Part Two: Blair Mountain: When Miners Went to Literal War Against Their Bosses

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with the crew of the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast about the coal wars of West Virginia and the blood that bought miners their rights.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a
podcast that comes out every week, and he usually has
the story split into two halves, which is my way
of saying that if you're listening to this, you should
go back and listen to the first half if you
haven't already, because it would just be weird to listen
to in the second half. Because this is the second half.
This one is the second half of a two part
episode because we already did the first half. I'm your host,

(00:21):
Margaret Kiljoy. My guests this week are the esteemable Cam
Collins and Steve Shell, who produced the amazing It's a
documentary podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia that tells all
the true stories about all the non fictional stuff that
happens in these Appalachian mountains. How are you all doing? Oh, dandy, dandy,
dandy upright breathing and with us on the call to

(00:43):
Sophie Lichterman, who's playing the part of the voice of God.
Are you there, Sophie, it's me Margaret, and that'll be
a to hill Mary's one. Are fought? Oh sorry, we're
not doing that right now. Okay, have you been saving
that or is that a regular break out. No. I
wrote this joke in a script like last week, and
then I didn't get to use it. It It didn't work out,
and I was really sad because I was really proud

(01:05):
of this joke and so I was saving it and
I wrote it into the script again today. Anyway, Cam Steve,
Let's assume that all the listeners have already listened to
your podcast, because they should. What's something that someone might
not know about you? All as people putting you on
the spot without telling you. I'm gonna give it m
m mm hmm do I actually don't know if I'm

(01:29):
allowed to wait a minute, do do do do deep
deep boop boop boop. So sometimes people don't know about us.
That isn't like on our bios everywhere. Um, you don't
put on the spot, Okay, godd sorry, I am. I am.

(01:50):
I am allergic to turkey. No other birds, no chicken,
no duck, don't anything like that. But turkey does and
does not do anything till it needs to leave my
system and then it puts me into the hospital. Turkey
death bird as I call it death bird Kiwi, which

(02:11):
is awesome because Kiwi is in I mean as almost nothing.
Occasionally if you get a fruit tray. It's in there.
But like, yeah, so Kiwiller, all right, so what are
you allergic to? Oh, we don't have time for this.
I mean, I just I just picked one. Turkey is

(02:31):
one of the things, but like it's probably it's it's
one of the ones I would avoid because previous experience
says the body doesn't need it. Subway clubs are not
that important. Mm hmm, I agree, and fun Thanksgiving. I'm
not allergic to any Actually, I have no idea because
I'm all the things I don't like are allergic to.
I stopped eating when I went vegan. Uh, but you

(02:52):
know who else isn't eating anymore? The mayor of mate
One said, way of the year, thank you, thank you.
So the mayor is dead. When we last left our heroes,
the mayor is dead. The chief of police is confusing
anarchist podcasters A hundred years later by being cool, and

(03:14):
the town of mait Wan is the center of a
brewing labor struggle big enough that it gets called a war,
and the blood bath was averted by the quick thinking
train conductors. So the state police roll into town and
they order said to dismiss the armed miners, which he
which he does so then said he uh, he turns
around starts talking up with the mayor's wife just immediately,

(03:36):
just as soon as the mayor's dead, he's kid. Yeah
and yeah. So and this led to rumors that he
actually killed Mayor Sustamen and the Felts and that it
was all applot to steal away the widow. And I mean,
who fucking knows, but his defense about this in court,
because it came up in court and his his murder trial,

(03:56):
that he had done it all to steal away the
young widow or whatever her, his defense sounds pretty solid.
Who the funk walks out into the middle of the
street to confront thirteen armed men alone with some master
plan to kill the guy next to you and all
thirteen people. There's got to be a better way to
elope with a married woman, is basically his argument. And
I believe him. That's hard mode. That's very much hard Yeah, yeah,

(04:19):
that's that's like you're definitely playing elopement on like what's
it called where you did hard mode? Yeah, hardcore mode?
Yes you are, Yeah, because if you die in real life,
you're dead. Yeah. So this is what the anti union

(04:40):
media runs with and eleven days after the Battle of
May One, Sid Hatfield and Jesse Testerman, they were arrested
in a hotel for quote improper relations, because you could
get arrested for having sex before marriage, apparently because the
world is fucking weird. And Jesse, for her part, said
that her husband and Sid had always been really good
friends and the mayor had said to her, if anything

(05:02):
happens to me, Mary, Sid, he'll take care of you
and the kid, because they had a kid together. And
I don't know, since the mayor and said we're thick
as thieves and everyone new trouble was coming, I believe it.
Also maybe all three of them were dating. Who fucking knows,
you know, you never know? I mean, communal living, communal loving,
It's yeah, it's the thing. So they beat the improper

(05:23):
relations charged by getting married less than two weeks after
the Mayor Chesterfield's death, and after Mate one miners come
and drove to join the union. Everyone is fucking stoked
about what has just happened again, minus the people who
hate them and want them to die, and the shanty
towns grow. In July one, they strike and they shut
down the mines and gun battles break out all across

(05:46):
the county between operators and scabs on one side and
striking miners on the other. It was not always pretty.
National guardsmen and the state police come back to town,
and that doesn't quell the guerrilla struggle. Should starts geting
blown up. People start getting shot. Sid and twenty two
others are indicted for the murder of the Baldwin felts men,

(06:06):
and they become instant celebrities. The community comes together and
pays their bond immediately, and then, uh, speaking of the
organized crime relationship to the union, the people who are
going to testify against Sid and all the other defendants
just start getting the funk out of town because they
all get letters saying get the funk out of town.
We're going to kill you. One of them, the hotel owner,

(06:27):
didn't get out of town. He got killed. More federal
troops pour in to try and keep the peace. Military
battles break out with hundreds on each side in the mountains.
When I first heard about the Battle of Blair Mountain,
I'm not even at the Battle of Blair Mountain. This
is all a warm up stuff. I was always like,
oh yeah, it's like probably some people gone to a
gun battle. Imagine that over labor rights or whatever, you know,

(06:48):
Like there might have been like thirteen people on each side.
We're like, no, this is like in the build up,
we're talking about hundreds on each side in these military
formations in the mountains. But between federal troops and a
really well placed Baldwin Felt spy, Like the guy who
rented out the Union headquarters above his restaurant was a
snitch who had been in the Union for ten years

(07:10):
and had like one was high up in the Union
and all of these different things, and and he was
just entirely working for the Baldwin Felts the entire time.
Good on the Baldwin felt I gotta admit, tactically that
was a sound move. Between this very well placed snitch
and the federal troops, things quiet down for a little while,

(07:30):
so the troops leave. So as soon as the troops leave,
things stopped quieting down. The battles resumed. Like so much
of the history, if you read about this, stuff is
just like and then they fought for weeks, and then
they stopped for dinner, and then they fought for weeks,
and then they did this other thing and then they're
back to fighting. And I don't run a like military
history podcast, so I'm not gonna get into all of

(07:52):
them back and forth. But the union miners start winning,
and a lot of the non union miners who had
come in transported on train to to break the strike,
they start leaving again on the same trains. So federal
troops come in and they declare martial law, and miners
start filling up the jails, not by choice, they're getting arrested,

(08:15):
And in one of the cooler turns of the whole thing,
sex workers start robbing the federal troops, which rules nice.
But then the Feds decide that they want to crack
down on sex work in Moonshiner, which doesn't rule. That's
like the opposite of the rule thing. And so they
tried to bring a real law and order vibe to
this town that was way more excited about a shoot

(08:36):
scabs drink whiskey and have a safe work environment vibe,
And so there's just kind of clashing vibes. You could
really argue that the whole thing, it's just a matter
of clashing vibes. Winner comes during this deadlock, striking miners
are living intense in the mountain cold. And then once again,
in one of these fucking moments that you read in
history books and you're like, okay, maybe sure, and I'm

(08:58):
the fiction writer, they had the bizarre touching Christmas where
everyone from all sides together they got a big old
Christmas tree out in the public and they all sang songs,
the soldiers and the union miners and the non union
miners and it was like fucking Hohoville or whatever. Um,
I don't know, I don't know, you all think it happened.
I mean, the history books say this happened. It's weird

