Bloody Mingo

The affray at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, is surely the most famous gunfight in American history. A far deadlier gunfight — which much more significant repercussions — is virtually unknown outside of regional histories. History is capricious.

The Battle of Matewan, or, more luridly, the Matewan Massacre went down on May 19, 1920, in the town of Matewan, in Mingo County, West Virginia. Ten men died in a hail of gunfire. It was a dramatic and deadly moment in the West Virginia Coal Wars, which would culminate the next year in the thunderous Battle of Blair Mountain. This is the territory Taylor Brown is exploring in his forthcoming novel Rednecks, which drops in May. I got my mitts on an advance reader copy from Paulina Springs Books, and I fell right down the mine shaft into coal country and the biggest labor uprising in American history.

(Yeah, I know… sidetrail. I’m still on the trail of McNelly’s Rangers, never fear. I’ve got rainy weather ahead I’ll hunker down and get that podcast written and recorded right soon).

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Mingo County was primed for an explosion in 1920 — and not from a methane pocket or the combustion of coal dust. We’re talkin’ an explosion of the economic-social-political kind. Miners were attempting to organize to improve the dire conditions in the southern West Virginia coalfields — shoddy company housing; debt peonage to the company store; incredibly dangerous conditions in the mines — and the mine owners were determined to prevent the United Mineworkers of America from gaining a foothold. They brought in mine guards from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Baldwin-Felts had started out as an actual detective agency, but like the larger and more famous Pinkerton Agency, they moved into contract security for big industrial corporations, particularly in the mining sector.

They were reviled by miners and their families as “gun thugs.”

The mineworkers were a rough bunch themselves. In a strike on Cabin Creek and Paint Creek in 1912-13, mineworkers, allegedly armed by the Socialist Party in West Virginia, threatened to kill mine guards and destroy mine equipment. In a spate of violence, 12 striking miners and 13 company men were killed. Some sources put the death toll higher. The governor of West Virginia declared martial law, and the state militia moved in and confiscated from miners an arsenal of weapons, including 1,872 rifles, 556 pistols, 225,000 rounds of ammunition, and a plethora of melee weapons.

The boom years of World War I and the deployment of many of the region’s men to Europe after 1917 dampened the conflict somewhat, but it had roared back to life by 1920, as post-war demand for coal dropped, taking prices — and profits — along with it. You had genuinely oppressed miners on one side and corporate owners and their hired guns convinced that they were facing a Bolshevik conspiracy on the other.

Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield knew which side he was on. He backed the miners. Smilin’ Sid, as he was known for his way of flashing his grill of gold caps, was kin to Devil Anse Hatfield, patriarch of the notorious Hatfield Clan of feud fame. He was an interesting choice for police chief, being a sporting man of some note — but he had sand, and was very good with his pistols, a pair of double-action Smith & Wessons he carried in leather holsters on his belt.

The Stone Mountain Coal Corporation had decreed that any miner who joined a union would be fired and kicked out of company housing. Some left on their own; others refused.

Baldwin-Felts gunmen showed up on the train to Matewan on May 19, 1920 to evict union-affiliated miners from their housing. Among the “detectives” were Albert and Lee Felts, brothers of detective agency partner Tom Felts. Hatfield and Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman demanded to see warrants for the evictions — which the Baldwin-Felts men could not produce. They claimed they were acting a court order, but it was really just the order of Stone Mountain Coal.

Testerman and Hatfield left the housing tract and returned to Matewan.

The Baldwin-Felts men completed the evictions, then returned to Matewan later that day, claiming to have an arrest warrant for Sid Hatfield. Hatfield was, himself, awaiting warrants for the Baldwin-Felts detectives to arrive on the train from the county seat. Standing by the back door of the Chambers hardware store, with Hatfield standing just inside, Testerman demanded to see Albert Felts’ purported arrest warrant, which he angrily declared bogus. Then, the shooting commenced.

Mayor Testerman went down with a bullet in his guts. Sid Hatfield shot Albert Felts in the face. When the flurry of gunfire died down, seven Baldwin-Felts gunmen, including both Felts brothers, were dead. Two townsmen were also dead, and Mayor Testerman was well on his way. Sid Hatfield was unwounded.

