yes.

The march failed to break through Blair Mountain. The miners dispersed after federal intervention. Union strength in southern West Virginia declined through the 1920s.

Over the longer story, it is more complicated.

The struggle for labor rights continued. In the 1930s, new federal laws protected the right to organize, and the United Mine Workers grew strong across the American coalfields, including Logan County.

Blair Mountain alone did not create those changes. It is one chapter in a much longer labor movement, but it showed, in the starkest possible way, how far the conflict in the coalfields had gone.

Chapter 19

Characters of Blair Mountain

Chapter 20

Myths & Legends

Chapter 21

By the Numbers

Chapter 22

Then & Now

Blair Mountain — 1921

Blair Mountain — later years

Today, Blair Mountain is quiet forest above WV Route 17. Archaeologists have found traces of the fighting, such as cartridge cases and old defensive positions, along the ridge.

The battlefield's protection has been fought over too. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, removed months later after objections from property owners, and restored to the Register in 2018 after a long legal fight. Much of the land is privately owned, and surface mining has taken place nearby.

Chapter 23

Why Don't More People Know This?

Thousands of armed workers. A private armed force. Machine guns. Aircraft. Federal troops. Treason trials. All in the mountains of Appalachia.

Yet many Americans have never heard of it. It was rarely taught in schools for decades, including in West Virginia. It was a story of Americans fighting Americans over work, not a war with a clear enemy or a clean ending. Many families who lived through it kept quiet about their part.

That is changing. Historians, museums, descendants and preservation groups have spent recent decades telling the story again, and it has found new readers well beyond the coalfields.