(09:20):
there there. Appalachian history gets so weird around this stuff
because it is. It can be a case of history
is written by the winners, but not always. But there
is always there is a for all the mother Jones
motherfucking out there. There is this desire in Appalachia to
be wholesome and for there to be like some implemented

(09:41):
the fact that the woman flushing back to the last
episode we talked about my mother Jones, that she doesn't
care for Christian language, the idea that Christianity and Christmas
could bring peace at least for one night. That's that's
straight up Jesus Ganda kind of like, but who knows.
Because Appalachian people we do have a tendency to be

(10:04):
genetically wholesome. Sometimes like we can't. It's like you motherfucker,
I hate you. I'm gonna we have to throw down.
But first, would you like some pie? You know? I can,
I can, I lend you my weed whacker, and then
I have another reason to batch you, you know like that.
It's just I don't know, it's possible. That's actually scarcely
because one of the reasons, like people are like people

(10:25):
ask me all the time. They're like, oh, one, They're like,
why then did you move here? Because no one moves
to West Virginia people leave West Virginia. Was yeah, but
I really like it here, and people are like, why
do you like it here? I'm like, well, everyone's really
nice and it doesn't feel like fake nice like further
in the South, where people are like we like you
as they're like staring daggers at your eyes heels. Feels

(10:46):
really wholesome and real here. But maybe it's just like
one extra layer of like they will absolutely let me
borrow the weed whacker while they're like planning to kill me.
For being whatever anyway, who knows, but who doesn't like
killing their neighbors. This isn't a that transition. The jurors
at Sid's trial because Sid and two co defendants have
the biggest trial in West Virginia history, and it it

(11:08):
takes forever to find jurors. They go through like a
thousand potential jurors and they can't find anyone who's not
related to one of the defendants and like within like
a hundred mile radius, and like, yeah, a lot of
people are named hat Field in this story, and I
kind of cut out most of the hat Fields. So
they have this really long trial and eventually they're found

(11:30):
not guilty. It was it was self defense, and you know,
basically they're like, well, it was actually wrong for a
private detective agency to act like it was the law
of the land, and probably they shot first. So Sid
and Jesse, Jesse's dead mayor husband's jewelry store they converted
into a gun store, which is something I hadn't heard

(11:51):
in any of the versions of the history when I
first heard it. So they they take the store and
they turned into a gun store so they can arm
all the workers, and Sid tries to live his life
as best as he can, but he declares that he's
a marked man and they're going to get him sooner
or later, and so he just spends the rest of
the time being the weirdest chief of police ever born
and selling guns to workers in the middle of this

(12:13):
pitched battle, which is actually, I mean, I guess if
you're trying to get money, it's not a bad time. Really,
that's a that's I don't know, is that is that
noble and awesome or is that capitalistic opportunity? Like I
got guns? Hear y'all like killing people? Yeah? Show? Yeah,
two guns? Sid Yeah, who knows. I mean, we'll find
out if he's a sponsor at the show or not.

(12:33):
Um So, by May, the war between the Strikers and
the Scabs reached this fevered pitch, and there's this thing
where for three days, miners hole up in the mountains
and there's just everyone just shooting at each other with
machine guns and shipped for three whole fucking days. They've
been doing it like a little bit here and there
with flare ups. It completely recks regular daily life. The
schools are closed, the town is deserted. Passenger trains when

(12:55):
they come through just like roar through and don't stop,
and all the passengers hide on the fucking floor, and
non union miners are giving up and leaving, and you know,
at the sort of terrible cost of the unions are
starting to win. Sid Hatfield he hospitalizes the superintendent of
a coal company by pistol whipping him, and finally a
truce is called martial law comes back. Now it's enforced

(13:17):
partly by an armed middle class that only enforces law
against union miners. And I guess, to be fair, the
previous chief of police only enforced the law against the
non union miners and the other people. But they go around.
They start confiscating people's legal firearms. They throw tons of
people in jail without bond or hearings. They send a
whole bunch off to distant counties. That's the jails fill.

(13:38):
And the miners start hiding all the guns in the
hills and straw bales. Like one story as they take
that I think it's the Sears robot catalog and they
cut out a gun shaped spot in it, you know,
hide the gun in there. They're hiding guns everywhere they can.
Miners are dynamiting and burning coal company offices, they're looting
company stores, Kentucky Militia, West Virginia State police. They're getting

(13:59):
into gun fights in the woods with union miners. Miners
are taking pot shots at all the soldiers enforcing the
martial law, and dozens of people arrested. At least one case,
they use submachine guns and machine gun into the tents
where all the workers and their families are fucking living
and sleeping the union office. I'm just like going through
it all because again, not even at the climax of

(14:20):
any of this stuff, the umw A offices get shut
down and everyone in them is arrested because operating a
union violates martial law. And the coal companies they want
fucking Sid Hatfield gone, so they come up with a
way to indict him in another county because there's no
way he's going to get convicted in his own county.
They indict him for a raid on a non union

(14:40):
minor camp and it's a trap and everyone knows it,
but Sid, his wife Jesse, his best friend, Ed Ed's
wife Sally, and some deputies and friends come for protection.
They all board the train. They head off to a
town called Welch for a trial. HM they walk up
the steps of the courthouse. Sit is unarmed because he's
about to go stand trial. Six Baldwin felt thugs. One

(15:04):
of them is the snitch who I was talking about
earlier at the who like ran the restaurant or whatever.
They're all waiting. As soon as he reaches the top
of the steps, broad daylight, in front of the courthouse.
We're supposed to stand trial, they just kill him. They
just gun him down. They kill him. They kill his
front ed front of their families, friends, supporters. All of
that only ed and said die I believe. And later

(15:28):
the their assassins are acquitted. Yeah, two thousand people march
in the rain for their funeral procession. Newspapers across the
country decry the murder. This is like it's finally starting
to kind of reach outside of West Virginia. But the
Union knew what the murder meant, and it meant fucking

(15:48):
war is what it fucking meant. So we're gonna leave
Mingo County for a bit, but we're not leaving in
a state of peace. All the ship continues. State troopers
are fighting miners in the hills. The jails are were flowing,
But we're going to take the story over to Logan County,
which is sandwich between Mango County, where the miners are
at war, and Kanawa County, where the miners are unionized

(16:09):
and pissed. So now we're entering our our third county
of our story of three Counties, which is not a
very good name for the episode and won't be the
name for the episode, despite Sophie trying to convince me
to name it the Tale of three Counties. It's really
fun to blame someone for something that they didn't do.
I'm used to it, Okay, yeah, Sophie. The Sophie's idea.

(16:29):
In Logan County, people are living in the fucking personal
fiefdom of Sheriff Don Chaffin, and he's paid by the
coal companies ten cents for every ton of coal that
comes out of the minds, and they pay the salary
of forty of his deputies. So the coal company owns
the law in this county. And I feel like that's

(16:50):
like a context worth understanding someone like SITD Hatfield, who
is the law and ardently pro union and pro minor
and anti coal company. Is that doesn't come from nowhere.
It's coming from well one people getting machine gunned in
their tents and to the next county over. The law
is literally the opposite. So one of Don Chaffin's friends
is a co operator named George Swain, and fifty years

(17:12):
later in this oral history, he brags about how corrupt
the whole thing is, and he's just completely unashamed. He
talks about how the minds in that area were started
by a prospector who didn't have the money to start it,
so he stole his school teacher sisters life savings of
six thousand dollars by forging a check as if he
was her. And then they talked about how the coal
companies bypassed all the federal pricing regulations through various bullshit,

(17:35):
like they sell to each other and do all this
economic should I do not understand. And the same guy
brags about how his buddy Don Chaffin intimidates organizers, kidnaps organizers,
mock executes organizers, just completely bald about it. To hear
some of the tricks straight from the horse's mouth. In
case people think it's just my bias, which I absolutely

(17:55):
have a bias, here's George Swain. I'd listened around on
my mind and see if any my boys were talking
about strike youing or anything like that. We'd recorded if
they did, and the mine owner would fire them right quick.
We never said that was the reason though. We always
said it was that they had missed a day or
that their work wasn't a very good quality or something
like that. And that's happening today, right Like I try
not to go heavy handed on the comparisons today, but

