by Lisa Alther
Gunfire immediately erupted among the detectives, Sid Hatfield, and several deputized miners stationed around the town. One researcher says the detective with the warrant started this barrage by firing five times at Mayor Testerman, followed by Sid Hatfield’s shooting the detective in the head.52
When the dust settled, seven Baldwin-Felts agents lay dead, including two brothers of Tom Felts, the agency owner. Two miners were also dead. Mayor Testerman himself was badly wounded and soon died. Two detectives swam the Tug Fork and escaped into the wilds of Kentucky, as did a third detective, who was wounded as he crossed a bridge over the river. Two others hopped a train that arrived in the station during the melee. The bodies of the dead detectives lay in the street for two hours until the sheriff arrived and ordered the miners still lurking in the streets to help him load them into the baggage car of a passing train for transport to an undertaker in a nearby town.
Sid Hatfield and twenty-two miners were indicted for the murders. Greenway Hatfield, son of Good Elias and nephew of Devil Anse, was in charge of helping select the jury.53
Eleven days later, detectives spotted Sid Hatfield and Testerman’s widow, Jessie, entering a hotel room in Huntington, West Virginia. The couple was arrested and jailed for “improper relations.” But they were released the next day when they showed the judge their marriage license dated the previous day. The judge agreed to cancel their fine if they married that same day, which they did. Rumors then swirled that Sid had shot Mayor Testerman in order to marry his wife.54 Nevertheless, miners all over the country regarded Sid Hatfield as a hero, a symbol of hope that it was possible to prevail over the injustices of mine owners and their hired guns.
The ousted Red Jacket miners and those evicted from other coal towns settled into tent colonies along the Tug Fork and conducted raids and attacks on nonunion mines in the area. State police moved into one such colony and shot and arrested some miners, ripping up their tents and demolishing their belongings.
It isn’t hard to imagine how these Tug Fork–native miners must have felt living in tents on land they had once owned or roamed. Now the hills where they had hunted were stripped of timber, punctured with mine shafts and railroad tracks, and bled of coal.
In 1870, two-thirds of West Virginia still had its virgin timber. By 1910 this figure had been reduced by four-fifths. By 1920 no virgin forests at all were left.55 Pastures and second-growth forests replaced them in the lowlands. But on the high plateaus and mountainsides, debris left from clear-cutting often caught fire from lightning or sparks spewed by passing locomotives or by mining equipment. The fires burned through the fertile humus down to the rocky subsoil, leaving blackened wastelands incapable of growing anything for many years.56
Mine shafts honeycombed these denuded hills, in which the Tug Fork miners spent their daylight hours in the dark, on their backs, chopping at coal seams with picks. The valleys were piled high with rock waste left from the extraction of coal. Rivers where they had once fished ran red from sludge created by cleaning the coal. Streams silted up from topsoil that washed off the bare hillsides. Acidic-smelling dust filled the air.
In days gone by, the families of many of these blacklisted miners had produced all they needed from their own land. Now the miners depended on manufactured goods bought from stores with scrip that could only be earned by working in the mines. Jobs that had seemed to promise lives of plenty had yielded, instead, devastation of their forests and streams, and the danger of death or dismemberment. Like Esau, they had sold their birthright for a pot of beans. When they had tried to join the union so as to demand higher wages and safer working conditions, even the pot of beans had been taken away from them. They now had nothing.
The following winter, Sid Hatfield and the miners indicted for the Matewan Massacre were found not guilty. For all the subsequent rejoicing, the situation still looked bleak for the UMWA. Of the nonunion mines, 80 percent had reopened with scabs and former miners who had capitulated to the owners’ terms. Blacklisted miners continued to attack these mines. Martial law was again declared, but pro-unionists continued their guerrilla activities up and down the Tug Fork, as had their fathers and grandfathers during the Civil War and the feud years.57 The feud had ended, but these later generations finally had their chance to perform heroic deeds.
A participant in the Matewan Massacre, in which coal company detectives killed the Matewan mayor, Sid Hatfield (right) was gunned down later on the steps of the Welch, West Virginia, courthouse along with friend Ed Chambers (left). Both died on the spot while the wife of one repeatedly beat an attacker over the head with her umbrella. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
Tom Felts, however, was gunning for Sid Hatfield for the deaths of his detective brothers. He managed to get Sid charged with dynamiting a tipple at a mine in another county, which required Sid to leave Mingo County for a trial in Welch, West Virginia. Sid, a friend, and their wives were ascending the courthouse steps in Welch when six Baldwin-Felts detectives riddled the men with a volley of bullets.58 Both died on the steps while one of their wives repeatedly beat an attacker over the head with her umbrella.59
The miners of West Virginia rose up in rebellion, supported by miners all over the nation. Mother Jones was quoted as saying, “There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice.”60 Miners demonstrated at the capitol in Charleston, presenting a petition of demands, which were rejected.61
Then, somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand armed miners began a fifty-mile march across southern West Virginia to Mingo County.62 They intended to free the miners arrested for guerrilla activities, to end martial law, and to organize the nonunion mines. Some dressed in uniforms left over from their World War I service. Others wore overalls with red kerchiefs around their necks. It was the largest armed insurrection in America since the Civil War.63
Don Chafin, a cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield’s wife, Levicy, was sheriff of Logan County, which stood in the miners’ route to Mingo County. Coal operators in 1920 paid Chafin, under the table, the equivalent of $300,000 to support their goals.64 He deputized a force of two thousand to three thousand men. Armed with machine guns, they stationed themselves in trenches along the top of Blair Mountain, on the border of Logan County. Chafin also hired a private plane to drop shrapnel bombs on the protesting miners.65
The War Department in Washington threatened to send federal troops to end this confrontation. In response, the UMWA told the marchers to go home. Some did. But when Chafin’s army of deputies started pursuing and arresting marchers, many homebound miners returned, and the battle resumed in earnest for several more days.