It seems that there was a single shot, followed by a volley of gunfire. Who fired that first shot? It’s not clear.  Hatfield would say that Albert Felts shot the mayor after the mayor declared his warrant bogus. Then the firing became general. Some believe that Hatfield had actually set an ambush for the Baldwin-Felts men. As historian Rebecca Bailey notes, that would render the tale more complex. And darker.

From Smithsonian Magazine:

According to one version of the story, the Baldwin-Felts agents tried to arrest Hatfield when he attempted to prevent the evictions from taking place. When the mayor defended Hatfield from the arrest, he was shot, and more bullets began to fly. In another version of the story, Hatfield initiated the violence, either by giving a signal to armed miners stationed around the town or by firing the first shot himself. For Bailey, the latter seems the more likely scenario because the agents would have known they were outnumbered—and if union miners and Hatfield did initiate the violence, the story of Matewan is darker than a simple underdog tale.

She’s not arguing moral equivalency here, and I tend to go along with her take — that the miners held the moral high ground even if they initiated the violence, because, in the larger scheme of things, the Baldwin-Felts men were the aggressors, and carried the power of corporation and state. What it boils down to, though, is that you can’t turn this into a simple white-hats/black-hats morality play. Bailey:

…“When we essentialize a narrative into heroes and villains, we run the risk of invalidating human pain and agency. The Baldwin-Felts agents were professional men. They believed they were fighting the onslaught of Communism. Their opponents were fighting for a fair and living wage, an appropriate share of the benefits of their labor.”

We’re supposed to believe that violence never solves anything, but that ain’t true. Sometimes, violence is the only way something can be resolved. Hard men with hard positions. It was bound to come to gunplay.

Sid Hatfield became an instant folk hero to miners. He also had a target on his back. Tom Felts was bent on avenging his brothers, especially after Hatfield was acquitted of murder charges in the Matewan gunfight. Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers were brought up on charges of conspiracy to shoot up or blow up the Mohawk mining operation in a neighboring county. As Hatfield and Chambers walked up the courthouse steps in the town of Welch on August 1, 1921,  unarmed and accompanied by their wives,* a cadre of Baldwin-Felts gunmen approached and shot them to doll rags. None of the killers faced justice. They had, after all, acted in “self-defense.”

The assassination of Hatfield and Chambers led directly to the uprising of West Virginia miners that culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, which we’ll leave for another day.

 

*Hatfield’s wife was Jessie Lee Maynard, the widow of Mayor Testerman. Hatfield married Jessie just 11 days after the shootout, after they had been caught in a compromising position in a local hotel room. Tom Felts and a Baldwin-Felts spy named Charles Lively pointed to this… awkward.. situation in an accusation that it was Hatfield who gutshot Mayor Testerman in a plot to steal his wife, with whom he’d been carrying on an illicit affair. Jessie, for her part, maintained that Testerman had asked that Hatfield take care of her and their child if he was killed in the brewing violence in Bloody Mingo. I buy the illicit affair part, but Sid Hatfield didn’t shoot Cabell Testerman. He was busy stacking Baldwin-Felts gun thugs.

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Without spoiling the action of Rednecks, I can tell you that Taylor Brown makes the most out of all of this intense drama. Brown is a fantastic writer and a Tier One storyteller, and this is as good as his best. He accurately depicts the ethnic and cultural diversity of the coal fields — about 25 percent of the miners were Black, and a good portion were European immigrants, especially Italians. One of the main characters is based on Brown’s own great-grandfather, a Lebanese Maronite Christian doctor.

Rednecks is a dark, raw piece of Americana, spun out with propulsive, poetic power. Brown brings the grainy black-and-white of a forgotten history into vivid life, a pulsing heart pumping red blood that is all too often spilled out in the fury of a civil war has long been an unmentionable in the American mythos. Highest recommendation. Order it up (but maybe not from the Big Company Store) and figure on a couple of days lost deep in the in the hollers.

Appreciate the ARC from Paulina Springs. If you need a bit to tide you over until the May release, Brown offers an excerpt in The Bitter Southerner.

What if we told you that in 1921 a battle raged on American soil in which a million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped, and 10,000 Appalachians fought for their livelihoods? In this excerpt from his new novel, Rednecks, Taylor Brown introduces us to some gritty characters, both real and imagined, who waged the largest labor uprising in American history. Union miners versus King Coal. Can you smell the smoke?

Yes. Yes, we can.