(18:17):
that is absolutely what all of the modern strikebreakers are doing,
is that they fire all of the workers for union organizing.
But it's illegal in the United States to fire someone
for union organizing, so they just come up with these excuses.
I guess I've never been fired for union organizing. One time,
I'm pretty sure my boss heard me talk about union
organizing and stopped putting me on the schedule and that

(18:39):
was really annoying because I needed that money to Okay,
I guess that's kind of like getting fired for union
that's the thing that happened, and that probably happened in
the city we used to share. Yeah, yeah, no, it
definitely happened in the city we used to share. Absolutely.
By the way, that's the name of our collaboration album. Yeah,
the City's just it'll be it'll be like doomy electronica

(19:03):
with some Midwest Emo mixed in. That'll be and and
it's gonna sell a lot. Yeah, this is actually all
a long form ad for our graduate collaboration. Yeah. So,
not only did Don chaff and decide who was allowed
to come into Logan County, Like as soon as union
organizers or anyone he didn't like would show up, he'd

(19:23):
his his thugs would turn them away and put them
right back on the train and send them out. He
also decided who could leave his thugs guarded the rail stations.
And I've read multiple accounts of families who had to
flee on foot over the mountains because they were denied
free travel by him. And they would leave because right
over the mountains was union territory. And this is why
Don didn't want any of his fucking workers to leave.
It's because if they crossed into union territory, they would

(19:45):
suddenly get something approximating the living wage where they wouldn't
get murdered constantly. So a literal living wage, yeah, wage
for which you don't get murder, Yeah, totally. And and
so people are disappearing in Logan County and no one
really doubting where they're going because they're getting killed. And
Chaffin's guys would would they would line up with machine

(20:06):
guns outside pro Union households and just like hang out
with machine guns and be like, hey, what's up, which
is not a very polite way of interacting with people,
And they would like pistol whip miners, not even for
talking Union, just literally and show of force. I don't know.
It wasn't a good time. And the whole thing kind
of has this like medieval vibe. When Mother Jones shows up,

(20:28):
I actually almost feel bad like talking. I actually kind
of like the medieval period in the way there's a
lot of workers freedom in various parts of medieval Europe
you would not find here. But people are like, oh,
this is like bad even by nineteenth century standards, like
this is some dark Ages ship again not the Dark
Ages are actually better than okay whatever. So that's the
context that brings us to the climactic event of this

(20:49):
whole story, the Battle of Blair Mountain. Some unions have
won at great cost or enormous effort. Some places, no
one dares to whisper the word union upon pain of death,
and sid Hadfield has just been extra judicially murdered. The
law isn't on people's sides, and it looks like it's
never going to be. Then in Union Kanawa County, the

(21:12):
contract is up for renewal and the co operators of
the union minds are like, look, we're losing money because
non union minds of the south are undercutting us so badly.
We can't give you a good contract unless those places
go union too. So the miners they think to themselves, well,
we've got three reasons to march down to Mingo County
to try and and this martial law first is raw solidarity.

(21:34):
There's folks in a shooting war with the coal operators
and they're under martial law and they're filling up the jails.
They need our help, right. And the second it's everyone
has to be in in a union or this whole
thing falls apart, we lose everything. And finally they're just
off to avenge Sid Hatfield and a guy named Alex
Breedlove because on June four one, a black miner named

(21:56):
Alex Breed Love had been killed in a raid on
a tent camp, and after he had been killed, the
thugs tied his body to the back of their car
and dragged it off. At his funeral, the line of
mourners was three quarters of a mile long, and breed
Love's name was on people's lips alongside hat Fields when
they were like, we're gonna fucking stop this. So they

(22:18):
they're like, fuck it, we're off to war, and I
hear me out. I want to get y'all's opinion about this.
I I combed through history and I came up with
the closest historic parallel, which is the Ride of the
Roherum when Rohan goes off to help Gondor against the
assembled forces of more Door from that documentary series Lord
of the Rings. Um aw, yeah, I did a minor

(22:42):
in the community college in Appalachis Yeah. Yeah, cool, okay, yeah,
as part of Appalachian history. It is the right the
mountain folk there are horses, and we have some horses here.
I thoroughly appreciate that reference so very much. Good. I
was yesterday, I was I was talking with my friends
who I played dand with, and they were all talking
about like the original names of all the Hobbits because

(23:06):
because he didn't Gandalf, No, Gandalf didn't write the story. Um, Tolkien,
he like whatever anyway, Like Bilbo isn't actually Bilbo's name.
It's like a translation from the the other. But you're
just supposed to be reading it. You're supposed to be
reading it like from the viewpoint of a contemporary scholar
who is telling you the history of this. Yeah, you know,
like Sam's name is like Paam or something like that,

(23:28):
are like tam or something like. Yeah. They gets it's
slight variations. And then there's yeah, yeah, And so I'm
calling my friends nerds were caring about this, And then
I go back to writing my script where I'm comparing
the Battle of Blair Mountain to the Right of the Reherum,
one of my favorite events in history. But except in
this case, in order to reach Mingo, they got to
go through Logan, which is to say, if they want

(23:49):
to reach Gondora, they have to go through more door.
Mm hmmm. Nerd. I know my friends are nerds. I
hate it. They're just terrible like me. I'm which is
somehow the opposite of nerd. No, I can't even pre
sound like cool nerd. That wouldn't make any The words
at the words the people I play D and D
with apply to your life. Then you it's there. You

(24:13):
are a nerd of one. And this this from a
person who's you know. Our our podcast production company is
Deep Nerd Media. A deep nerd. If you dress up
for a midnight premiere, If you're like me and are
willing to reenact the Middle Ages. The wall of pictures
you can see behind me in the zoom those that's
me and my friends in costumes at a big ceremony weekend.
For me, the the nine million years I put in

(24:34):
a medieval re enactment, then you are a deep nerd.
You are one word, deep nerd, and and that's where
you if you own garb or costplay of any sort,
deep nerd, deep nerd. I only own two chain mail
shirts that I made, only two, only two, nerd, but
that you made? Yeah yeah, well I had to make

(24:55):
the second one because I put on some weight. How
many do you own that you didn't make? I actually
only owned two total, because I'm obsessively d. I y
it bothers me that I owned medieval weapons that I
did not hand forge. Anyway, I'm totally cool and not
a nerd, and so back to the cool history. Okay,
So but first, it's that time again. Uh, time to

(25:20):
advertise things. Mm hmm. We asked guests off of this,
is there a good thing you would like to sponsor
a podcast, such as the concept of potatoes or or
tap water? Yeah, you have any ideas anything we should
get sponsored by. I think you should be sponsored by
the Riders of Rohan. I think I think horses should sponsor.

(25:46):
It would be the coolest sponsor ever. So I mean
I think you should. I think you should get sponsored
by George the Cat. George's legit. George is very pro labor,
very pro labor. Okay, well that's I think that's a
very appropriate sponsor. So that's who we're sponsored by. And
anything else that slips in is not officially. I literally
don't know what the rules are around what I can

(26:08):
and can't say about our ads. Here's the ads, and
we are back, and both sides are gearing up with
their chain mail and their swords, blowing on their war horns.
By that, I mean overalls and rifles, and I don't

(26:29):
know they might have war horns. I wouldn't put a
power hunting horns. Okay. So, so Union miners in Canalam,
they vote in their locals pretty unanimously to go join
the march and to not sugarcoat it. They also browbeat
everyone who doesn't want to come into coming and like
one group of twenty miners they call themselves the Coal

(26:50):
River Hellcats, they announced that anyone who doesn't show up
better not be there when the miners come home. Somewhere
between peer pressure and conscription basically is what the Miners
March kind of comes up with. And a few people
who oppose the march out right end up dead. It's
hard to know exactly because their deaths tend not to
be investigated. And then history, like the first book that

(27:12):
was written about the Battle of Blair Mountain was written
a couple of years later by someone who is very
very actively anti union, and even a lot of like
the one of the neutral history books that I read,
the one that talked about this conscription was written by
someone whose father had fought on the anti union side
during this fight. And that does not necessarily mean that
this person is not a neutral party, right, But it

(27:33):
becomes very hard to to know who to trust. But
most historians say that it was about ten thousand men
as well as uncounted women and children who were there
to support them. They gather at a place called Len's
Creek at the start of the march. No one's really
counting some historians. I think. I think historians settled on Tenta.
I'm very critical of his storians throughout all of us.
It's just it's hard to know who to trust. You

