Blood on the Mountain

In August 1921, ten thousand armed coal miners marched south through the West Virginia mountains toward Blair Mountain, carrying Springfield rifles and wearing red bandanas at their throats. What followed was the largest armed labor uprising in American history - a ten-day battle fought with machine guns, aerial bombardment, and the full apparatus of corporate and state power ranged against a workforce that had exhausted every legal alternative the constitutional system offered and had decided, finally, to answer force with force.Blood on the Mountain is the full reckoning Blair Mountain has never received. Drawing on court transcripts, congressional testimony, archaeological evidence, and oral histories collected from the descendants of the men who fought there, Hugh O’Donnell reconstructs the thirty years of company-town feudalism that made the march inevitable, the battle itself in tactical and human detail, and the century of suppression, recovery, and continuing argument that followed. Here is Sid Hatfield, the Matewan police chief who stood against the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency - and paid for it on a courthouse staircase. Here is Bill Blizzard, commanding ten thousand veterans across a twenty-mile mountain front. Here is the mountain itself, holding its buried guns and its unmarked dead, patient as stone.The fight Blair Mountain began has not ended. This is its history.