Gen. Billy Mitchell, a military air tactician who kept himself busy bombing derelict ships in the Atlantic, sent fifteen to twenty single-engine planes to West Virginia, along with two or three large bombers.66 Several crashed or were lost en route.67 It was the first time the US government had ever deployed military aircraft against its own citizens. Some planes performed aerial surveillance on the miners.
When federal soldiers finally arrived to break up the fracas, they stationed themselves half behind the miners and half behind Chafin’s men, demanding that they stop fighting. Many of the miners had fought in World War I and didn’t want to fire on their fellow soldiers, so they withdrew.68
Both sides claimed victory, the miners because they hadn’t stopped fighting due to Don Chafin’s might, but, rather, due to their loyalty to Uncle Sam. Some miners rode a streetcar through Charleston and were cheered as victors. But the real victory went to the mine operators. Within a few years, union membership in West Virginia had plummeted from fifty thousand to ten thousand—and wages from seven dollars for an eight-hour day to two dollars for a twelve-hour day.69 Almost a thousand miners from the Blair Mountain March were indicted for murder and for treason against the state of West Virginia. Some were acquitted, but others went to prison for several years.
But an unknown number of miners and guards alike had died on Blair Mountain, and many more had been wounded.71 The large corporations had originally refused to enter the Tug Fork Valley due to the supposed savagery of the people who lived there. But the system the corporations had set in place instead turned out to be far more savage and lethal than anything enacted by the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Devil Anse died just before twenty-eight-year-old Sid Hatfield went to trial for the Matewan Massacre. No mention is made anywhere of how Devil Anse regarded Sid Hatfield or the union battles. He himself had been the poster boy for freedom, autonomy, and self-reliance, and one might expect him to have resented the machinations of the large corporations and absentee owners, just as he had resented the wealthy Tidewater planters during the Civil War.
But Don Chafin, his wife’s cousin, was leading the antiunion forces. His sons Johnse and Cap worked as guards for coal operators, and his son Willis was a personnel officer for a coal corporation. His children and relatives had sided with the coal industry and were benefitting from it. So it’s hard to say where Devil Anse’s loyalties might have lain. Perhaps he felt indifferent. He was an old man who had fought his own battles. The Tug Fork Valley had become a different place from what he had known as a young man, when he and his men had thundered across the river on horseback in the dead of night, pursuing their missions of vengeance. He might have regarded the union battles as having little to do with him, no matter how much the pro-union guerrilla activities along the Tug Fork resembled the campaigns of his youth.
Unfortunately, those new battles along the Tug Fork did have a lot to do with Devil Anse Hatfield—or rather, with how his behavior had been portrayed in the national media. Because other Americans had come to regard the residents of the southern Appalachians as brutal savages, they felt little concern that those savages were now being starved and maimed, their once-sparkling rivers murky with toxins, their towering primeval forests reduced to stumps.
A similar process had robbed Native Americans of their land in the western states in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The national press widely portrayed them as vicious barbarians, which made it acceptable to other Americans that they be corralled on reservations and reduced to poverty, while their ancestral lands yielded profits for outsiders. Blacks have suffered a similar program of systematic dehumanization throughout their history in America, painted as violent and unintelligent in order to justify their subjugation, first as slaves and later as freedmen.
The hillbilly stereotype spawned by the Hatfield-McCoy feud—of an uncouth bearded bumpkin in a slouch hat and overalls, holding a rifle in one hand and a jug of moonshine in the other—in part justified the exploitation of coal miners and lumbermen in the southern Appalachians and the destruction of their environment. It masked and made a mockery of the real issue of who would control and benefit from the enormous natural resources of the region.
This stereotype of the venal hillbilly served several other functions as well. The Civil War had ended when the feud began. More than six hundred thousand soldiers died, and many more were maimed for life, to say nothing of the civilian toll. As Americans attempted to put these staggering statistics behind them and resume life as a supposedly civilized society, they projected their own participation in such brutality onto the powerless rural people in the Southern mountains—a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black.
Nor had all the atrocities happened in the past. At the same time that feuds were playing out in the southern Appalachians, lynching reached its height in the plantation South, as did strikes and riots in the industrialized North. The regional stereotype of the savage mountaineer remained in force during the Spanish-American War, with its nearly 20,000 deaths, and throughout World War I, with its 10 million civilian deaths and 9.7 million military deaths. It remained strong despite the estimated five hundred deaths engineered by Al Capone in Chicago.