(27:54):
can trust me. I only speak the truth, okay. Well,
so just just to be clear that Appalachi is the
is a region of the people that history has spoken
four for generations because we're just malbilities who you know,
don't matter, you don't they can't read the history. But
no way, you go ahead and run whatever you want,
you know, like and so I think you're absolutely right

(28:14):
to be distrustful of historians writing about stuff like we
were like a mysterious subcontinent to the to the bulk
of the country for generations. So like any actual like
like even reading dark and bloody ground. The oral history
is just you're dealing with people who are telling it,
you know, holy ship there was, you know, and that's

(28:35):
gonna be as subjective, you know as you know as
it's gonna be. So you absolutely right to be skeptical.
And I want to encourage that skepticism, nurturing it, feed it,
sendt it a birthday card, Yeah, and bring it strange
things that I find in the woods. Mm hmm. Somewhere
between five thousand and thirteen thousand miners. That's the range
that most historians are presenting, and I'm gonna stick with

(28:57):
the ten thousand because it's a nice round number. Of way,
at least two thousand of them are black, and supporters
start coming in from as far away as Ohio and Illinois.
Folks actually came up from Mingo County as well, but
most of them weren't able to get through safely from
Logan and this part it's important to you all might
have opinions about their the Redneck Army. Literally that's what
they call themselves, and that's what their enemies call them.

(29:19):
The term redneck is is older than that, and as
far as I can tell, it comes from the nineteenth
century and does come from where most people say it
comes from, about the white folks in the South working
outside getting some burned in the back of their neck.
But it's at the Cold Wars that it finds us
new meaning, and I think where it might become popularized.
And I'm curious if you all have, not to accuse
you of having opinions about the word redneck, but it's

(29:41):
it's just one of those things. It hidn't I'll be
trade honest with you. Growing up like as kind of
a punk kid or even a weirdo kid before I
was a punk kid. In Appalachia, redneck was always an insult,
and it always implied yahoo country pickup truck drive and
country music listening, gun toting, probably racist, like you know,
like that that word was definitely fucking red Knicks. Like yeah,

(30:04):
it's just like it was just one of those It
wasn't a class thing because like rich kids were read
next too, but it's just a matter of it was
just it was something that was embraced by aggressively country
conservative pickup truck driving, you know, beat you up for
for being queer, you know, like that's what That's what
red Knicks meant to us growing up. Like it wasn't
until much later that I learned about you know, the originally,

(30:26):
much like a lot of Appalachia originally was once very
progressive and championship changing causes and now in some places
have just inverted itself into something else entirely. I mean yeah,
basically the same thing it was. It was never, you know,
never what you wanted to be when we're growing up,
for sure. Yeah, it makes sense, and it depresses me

(30:47):
how often these things kind of come to mean their opposites,
right Like because in southern West Virginia it means that
you are a Union miner, either white or black, and
you're not afraid to fight. And they all wore red
bandanas around their necks as their uniform and the Redneck
army And I'm not trying to like specifically be like,

(31:08):
everyone go run out and reclaim this word, right Like,
words are real complicated, but but it's it's just annoyance,
like this asshole should be able to have it, you know. Anyway,
So they show up with whatever clothes they have. Some
of them have World War One uniforms and helmets because
their vets. Some of them, most of them wore those
red bandanas, and a lot of them wore blue overalls,
and the blue overalls eventually became even also part of

(31:29):
the uniform. And they had revolvers and they had rifles,
and they had shotguns, and then they started having machine
guns once they started robbing stores to steal all the
machine guns. Just a decent way to get machine guns
if you suddenly need a lot of machine guns. I
actually it's it's so, I don't think there's a store
around here. I could. I could robbed get machine guns,
but I don't know. Times change, I guess, and so,

(31:52):
and they show up every fucking which way, and they're
pouring out of the hollers. Some of them are riding
in cars, some of them are riding passenger trains. Some
are clinging to the roof of passenger trains. Walk Three
miners have train tickets, and there's no room for them
on the passenger train, so they go in commander a
freight train at gunpoint, and then they politely give their
tickets to the yard master. Some of them carjacked wagons.

(32:13):
No one is in charge. They're all in these individual groups,
and they're driven by the task at hand and their
anger at being beaten, fired, machine gunned, and generally mistreated.
A sheriff shows up and orders them to disband. You
will be shocked to know that this is not an
effective tactic, and they choose not to listen to that man.
They are not in orderly crowd. They robbed farms for

(32:34):
vegetables and chickens. They robbed a deputy for his money.
They robbed company stores for arms and ammunition. Oh god,
that's why they have fucking machine guns at the stores.
I didn't even put that together. They had fucking machine
guns at the stores because that's where the fucking thugs
would go buy their cut town machine guns. One time
I wasn't this is completely outscript. One time I was
in West Virginia, are hanging out with people who are
working to stop Mountop removal, and I went to go

(32:56):
see this graveyard of workers who had died in the
coal wars, and you actually had to trespass on the
company land to see it, and which of course I
didn't did, but somehow I ended up there without trespassing.
And there was a bunker, a stone bunker, on top
of this hill in the graveyard, and it's there for

(33:16):
them to machine gun miners with, like these fucking bunkers
existed to like watch over the miners and shoot them
if they got out of line. That kind of hit
me when that happened. Yeah, So a lot of these
miners they buy their guns. The ones that they buy,
they buy from a union friendly merchant and some folks
later say that the union coal operators actually loaned them

(33:38):
the money to go buy like give them advances on
their paychecks and all this stuff to go buy machine guns,
which actually makes sense because the coal companies are almost
as much trouble from the non union miners as the
miners themselves were. And to get also to the progressive
history of this, they knew where they stood in history,
and they tied the struggle into the other great thing
that happens in West Virginia, John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry.

(33:59):
They sing version of the song that was on the
lips of the Union army when it invaded and freed
the South two generations prior. John Brown's Body was a
song that I will not sing for you all on air.
I'm terribly sorry. And John Brown's Body is with the Union,
the original Union, when they invaded the Confederacy. To to

(34:20):
stop the Confederacy, they sang the song, and the Union
coal miners sang will hang don chaff into a sour
apple tree to the same song. As they went on
their march, some Mother Jones shows up and she tells
them to disband. And this is not my favorite thing
that Mother Jones has ever done. She shows up and
she says, I have a telegram from the President of
the United States of America that says, if you go

(34:41):
home now, he will address all your grievances. The crowd
asks to see the telegram. She refuses because she was
lying about it. The crowd figures out that she's lying
about it, so some of the Union heads they head
back to Charleston to confirm that the President never sent
a telegram like that. She's found out to be a liar,
and the crowd stops listening to Mother Jones after that,

(35:04):
and it's kind of starts this whole thing that happens
where basically like the leaders start being like, oh, we
don't have control over what's happening, Like, no one has
control over what's happening. This is the Battle of Blair
Mountain becomes a force of its own in Logan County.
The forces of Saron I mean, sorry, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Nope,
the Sheriff of Logan County. M the forces are. They're

(35:27):
getting ready to first and foremost Don chaff And has
conscripted everybody that he can. I know it compared what
happened to the union miners as conscription. But Don Chaffin
actually did conscription, and it was systematic and it wasn't
through like peer pressure or whatever. It was fight for him,
or you lose your job. At best, miners were threatened
at gunpoint. Pro union miners or anyone who just wanted

(35:48):
to say the funk out of it all had to
go into hiding. Some people, and I would say, these
are the cleverest of them all took the free guns
that he was offering and then went into hiding, which
seems like the better plan. That seems like the better
plan there. Yeah, And because he controlled who came and
who went, he actually stopped people from leaving. And so
one family actually had to pull guns on guards in

(36:10):
order to fight their way onto a train to leave,
rather than be conscripted to go fight against the Union army.
And the governor of Kentucky sent them all machine guns.
Because there's so many machine guns in this story. There's
such a low body count for the number of machine
guns in this story. It's kind of spoiler alert. Not
that many people die. I mean, if I'm one of
the people who died, I'd be like, I wouldn't care

