page_title: Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912
section_title: The strike
hierarchical_section_title: Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 / The strike
caption_attribution_description: English: Miners posing with their guns in Eskdale, West Virginia during the Paint--Cabin Creek strike from 1912-1913.
context_page_description: The Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, or the Paint Creek Mine War, was a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek.
  The strike lasted from April 18, 1912 through July 1913. After the confrontation, Fred Stanton, a banker, estimated that the strike and ensuing violence cost $100,000,000. The confrontation directly caused perhaps fifty violent deaths, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In the number of casualties it counts among the worst conflicts in American labor union history.
  The strike was a prelude to subsequent labor-related West Virginia conflicts in the following years, the Battle of Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain.
context_section_description: After the strike began, the national United Mine Workers pledged full support, hoping to spread the union into Southern West Virginia, a longtime goal of the union. The UMW promised full financing and any aid it could provide to support strikers.
  Partly because of the influence of the UMW, the strike was conducted without violence for its first month. However, on May 10, 1912, the operators on Paint Creek and Cabin Creek hired the notorious Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to break the strike. Baldwin–Felts responded by sending more than 300 mine guards led by Albert Felts, Lee Felts, and Tony Gaujot 
  Activist Mother Jones arrived in June, as mine owners began evicting workers from their rented houses, and brought in replacement workers.  Beatings, sniper attacks, and sabotage were daily occurrences.  Through July, Jones rallied the workers, made her way through armed guards to persuade another group of miners in Eskdale, West Virginia to join the strike, and organized a secret march of three thousand armed miners to the steps of the state capitol in Charleston to read a declaration of war to Governor William E. Glasscock.  On July 26, miners attacked Mucklow, present-day Gallagher, leaving at least twelve strikers and four guards dead.
  On September 1, a force of over 5,000 miners from the north side of the Kanawha River joined the strikers' tent city, leading Governor Glasscock to establish martial law in the region the following day.  The 1,200 state troops confiscating arms and ammunition from both sides lessened tensions to some degree, but the strikers were forbidden to congregate, and were subject to fast, unfair trials in military court.  Meanwhile, strikers' families began to suffer from hunger, cold, and the unsanitary conditions in their temporary tent colony at Holly Grove.
  On October 15, martial law was lifted, only to be re-imposed on November 15 and lifted on January 10 by Governor Glasscock, with less than two months left in office.  On February 7  Mucklow was again attacked by miners with at least one casualty.  In retaliation that evening, the Kanawha County Sheriff Bonner Hill and a group of detectives attacked the Holly Grove miners' settlement with an armored train, called the "Bull Moose Special", attacking with machine guns and high-powered rifles, putting 100 machine-gun bullets through the frame house of striker Cesco Estep and killing him.  Another miners' raid on Mucklow killed at least two people a few days later, and on February 10 martial law was imposed for the third and final time.
  Mother Jones was arrested on February 13 in Pratt and charged in military court for inciting riot (reportedly for attempting to read the Declaration of Independence), and, later, conspiracy to commit murder.  She refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the military court, and refused to enter a plea.  Jones was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary and acquired a case of pneumonia.
  New governor Dr. Henry D. Hatfield was sworn in on March 4 and immediately traveled to the area as his first priority.  He released some thirty individuals held under martial law, transferred Mother Jones to Charleston for medical treatment, and in April moved to impose conditions for the strike settlement.  Strikers had the choice to accept Hatfield's somewhat favorable terms, or be deported from the state.  The Paint Creek miners accepted and signed the "Hatfield Contract" on May 1.  The Cabin Creek miners continued to resist, with some violence, until the end of July.
caption: Miners hold their rifles in Eskdale.
exif: {}