The Cordova daily times., 1922-05-10
WIVES AND CHILDREN OF
 MINERS NOV FACE EVICTION

women III poverty rags anu tuelr half-starved offsprings today told a mute story of West Virginias indus trial tragedy
 These pathetic victims of the "War between capital and labor," who for two years have lived in indescribable misery, are now to be evicted from the squalid homes under an injunction of the federal court.
 Eight hundred women and children, scattered through a half dozen colon- ies tucked away in the West Virginia mountains, must abandon their leaky tents and seek new homes because their presence, so the court held, is a menace to the operation of coal mines in Mingo country.
 Nearly two years ago, July 1, 1920, miners in the Mingo fields quit work because, they said, the operators would not recognize their union. They took their families to live in tent colonies. The men were fighting for a prinicple-that of the right to organize into union whereby they might collectively deal with the big coal associations
 WOMEN PAID PENALTY
 But the women and the little chil- dren, who had nothing to do with the industrial war, paid the penalty.
 The women, from the time they went to live in the tent colonies, were the real victims of the strike. Some of them have been deserted by their husbands. Tuberculosis, contracted as the result of exposure, has afflict- ed many All are poverty stricken, living in filth and under appalling hardships.
 Babies have been brought into the world under these conditions. Other children, infants when they were taken to the tent camps by their parents, have never known what it was to have real waterproof roof over their heads, a floor beneath their feet or a clean, warm bed for their little bod ies.
 Today I visited the Lick Creek tent colony. It is the largest of the Mingo camps.
 "Where will you move?" I asked a woman
 She was frying a piece of yellow, greasy bacon, while she rocked an improvised cradle. The babe had been born week before.
 The woman looked at me with a | vacant, hopeless sort of stare which told it's own story of cruel pri- | vation, of misery, of want and of squalor.
 She was woman in unWomanly | rags" and she sang the song of every other woman in the tent colonies.
 Where are you going when the law puts you out of your tent?" re- peated.
 uOH hllOW, oIS iCplICu.
 A fit of coughing shook her frail body-the bacon burned, and the in- fant cried pitifully.
 INTERVIEW BRIEF
 That was all of the interview, but the few words expressed volume of tragedy. She didn't know where her family would go, where the little chil- dren-there were six of them-could be taken. And resigning herself to the inevitable, she didn't care very much
 David Fowler, international organizer of the United Mine Workers of Amer ica, who has been permitted, under the martial law edict which rules Mingo County, to furnish supplies to the tent colonists, admitted he didn't know what would become of the col ,onists.
 Surely the country won't let them starve," he said. "The United Mine Workers will care for them some way
 The women and children know noth- ing about the federal court injunction, the check-off or the hundreds of other matters which have arisen between the coal miners and operators. They simply are the victims of circum- stance.
 If the tent colonies are not aban- l doned in the time specified by the court the arm of the law will reach out to evict them.
 The United Mine Workers, enjoined to prevent further payment of relief to the colonists, must cut off their sup ply of food and clothing. Unless the