SHOWDOWN AT BLAIR MOUNTAIN
On the night of August 30, 1921, the Reverend John Wilburn, a self-proclaimed Baptist minister in Blair, West Virginia, wasn’t tending to the Lord’s business. In defiance of an order issued by President Warren G. Harding, Wilburn was leading a party of 75 armed miners, some wearing tattered uniforms from the late war and bright red bandannas around their necks, up the east side of 1,800-foot-high Blair Mountain. Their mission was to feel out the defenses of the coal operators, sheriff’s deputies, and mine guards who had occupied the heights a few days earlier. The reverend instructed his troops in terms that were less than pacific. “Take no prisoners,” he said.
The next morning, after bivouacking for the night on a ridge halfway up the mountain, the miners were awakened by scattered gunfire. Leading a four-man scouting party, Wilburn came across three men blocking the narrow road around the ridge. Logan County sheriff’s deputy John Gore, armed with two pistols and a rifle, motioned for Wilburn’s men to come forward. Two nonunion miners, John Colfago and Jim Munsie, stood behind him, cradling rifles.
The absentee land owners of Logan County called the area “the El Dorado of Appalachia.”
An uneasy moment passed. Then one of the nonunion miners made a sudden move, and gunfire erupted. Gore, mortally wounded, managed to get off a shot as he fell to the ground. Eli Kemp, a black miner in Wilburn’s group, was struck in the back as he turned to run and also fell to the ground. Wilburn’s men crept forward through the gun smoke. Gore and Colfago were dead; Munsie writhed in agony in the tall grass. As Munsie begged for his life, union miner Henry Kitchin put the muzzle of his rifle against the wounded man’s forehead and pulled the trigger. Muncie’s head bounced off the ground, blood pumping out “like water out of a hose where you turn it on and the pressure is light,” one of the other miners observed. Wilburn’s men carried the unconscious Kemp back down the mountain to Blair, where he soon died in a doctor’s office.
With that brief, confused exchange of gunfire, the Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War and the largest labor uprising in American history—commenced. For the next four days it would rivet the nation, as striking miners faced off against state police, hastily organized militia, and paid strikebreakers. Thousands of rounds from machine guns, rifles, shotguns, pistols—even improvised bombs dropped from private airplanes—would riddle the remote West Virginia countryside, and soldiers from three crack U.S. Army infantry regiments would rush to the front. Even the nation’s best-known military air commander, World War I hero Billy Mitchell, stood ready and eager to enter the fray.
The events that led to the bloody confrontation on Blair Mountain had begun more than three decades earlier, when representatives of the newly formed Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, cash in hand, swooped down on southern West Virginia’s sleepy hills and “hollers.” Bankrolled by wealthy investors from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio, and even as far