(36:32):
that it's a low number because a number that includes
me is a significant number for me. That goes to
another thing about going back to the reliability of Appalachian history. Sometimes,
how many bodies do we not know about? How many?
How many? How many ambushed people trying to leave were
just chucked into a creek bahalla and left to you
lift lift for the animals to eat and decay, you

(36:54):
know whatever. How many maskers were that they don't have
a state roadside marker? Yeah, you know, I think that
the I think the Cold War has had a lot
higher body count because I think the messaging overall has
been controlled by the industry and by the government. I
think there are a lot of family lines that ended
uh in the nineteen twenties and nineteen and the early
nineteen hundreds through the nineteen twenties leading up to like

(37:17):
Bloody Harland, for example. UM thought, yeah, I just I
just if the future generation before I leave this planet
starts finding mass graves in Appalachia around coal mining sites,
I will not be I will not be shocked. No,
that makes sense. I mean I remember when I was
the first time I was driving through the coal fields
and I was like, oh, I'm gonna go to all

(37:37):
these ghost towns, because it's like all these ghost towns
around and you go and there, they're not there. Because
what happens is as as minors this is later, but
as as the industry is automated, mountaintop removal and and
strip mining, all these things like layoff all the workers
and people are replaced with dynamite basically, and the coal
companies just go through and buy up the towns and
demolish everything and leave no record, no history. These places

(37:59):
are just gone. And the idea that coal companies is
kind of a tangent or soapbox or something. But the
idea that coal companies represent the legacy of Appalachia as
a complete and utter live these are the companies that
are absolutely actively working to erase the history and the
people who made them rich in the first place. Sorry,
I just said where I grew up in southwestern Virginia,

(38:20):
WA cam and I grew up uh specifically my mom's family,
UH living upon a place called Factors Branch up off
of off of Norton, Virginia, near places like Dorchester and
in Bowden and Blackwoods where if you even went back
to like the sixties, like there's a Facebook group called
Coal Camps of Wise County. Dorchester, in my mind is

(38:41):
a trailer park and a couple of wide spots in
the road. If you go back on that Facebook group
and look for pictures of Dorchester, it looks bigger than
downtown Wise, Virginia. It looks bigger than downtown Norton. There
are three and four story brick and mortar buildings. There's
a movie theater, there is a playhouse. There is is
this entire place bigger, that looks bigger than the town

(39:04):
we grew up in downtown and it in a matter
of twenty or twenty five years, is just gone. And
it is one of many. There are places my mom
talks about, like in boding Osaka Stone Aga, Derby, places
that she could have gone as a young teenage girl
or you know, and my mom is not. My mom's
only nineteen years older than me. Uh, you know, the

(39:25):
places that were places they could go to do things
or see things, and within by the time the eighties
roll around, they're just gone. Yeah, it's just it blows.
That's one of the things we not to talk about
our show, but we I'm actually writing a thing right
now about a fictitious West Virginia town. That's an analog
for another town that I won't name because that we've
named it Turniquet, West Virginia and um. And it's about

(39:47):
a place where the coal went bad. The company pulled
out and seated the land back to the county, and
then twenty years later the county decided to show up
and tear it down. And that's that happens usually a
lot quicker, but they're play says that during coal booms
were bustling places like St. Paul, Virginia is like a
town so small that they're high school couldn't feel that

(40:09):
their high school had to consolidate with Coburn High School
to be able to field a marching band. Okay, but
at the height of the coal boom in the sixties
and seventies, there was gonna be a Minneapolis, Virginia built
on the other side of the river of St. Paul,
and they were expecting to be thriving metropolitan areas by
the nineteen eighties, you know. And they're both like tiny,

(40:29):
tiny towns with minimal tourism dollars now and maybe like
a brewery and a winery and and burned up coal
mines like, you're absolutely margus uptually right. It's it's a
fucking tragedy that the companies that exploit and just have
destroyed the bloodlines of where we're from. It gets throughout

(40:50):
the history and literally gets to white people off the
map where they just don't fucking exist. Fuck, that just
made me way irrationally angry, or than I realized it
was when I started talking. I'm so sorry. No no,
I mean yeah, no, that fuck it makes sense. Okay,
So I feel badges like cutting right back into it.
But they know the redneck army is coming, so they

(41:10):
march up on a bladder mountain and they start digging trenches.
And plenty of people on both sides or World War
One vets, so they know a thing or two about
digging a trench and then getting caught in some awful
fucking conflict that accomplishes nothing. Don't Heaven controls all the
press and his fiefdom, of course, so all of this
is done in secrecy. Yeah, I mean, you're right, Like,
it's like, I wonder how much we would even know
if like this thing hadn't happened, if it hadn't hit

(41:33):
this level of intensity that made people actually go look
behind these fucking sheriffs who are the kings of their
kingdom or whatever. So the redneck army they have the numbers,
and the coal warlord's army have the advantage of defense,
and they have planes and they have like all this.

(41:53):
You know, they have the money, right and the planes
at first are just used for reconnaissance. And during all this,
the federal government is like hanging back to observe, and
the West Virginia government is like, hey, fucking federal government,
could you stop this. There's about to be a war.
And the federal Government's like, I mean, maybe let's figure
out what's going on. Right when the march starts, the

(42:15):
U m w A loses its nerve. They call a
big meeting at a ballpark and they say, hey, guys,
we should probably go home before the U. S. Army
shows up and makes us go home and they call
the march off. So the Union is like, we can't
fucking do this. This is too much. We can't go
to war, and some of the rank and file they
want to keep going anyway. She gets really messy here.

(42:35):
There's a lot of back and forth about dowe March.
Do we not march like, some people start marching, but
they don't really get anywhere. And but by and large,
folks don't want to fight the U. S. Army. And
because these are fairly patriotic folks at the end of it,
and a lot of them are vets, and they also
just kind of weren't suicidal, the march is probably over
until John Chaffin just fucking couldn't help himself. He meets

(42:58):
up with some state troopers and they want revenge, not
because they've been shot, but because one time they got
embarrassed because they got surrounded by a bunch of union
miners who forcibly disarmed them. So they're mad and they
want blood. So they now go and they start marching
on the scattered union folks and they arrest people as

(43:19):
they go. They end up arresting about ten people before
they come upon some armed miners who just aren't fucking
having it. The troopers ask, hey, why are you armed,
and they answer, by God, that's our business, which I
feel like is a reasonable answer to that question. Yeah.
As always, no one knows who shot first. I think

(43:40):
goes Han Solo. This time it went badly for the miners.
Three miners died, including a man named William Greer who
had been evicted with his family in mate Wan and
part of the wave that had started the whole chain
of events which led to where they are now. So
he didn't really have a good time with this whole thing.
First gets a victim, then he joins the Union Army,
and then he gets killed. The trooper is run off

(44:00):
as the miners shot. But you know who won't run away?
Are these screaming deals on our goods? And I'm an advertiser,
I'm so good at being enthusiastic about these deals. Here's
some and we are back man those satans. So rumors

(44:30):
run like wildfire and there is no more fucking truce.
The marches back on. I'm gonna call it the Miners
March two. This time it's personal, which is probably what
they called it, and they also also probably referred to
it as this. They got really grand theft auto on
the whole thing at this point, because now they're all
scattered right there, not in the same place, so they
commandeer every car, truck and trained they can just to

(44:51):
get back to Blair Mountain. I was wondering where you
were going with that. Yeah, No, they're just sucking is
this page is after pages of like and then six
people went to the following guy and said give me
your truck. And then the doctor only didn't get his
car command deer because he said I'm a doctor and
they let him go. And one of my favorite side
notes out of it is that like, while this march

(45:13):
is happening now, the black miners push their way into
whites only restaurants and they're like, you're gonna fucking serve us,
and they're like, yeah, I guess we're gonna serve you.
So one way to force integration is to be all
in the same union and have guns. So and the
umw AS tries to stop the march again, and the
miners are like, no, we're we're fucking doing this. We

(45:36):
we actually don't care about like the official union line.
We are off to free Mingo County and they they're
all like off to Mingo and they're all chanting off
to Mingo. I don't know if that's actually what they chanted.
It says with that's what they chanted, but I have
a feeling they had a lot more clever chance. You know,
at one point I was wondering as I was like,
looking through all this, I was like, I wonder whether
these people are ideologically motivated, you know what degree, or

(45:58):
they like communists or socialists or an anarchists like a
lot of the Union people fighting around during this time.
And with my own personal bias, I'm always kind of
like looking for the anarchists and history because we get
written out of history a lot, also because we, much
like Appalachians, don't tend to win. And but I realized
when I was reading this, and as I was thinking
this was like, I'm going about this entirely wrong. Like, yes,

(46:19):
many of the miners were ideologically motivated, and i've you know,
find notes about them talking on capitalism itself. But the
march was not about an ideology. They were a self organized, leaderless,
multi racial force that went off to end martial law
and free folks that they had never met from a jail.
So I don't care what they called themselves. They fucking ruled.

