Bullets snapped the air, breaking branches and kicking dirt.
Biplanes droned overhead, and when the pipe bombs dropped by their pilots actually went off like they were supposed to, the aftermath was bloody.
With their bellies flat against the terra firma, the sudden-soldiers below crawled through heavily wooded fissures, seeking purchase as it came.
Rounds were chambered and rifles were aimed.
Those wielding the weapons on the ground were tough, rangy and more than committed.
Many of them, in fact, were combat veterans of World War I, and it didn’t take long for the ones who had been Over There to revert back.
Except this wasn’t the Argonne Forest in 1917.
This was Logan County in 1921.
Blair Mountain.
The rugged peak shadowing West Virginia southern coalfields was the site then of the country’s bloodiest insurrection since the Civil War, as miners struggling to unionize dug in against the coal barons — who wanted things to stay as they were.
It’s easy to cast heroes and villains in that dark period of Mountain State history.
However, Tony Hylton, the former West Virginia newspaperman and lawmaker, and current novelist, came to the offices of The Dominion Post last Thursday shouldering a different perspective.
Literally.
In his possession was a Winchester Model 1894 lever-action repeating rifle. The slightly pitted and rusted weapon is a genuine artifact of Mine War history in the Mountain State.
It was carried to Blair Mountain by his grandfather, Charles Dayton Hylton Sr., at the request of Don Chafin, Logan County’s notorious anti-mine union sheriff.
And Tony Hylton, his grandson, was donating it to the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan. First, though, some history.
Go tell it on the Mountain
Both sides were acting — and reacting — to their circumstances during those days of 101 years ago.
By 1920, the simmering anger in Matewan, Mingo County, between labor and management of the Stone Mountain Coal Co., blew like a spark in a methane-choked mine shaft.
Sid Hatfield, the county sheriff sympathetic to the miners, tried to stop the company-hired detectives from the Baldwin-Felts agency from evicting miners from company houses for joining the mine workers’ union.
Town Mayor Cabell Testerman joined with the sheriff. Arguments turned into gun fire. Seven Baldwin-Felts detectives were killed, along with the mayor and two miners.
Retribution ruled. On Aug. 1, 1921, other detectives from the agency gunned down Hatfield in McDowell County.
A miners’ militia was formed with a mission to march to Mingo to again take on Stone Mountain. They got as far as Logan County, and the 2,000-foot Blair Mountain, which was right smack in front of them.
“No armed mob will cross the Logan County line,” Chafin decreed.
The sheriff assembled a 3,000-strong opposing force, including the aforementioned coal operator Hylton.
Trenches were dug and machine gun nests went up the craggy sides of the mountain.
By Aug. 28, the pro-union militia numbered 10,000, all with red handkerchiefs around their necks so people knew who was who — the “Red Neck Army.”
Twenty to 100 may have died in the ensuing skirmishes. No one knows for sure. President Warren G. Harding summoned 2,100 U.S. Army troops and a squadron of U.S. Army Service planes — joining the ones hired earlier by Chafin with the homemade ordnance.
By Sept. 4, it was over.
As ardent to the cause as those miners were, the Republic, in many ways, still won out.
That’s because the labor union forces were emotionally outflanked, even if they were populated by people who knew how to fight.
Those World War I veterans couldn’t digest the thought of firing on active-duty soldiers, so they laid down their arms.
Everybody has a story
Charles Hylton Sr., Tony Hylton proudly notes, was a bit of an anomaly back then.
That’s because the supervisor of Grey Eagle Mining Co., actually had a reputation of being fair to the miners who answered to him.
By all accounts, he was liked and respected by the rank-and-file workers who carved out the coal.
His participation at Blair Mountain, his grandson said, shows how wrenching it can get, when a regime change is rolling out all around you.
“If you had talked to people on both sides,” Tony Hylton said, “you probably would have gotten similar answers. Both sides thought they were doing the right thing. You don’t know what you’re going to do, until you’re suddenly living it.”
Shaun Slifer, meanwhile, lives for both sides. He divides his time between Pittsburgh and Matewan. He’s an artist and writer who also serves as creative director of the Mine Wars Museum.
This particular Winchester Model 1894 is history, and deserves to be represented, Slifer said.
He spent his boyhood in part, in Nebraska, and didn’t know West Virginia history — coal mining, or otherwise — until he became associated with the museum.
“We at the museum really appreciate the generosity of Tony and his family,” he said. “This is one more chapter to the story. I learn something every time I’m in West Virginia and Matewan.”
The museum, meanwhile, is readying to open March 31 for this year’s season. Visit https://wvminewars.org/ for details and a virtual until then.
Charles Dayton Hylton Sr., moved on from Blair Mountain.
In 1942, at the height of World War II, he was asked to step in and oversee a non-mechanized mine in Maryland for the home front effort. The mine used donkeys to help haul its coal to the surface.
His son, and Tony’s father, became a crusading newspaper publisher in Logan. A Hylton grandson would also work in journalism.
The Hylton patriarch, ironically, ended up being a coal casualty himself.
He died in 1955 of black lung and other health issues, wrought by a lifetime of working in and around the mines.
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