The hillbilly stereotype absorbed the shadow sides of those who held it. As Altina Waller puts it, underneath the stereotyping lurked “the terrible fear of the dark or ‘savage’ side of their own natures that might gain the upper hand if allowed the freedom that mountaineers enjoyed.”72
This stereotype remains strong even today, over a century after the end of the feud. My own generation grew up laughing at the stupidities of the hillbillies in the funny pages and on television. Many of us shuddered over the gruesome scene in James Dickey’s Deliverance in which a degenerate mountaineer rapes a man from the city.
Meanwhile, the brain drain has continued. Many counties in Appalachia have declining and aging populations. Almost a quarter of all Americans have college degrees, but fewer than 18 percent of Appalachians do.73
Many Appalachian forests have been clear-cut, so logging jobs, once plentiful in the region, are now scarce. The ownership of farmland had been limited by the large purchases by railroad, timber, and coal consortiums, and by confiscations by the federal government for national parks and Tennessee Valley Authority dams and lakes. Much land that remains is unusable for farming because it is too steep, or because the topsoil has eroded due to clear-cutting or has been buried by strip-mining and mountaintop removal.
Requiring only half as many laborers, mountaintop removal is largely replacing the old method of underground mining. Explosives expose coal seams located as much as four hundred feet below the surface. The explosions and the rocks they blast into the sky damage nearby homes. The toxic dust harms some inhabitants’ lungs, many already suffering from the black lung disease acquired in underground mines. Called the “overburden,” trees, soil, and rocks, often saturated with heavy-metal content, are scraped off coal seams into surrounding valleys. Sometimes this overburden buries the headwaters of streams, destroying water supplies for humans and habitats for fish and wild animals. The toxic runoff pollutes drinking water far downstream.74
The rate of birth defects in babies born near mountaintop removal sites is 42 percent higher than that of babies born elsewhere in Appalachia, and the cancer rate for those near such sites is 14.4 percent versus 9.4 percent for other Appalachians.75 The speculation is that the contaminants released into the air and water by the blasting and the runoff impair fetal development. The Coal River Mountain Watch maintains that mountaintop removal is causing a “wholesale poisoning of Appalachia.”76
Several thousand pro-union miners fought on Blair Mountain against Don Chafin’s army of three thousand antiunion deputies in 1921. It’s a site of major historic significance for the American labor movement. Yet Alpha Natural Resources plans to remove a portion of Blair Mountain77 and ship it to markets in India, Turkey, and Egypt.78
Strip-mining and mountaintop removal have destroyed five hundred mountains in Appalachia so far.79 That coal corporations can freely subject citizens of the region to the demolition of the mountains in which their families have lived for generations further testifies to the damage done by the stereotypes spawned by the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Once all the peaks have been leveled and shipped to India, once the region has become merely an extension of the Great Plains, there will be no more towering mountains and no more ornery mountaineers to impede the grand march of Progress.
******** Apart from his participation in and promotion of a movie about the feud, about which, more later.
15
MAN TOYS
I grew up in a wide river valley in East Tennessee, the Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge on one side, the Cumberland Plateau on the other. My town, Kingsport, was founded in 1916 as a base for Northern industry. The main employer is the Tennessee Eastman Chemical Corporation. When I was a child, the town also hosted a large printing company, a paper mill, a glass plant, a couple
of textile mills, a brickyard, and a defense contractor. Factories, some now closed, spread down the banks of the Holston River, alongside the tracks of the Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio railroad, on which coal arrived from the mountains all around us to fuel their activities. The factories discharged wastewater into the river and smoke into the air, which still has a sweet-and-sour odor to it. The parents of many of my schoolmates had moved to Kingsport from area farms to work in these factories. The managers, often from the North or from Southern cities, were friends of my parents and grandparents.
We were the New South—though we thought we were the Old South. The unions at the printing company, the largest press under one roof in the world at that time, went on strike for four years during the 1960s. While strikers were shooting up the homes of their supervisors and tear gas was floating on the mountain air, my friends and I were waltzing at the country club in elbow-length kid gloves and strapless gowns with hoop skirts, trying to convince ourselves that we were Southern belles.
My father and his parents had been born in Virginia. In the minds of many Virginians, this chance occurrence is like winning the lottery. My grandmother portrayed herself as a descendant of Tidewater aristocrats and Confederate Cavaliers. She helped found the Virginia Club. At their meetings, members gave papers on famous Virginians and expressed pity for those of us born in Tennessee.
In reality, my grandparents had grown up in a coal-mining area in southwestern Virginia—not to be confused with northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, or with the eastern Tidewater and its former plantations.******** My grandmother came from a town named Darwin, where her father had farmed. My grandfather came from Skeet Rock in a district called South of the Mountain, at the foot of the Cumberlands that separate Virginia from Kentucky. His father was also a farmer. Their towns were about twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, from Pikeville, Kentucky, and thirty-five miles from the Tug Fork Valley, epicenter of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.