(46:39):
They're fucking ruled awesome, And it's just and and and
so much of it comes back two to the me
into a traditional Appalachian value of I had the right
to provide for my family, and it's not necessarily like
capitalistic gain. I have a right to a mass wealth
and do whatever. But I have a right to fucking
feed my face, Emily. And if the game in town

(47:02):
is fucking mining, then that's what we're gonna do, and
we're gonna do it in a way where we can
survive doing it. And if not, fuck you and your
machine guns. You know, it's just like um because there's
a lot of union stuff nowadays. It comes down to
the allegiances to their paycheck. As long as my kids
get paid for when I'm gone and the money is there,
you know, fuck you, fuck your politics, fuck your socialism,

(47:23):
Fuck you know, go to all kinds of unfortunate incidents
involving racism and union and stuff in West ViRGE sadly
West Virginia right now. But but but that allegiance is too.
I have a right to provide for my family, and
I think that's a that's something that is rooted in
the survival instincts of the people that ended up here
after we still Lappalatia in the first place. But the

(47:46):
people who ended up here in this land that was
so hostile to try to fucking tame that was there,
that was what they had, Like I've come this far.
I have a right to fucking feed my kids, you know, totally, no, absolutely,
And so they they take five prisoners of war right off,
because there's five deputies from Logan who are like wandering
around lost, and by all accounts, they actually treat these

(48:09):
prisoners really well. And I'm just going to come up
a couple of times. And basically at this point, everyone's wondering, like,
are we about to have a second civil war? Kind
of a class war this time, because the anti union
forces get a wave of new recruits from the upper classes.
Lawyers and bankers and business owners and like from all
over the state are arming up and heading off to
the trenches to fight these damn rednecks. And in the

(48:31):
end there's about defenders to ten thousand attackers. The first
person to die in the defending army was a cop
who got shot by his own side from a negligent discharge.
They go up the mountain, both sides and they start
shooting at each other. By a lot of accounts, it
was more of a hide and snipe kind of fight
than a charge with bayonets fixed kind of fight. Somewhere

(48:54):
near the start of it, a Union sympathizer woman who
lives on the mountain. She's like signaling to the Union
that non folks are coming by, like flickering her lights
on and off, and so the anti union folks break
in and murder her, just like fuck you. And a
pro union minister who has all these quotes about it's
time to put down the Bible and pick up the
rifle named John Wilburn. He's patrolling the mountain with his

(49:15):
son and a few others when he comes upon another
patrol led by John Gore, who is an anti union deputy.
They both give their sides passwords at the time. The
Union side their password is I come Creeping and the
anti Union side is amen. I actually think these are
both sick passwords. But I come Creeping and I Came

(49:36):
Creeping is like awesome, yeah, yeah, And so they both
realized that there facing the enemy, and both sides open fire.
John Gore and his two buds they go down and die,
but first they shoot the first casualty of the Union side,
who's a black man named Eli Kemp, and the war
keeps going. The anti union side is losing, so start

(50:00):
fucking bombing the miners with planes. They fill up planes
with bombs, full of T and T and chemical weapons,
and I believe it's the first time chemical weapons were
well used on people in US. I don't know. I mean,
there's everyone always says this is the first time this
happened in history, and then you always find other times
that this should happen in history before it whatever, it
was not a fucking normalist thing to start dropping chemical

(50:22):
weapons from fucking biplanes on goddamn your employees an American citizens,
Yeah as well, Yeah totally. And what's funny about it
is they don't actually manage to kill anyone this way,
and only one person is injured seriously by a chemical
weapon bomb during all of this, who is an anti
union miner who accidentally sets off a bomb like not

(50:43):
even on the mountain and he's hospitalized with burns. So
I kind of like, how comedy of errors these fucking
people are. The actual Union army is still segregated at
this time, right, and it's going to be segregated for
decades to come. The Redneck Army might be the first
army the US ever produced that wasn't aggregated. Again, I'm
doing the like the first time ever or whatever, right, Like,

(51:03):
I don't fucking know, but it's the first one I've
run across. And black men led white troops. A man
named Red Thompson led seventy soldiers in an attack. Yet
in all this fighting, and actually, to your point, I'm
not actually certain about this line that I wrote. From
what I've read, casualties were fairly rare. A lot of
folks weren't even fucking aiming, and they shot an awful lot,

(51:25):
but kind of usually just sort of like uphill in general,
and especially on the anti union side, because a lot
of the anti unions I did not want to be there.
A lot of the non union miners went up the
mountain because they were conscripted and told to and then
they just found a really good place to hide out.
And that they just hung out for nine days and
just like fucking laid down and waited for the whole
thing to be over. The Redneck Army had no general,

(51:48):
They just had a lot of leaders, several of them
were black. A doctor named W. F. Harless, who made
daily trips up to the mountain, passed machine gun fire
to treat wounded miners. He talked about leadership and what
he said was now a lot of people will tell
you Bill Blizzard was the leader of it all. Now,
Bill is one of the finest people that's ever lived,
don't get me wrong. And even though Bill and I

(52:09):
have had disagreed on a lot of things, I'd vote
for him again if he was still living, and I
was in the hospital the day he died. But he
wasn't the leader anymore than the rest of us was.
From the way I see it, we was all just
leaders in a manner of speaking. I love that because
it was still really organized. Everyone was fed, everyone was
taken care of. Ammunition showed up on time. Like a

(52:32):
million rounds got fired in this fucking nine day battle.
And for secrecy's sake, for there's reporters around, and what
they're doing is hell illegal. You're not actually supposed to
have wars in general, if you're not a government. There
governments are allowed to have wars, then it's encouraged. So
they avoided using names. They use numbers instead, and they

(52:52):
mostly just called everyone buddy, which I think also rules. Also,
can we can we take a moment to appreciate Bill
Blizzard I was a name or a person, because either way,
as a name just don't have a true rule. Yeah,
But like You've got Sam, You've got Sid McCoy and
Bill Blizzard. Yeah. I mean that's that's that's a that's
a new first person shooter game, right there. I mean

(53:13):
that's just like me. And also dope figures in history. Yeah,
like yeah, but two guns, Sid and Bill Blizzard. Yeah yeah, no, Yeah,
there's there's so many things I keep It happens to
be over and over again as I work in this podcast,
where I'm like, if I wrote this in a fiction,
people would make fun of me because it's too on
the nose. But Bill Blizzard rules, um, and he gets

(53:36):
called the general a lot and a lot of these stories,
and he ends up I think he ends up in
the u m w A leadership and he was involved
in some of the earlier strikes in thirteen. But yeah,
he was like one of the leaders. What's up? Was
he killed? What did he die? I don't remember. I
think he lived. I think he survives all of this.
I think you're right. I mean look that up quickly. Okay, great,

(53:58):
So not on this leaderless fucking battle against the rich
people is winning. I mean, okay, they have four times
as many people, but they break through the enemy lines
in some spots. Waves of reinforcements are coming from all over. Basically,
the the armies of the rich are never going to
have as many people as the armies of the poor
if whenever the poor figure out that they shouldn't be

(54:19):
divided along race lines. And we don't know how many
Wobblies showed up. Wobblies are members of the i w W,
which is a more radical union that's trying to end
capitalism itself. But we do know about one Wobbly who
showed up. This guy named Comiskey, and he's a bricklayer
and he shows up in Logan County during all of this,
he's immediately arrested, taking to jail, and within thirty six

(54:40):
hours of his arrival, the jailer's adult son walks into
the jail and shoots him to death. So that's the
you know, that's the justice on the law and order side.
The other thing I keep running across throughout histories that
no one actually cares about law and order, Like neither
side of this is like what we care about is
the law. They only use the law in order to
get what they want. And one side is doing something
want something that I want, So I agree with and

(55:01):
the other side, Yeah, is pretending to use the law,
but doesn't. They're just fucking killing people um in their
own jails. In comparison, and again weirder than fiction, the
the jailer of Logan County, his brother bad Lewis White
is the jailer on the other side, on the Union side,
Badis was bad Lewis White White. Okay, So to fulfill

(55:28):
our bill Blizzard content so he Yeah, he was totally Blizzard.
After the Bella Blair Mountain, Blizzard continued to fight for
minors rights. In ninety three, in the way of the
New Deal, the umw A was reorganized, reinvented. John Lewis
gave Blizzard his job back, and in turn Blizzard was
back preaching across the state as a umw A member. Again.
Col Mona in West Virginia admired and looked up to him.
He became a strong opponent of the West Virginia Minors Union,

(55:51):
which was a county in the un w A, and
he got in a fist fight with John Lewis's who
was head of the um w A, got in a
fist fight with his younger brother and John Lewis ran
him out. Of the U m w A. But Lewis
retired to a farm and died three years later on July.
He was sixty five years old. So he even went

(56:12):
out fucking swing yeah against union corruption. Probably that we're
that's what we're saying. We're writing history right now. So yeah, yeah,
putting that down. Yeah, and his name is Bill Blizzard,
so like you can argue with that Bill Blizzard with
a god damn I know. So so bad Lewis Waite
and our other hero who's the jailer, unlike his brother

(56:33):
who's the jailer on the other side of this brother
versus brother battle. Uh, the actual bad brother, the anti
union brother is feeding people beans with crushed up glass
and murdering people in the jail um whereas bad yeah yeah,
which doesn't sound like a healthy and balanced diet. That

(56:55):
is not Sophia. If it's possible, we could in advance
not allow the concept of beans filled with crushed up
glass is not It should not be a sponsor of
this show. Oh, good to know. Good to know for
our show as well. Pleased. I will make note of
it and make sure Kal knows what's up. Okay, thank you,

(57:16):
So Bat Lewis White takes care of his prisoners because
five of them he does prevent the son of the Um,
the son of Deputy Gore, the guy who got shot
earlier in the fight. Um he doesn't let his son
go to his father's funeral because he's busy being a
prisoner of war. The fight goes on for nine days,
and in the end it's the U. S Army that

(57:37):
breaks it up, which is sort of predictable based on
howe everything is going. Neither side wants to go to
war with the US itself, so thousands of troops come in.
They split into two forces. They cut off both the
Union and the anti Union side and forced them to
stop fighting. Most miners kind of slink off home. Six
hundred of them directly surrender. Out of a million rounds fired,

(57:58):
maybe fifty to a hundred Union miners died, and about
ten to thirty of Chaffin's men. One thousand, two hundred
and seventeen indictments were handed down against the marchers, including
three murder charges and twenty four counts of treason. Bill Blizzard,
the I wrote down one of the leaders. But now
the audience is fully aware, so Bill Blizzard has tried
for treason in the same West Virginia courthouse that John

(58:21):
Brown had been And if I ever get tried for treason,
which I hope I don't, I'm kind of a you know,
I don't really like when bad things happen to me,
But if I do, I would love to be tried
in the same would an honor to be tried for
treason in the same court house that John Brown has
tried for treason and Blizzard, in contrast to John Brown,
was found innocent. He actually used an unexploded bomb as
evidence that they were like, these motherfucker's were dropping bombs

(58:43):
on us from biplanes. These people are clearly the bad
guys and them, you know, basically, I mean like the
company's fucking brutal, and that helps a lot. In the trial,
only one guy got convicted of treason, a man named
Walter Allen, and he rules for the one fact that
he jumped bail, fucked off good and has never heard
from again, which is the other thing I would like.
I would never do. I would Jesus Christ, I would

(59:05):
never say radius show that okay. So Don Chafin, however,
is one of the only characters in this story took. Yeah,
he actually serves some time. He gets two years for
violation of prohibition because he's like everyone else, crooked as fuck.
But he retires rich and his life is fucking easy
and because there is no God. The Mingo strike drags

(59:27):
on for another year. It bankrupts the local branch of
the union, and eventually it fails. Even the union miners
in Kanahua lose their contract, and the umw A membership plummets.
Throughout the whole nineteen twenties, Basically, the union lost the war,
even though both sides surrendered, because that meant going back
to the status quo, and the status quo was the

(59:49):
companies are in charge. For about ten years, the company
the union languishes in West Virginia until a federal New
Deal law in nineteen thirty three guarantees workers the right
to organize the National Industrial Recovery Act. And as soon
as that happens, as soon as they're like, you know,
basically like the yellow Dog, contracts no longer apply and stuff,
everyone signs up. All the places that the union had

(01:00:12):
been strong, all the places that the union had been weak,
everywhere people poured in and unionized and collectively bargained their
way to a better life. And one of the things
that that tells me is that even the people who
were like on the anti union side, who are conscripted,
would have been happier, wanted to be in a union,
by and large, not all of them. Obviously, no one
said no group as a monolith, but they just didn't

(01:00:34):
feel like that was a possibility. And it it still
didn't come easy. It wasn't like this law passed and
then everything was like perfect because co operators don't want
to lose their profit margin, and so there's still violence
on both sides. Pickets are guarded by armed miners and
I don't know, I guess it's like the federal law
made this possible, but it was the fighting and the

(01:00:55):
bravery that built up the camaraderie necessary to see it through.
And as as you've talked about throughout this, you know,
the um w A ends up the largest union in
the country, and within several decades it starts to becoming
increasingly corrupt. And actually, the the history book that you
keep referencing on Dark and Bloody Ground is also where
a lot of the direct quotes that I'm using are
come from, and it was written in the seventies by

(01:01:18):
people trying to fight the corruption within the um w
A who are trying to basically go back and be like, hey,
remember when we were cool, Like, remember when we wed
like good stuff? You know. At one point, at one point,
there were two copies of Dark and Bloody Ground like
left in the entire state of West Virginia's library system
until this reissue that the Mind Wars Museum did, like
it was almost extinct from like from print, and the

(01:01:41):
Mind Wars Museum was instrumental in bringing it back. That's
that's kind of that's kind of sick, yeh, which is
why archivists are fucking cool. Um So, when Logan gets
the county in nine three, miners no longer have to
work thigh deep in water. Their hospital gets cleaned up,
it's not full of roaches and bed bugs, work, are
allowed to shop at other places other than the company's store.

(01:02:03):
Wages quadruple in some jobs. And I feel like it's
worth reiterating how simple and basic the ship that they
were fighting for was. And there's there's one more story
I want to tell about, just a story interaction I
had with some miners. I live in West Virginia now,
But a while back, I wasn't living here, and I
was visiting as a photojournalist taking pictures for Mountain Justice,

(01:02:23):
which is a group fighting against mountaintop removal coal mining.
And a lot of union miners were and are involved
in that fight. And I don't remember who told me
this story, and it bothers me and I asked my
friend who was there, and and they don't remember either.
It was either Chuck Nelson, who's at UMW a member
and a fourth generation coal miner, or it's Sid Moy,
whose father and grandfather were miners, but he worked as

(01:02:45):
a printer and he taught home studying instead, and both
of them have since passed away. I met Sid at
a civil disobedience training where we were practicing how to
navigate arrest and deal with police. Because there's there's stuff
I don't have time to get into. I kind of
wish I did, right, I wish I had the words
to get into about how like being like, yeah, industry,

(01:03:05):
I mean like coal mining, like like coal's fucked up, right,
Like I'm not trying to I don't want anyone to
leave here, and being like that's why we need more
coal jobs in America or whatever, right, like no, like
like fucking leave it in the ground, like use renewable ship.
But like, that doesn't mean that the miners aren't right
to fight for a decent living as they navigate this

(01:03:27):
hellscape of the world we live in. And a lot
of these miners are at the forefront in the fight
against mountain top removal because they care about the fucking mountains.
You know, a lot of people are seeing the environmental
the can everything from the cancer rates to groundwater contamination,
to everything that's come from mountaintop removal. Like the growing

(01:03:48):
up we were talking, we always talked about the strip
job dad works on. My dad didn't work in the minds.
He worked on the strip jobs where they cut away
a section of the mountain and he was maintenance crew.
You know, he was on the thing that pairing the
machines that were taking the tops off the mountains. That said,
he didn't go into the mines, so he was well
into his thirties to pick a piece of gear and
that was the one and only time and he never

(01:04:08):
ever wanted to go back because it was terrified. But
but a lot of people in Central Appalachia and Southwest Virginia,
Eastern Kentucky. They've seen what this process has done to
the land, They've seen what it's done to our health,
they've seen what what it's done. I mean, just there's
just I can't we don't have time to get into it.
But the cancer rates, especially among women in Wise County, Virginia,

(01:04:30):
are absolutely insane, especially when you trace it back to
where water has drained off, where groundwater has been contaminated,
and it's absolutely yeah, it's it's absolutely insane. So yes,
a lot of minors and a lot of I want
to just phone a valley, A lot of a lot
of good applachic folk who probably wouldn't spit on me
politically otherwise or any of us politically otherwise, will stand

(01:04:52):
against that. And and a lot of them who at
one time probably wouldn't have. But in you know, in
recent years, they've they've finally come to it to see it. Unfortunately. Yeah, no,
not not unfortunate, they came to see it, but you know,
unfortunately they've had to see it, had to see all
the stuff that's happening. You're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:05:14):
at a certain point you just can't ignore it anymore. Yeah,
or you can you come to realize it because you're
you know, your partner has has cancer because of this,
or your parents have died twenty years beforehand because of
exposure too. You know that maybe they never worked in
the mind, but there's a mind sight on the other
side of the mountain, and your groundwater is sucked up.
So the amount of it's yeah, it's it's it's so

(01:05:37):
much bigger than black lung is awful and horrific. But
the health stuff that radiates out from from mining and
has over the years, especially from mountaintop removal stuff has
just been it's it's off the charts. Yeah, I mean,
I remember, you know when I when I was on
my way to to go go to the coal fields
for the first time and work. I'll try it. I

(01:05:57):
didn't do a ton of I'm really not trying to
like play at my own and into this whole thing.
But I went and saw it right to take pictures
for people. And I went and someone from Wise County,
you know, who had grown up there, and the street
he lived on was like his last name, and it
was all you know, different small houses with people who
have his last name. And he he takes me up

(01:06:17):
and he shows me a mountain top removable site and
it's just a I don't know, I don't have words
for it. I used to avoid thinking about mountain top removal.
I was a forest defender. I was like working in
like tree sitting and shipped like that and working in
as if it was an industry. You know. I was
a volunteer activist and I go sit in trees. But
I never went to West Virginia to go confront mountain
top removal because it was too much problem. I couldn't

(01:06:39):
wrap my hand around it. You know. You get um,
disaster fatigue is facing a lot of people right now,
right and the concept that people are just blowing up
mountains things that make clear cutting look good in comparison,
you know, it was it was too much for me.
And I went up and I stood on this what
should have been a mountaintop instead it was this flat,
weird field, and it just I don't know, anyway, it's hard. Yeah,

(01:07:05):
I mean as too, you know, as people who grew
up there and like I could walk to the reservoir
near my dad's house, cross the road behind the reservoir
and my friends and I used to go when we
were twelve thirteen, would go play Lord of the Rings.
Wasn't that cool? We have we'd go have our own
fantasy adventures because the fucking landscape looked like an alien
planet because everything had been stripped. Nothing was native. It

(01:07:28):
was all these pine trees and shrubs that were planning
to reclaim the land, and it looked like like like
some new god had reached down and carved up everything
that was familiar into a different planet. Like it's it's
unreal and it's awful, and it's no, it's yeah, I
get you, I get you, just it's it's hard to even. Yeah. So,

(01:07:54):
so one of the stories I heard from either Chuck
now Center, said Moy was how in the sixties, him
and friends were busy protesting against the draft in the
Vietnam War in West Virginia, which already kind of like
because I came from outside and had these preconceptions about
people who live in West Virginia, which I'm not proud of,
and I was already like surprised, right, And he was like, well,
me and my friends were in one street corner and

(01:08:15):
protesting against the draft. We look across the other street corner,
black folks are protesting for civil rights, and on a
third corner, gay folks are protesting for their rights, and
we all looked at each other and we realized we
would be way better off protesting together. So all three
groups got together and we were an awful lot stronger
that way. I know, it's like oversimplified and probably not
a literal direct thing, but might have been a literal

(01:08:36):
direct thing that happened to this guy. And I just
I've been thinking about it in the like ten fifteen
years since then, like all the time, just that simple
act of like, it's the same thing that is the
concept of the unions. The concept of the unions is
not all that matters is building this power structure of
people who dig coal. It's all of these people realizing
that their struggle is the same struggle and getting together

(01:08:58):
and fight, um try not to go for it as
hard of a moral at the end of it. I
just like, really that story just really sticks with me.
That's the story of the Battle of Blair Mountain. How
are you all feeling? It's a lot? It is it is.
It's a lot. It's a lot. And that's you know,
when when like ever since we launched the podcast, people

(01:09:21):
have you know, have said to us, we want you
to cover Mate one. You know, we want you to
do a story about Mate one. We want you to
do about Blair Mountain. And you know, we're like, you know,
when we launched this season, we're like, we're gonna cover
them un We're going to talk about mind wars. But
we can't do that, Like these are these are real
people's lives. We're not going to try to, you know,

(01:09:43):
take those stories and just spoop them up. That's not
you know, that's that would be disrespectful. A Blair Mountain
happened because of the mountain is possessed or something. It's like, yeah,
there's there's Yeah. Now you are already do better not
trying to spoil anything for anyone who's listening to this
who hasn't yet started listening to your show. You already

(01:10:05):
do work with what it means to be digging into
the earth, you know, and you're doing it at a
better level than just being like which told the miners
to shoot and that's why they started fighting against their
bosses or whatever. Yeah, you can be a writer said

(01:10:26):
you should you should shoot. We can we can talk
about that, Margaret, We we you qualified. You qualified, you
are Appalachic. We we actually we actually have we we
kind of have policies. We we have written the show.
We have one guest writer who is an outsider, but
they are writing from the perspective of an outsider. But like,

(01:10:47):
get caught up and I all right, yeah, get caught
up on the show and I'll be more Absolutely would be.
We can talk. We'll talk about it after the show. Yeah. Yeah,
But it's gonna be about owegivor. It's not board, says Oregon.

(01:11:07):
It's the ghost of Mother Jones. It's creeping, creeping libration
idea either. I'm just going to throw that out. Oh yeah,
we're definitely gonna do that. Yes, well we are going
to do We are gonna do a season about the
Satanic panic in Uh, it's gonna happen. Okay, that sounds

(01:11:29):
a great And where can people hit you all up?
If they want to know more about your show, they
can go on over to Old Gods of Appalachia dot com. Uh,
you can find us one. Actually, Old God's Appalagy dot
com is the best all our social media, the discord server,
all that kind of stuff is there and we're available
wherever your fine podcast Sundry Goods are found awesome, Margaret,

(01:11:52):
Do you have anything you want to plug here? You mean,
like my upcoming book of short stories, we Won't Be
Here Tomorrow. I have an upcoming look of short stories
called we Won't Be Here Tomorrow that comes out from
a k presl in September two thousand twenty two. That's
the right year, that's this year, and people can pre
order it some time in June, which is probably around
when you're listening. Actually, you can be listening to this

(01:12:13):
fifteen years from now if they're still a world. That'd
be pretty quick, don't know. Yeah, And uh, Sophie, where
can people find you? Oh gosh, nowhere? But they can
follow at cool Zone Media on Twitter, Instagram, cool And
we just wanted to shout out our editor Ian Johnson,
Yeah for all your hard work. It takes a bunch

(01:12:36):
of people to do these things and that gets forgotten,
but not by the people who do the things and
not by you listeners, because now you know, Daddie and
Johnson rules. He certainly does. And we'll be back next
week with another ya by Cool People Who did. Cool
Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media, but more

(01:12:59):
podcasts and cools in media. Visit our website poulls own
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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