To understand Blair Mountain, you have to understand what a West Virginia coal miner's life looked like in 1920. The mines in Mingo County hired only non-union workers and enforced employment contracts that made union membership grounds for immediate termination. Since miners lived almost exclusively in company towns, getting fired also meant losing your home. Evicted families -- including, in one case, a woman with a newborn -- were thrown out of company houses and forced to live in tent colonies along the Tug Fork River. The miners were paid so little that, as one Keystone Mine worker remembered, 'You could go in the mines and load five or six cars of coal and couldn't come out to the company store and get enough food to feed your family till you worked another day.' In 1920, UMW president John L. Lewis launched a major push to organize the region. Over 3,000 Mingo County miners joined the union and were summarily fired. The coal companies hired agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to evict the families.

On May 19, 1920, a dozen Baldwin-Felts detectives arrived in Matewan, Mingo County. The agents -- the same organization responsible for the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 in Colorado -- had come to evict miners' families. Albert Felts had already tried to bribe Mayor Cabell Testerman to let him place machine guns on the town's rooftops; Testerman refused. That afternoon the detectives forced a woman and her children from their home at gunpoint in bad weather. As the agents walked to the train station afterward, Police Chief Sid Hatfield and a group of deputized miners confronted them. Albert Felts claimed he had a warrant for Hatfield's arrest. Testerman ran out to examine it and declared, 'This is a bogus warrant.' A gunfight erupted. When it was over, ten men lay dead -- three from the town and seven Baldwin-Felts agents, including both Albert and Lee Felts. Chief Hatfield became a hero to the union miners. But on August 1, 1921, Baldwin-Felts agents ambushed Hatfield and his friend Ed Chambers on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse, shooting both men dead. Word of the murders set the coalfields on fire.

Enraged miners along the Little Coal River were the first to organize after Hatfield's assassination, capturing and disarming troopers sent by Sheriff Chafin. On August 7, union leaders Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney called a rally in Charleston and presented Governor Ephraim Morgan with the miners' demands. Morgan rejected them. The miners decided to march. By August 20, armed men began gathering at Lens Creek Mountain in Kanawha County. Four days later, 13,000 had assembled -- the largest armed gathering of American civilians since the Civil War. Miners near St. Albans commandeered a Chesapeake and Ohio freight train, which they renamed the 'Blue Steel Special,' to ferry men to the advance column at Danville, Boone County. As the army of miners moved south, Keeney and Mooney fled to Ohio, and Bill Blizzard -- whose name would become synonymous with the uprising -- assumed leadership. On Blair Mountain, Sheriff Chafin was digging in.

The first skirmishes broke out on August 25. President Warren G. Harding threatened to send in federal troops and Army Martin MB-1 bombers. The miners briefly agreed to turn back, but rumors that Chafin's men had shot union sympathizers in the town of Sharples -- and that families had been caught in the crossfire -- sent them surging back toward the mountain. On August 29, the full battle began. Chafin's men held the high ground and had superior weapons. Private planes hired by the coal operators dropped homemade bombs on the miners' positions. A combination of poison gas and explosive ordnance left over from World War I fell near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples, and Blair. At least one bomb failed to explode and was recovered by the miners, later used as devastating evidence in their defense at trial. Army bombers under orders from General Billy Mitchell flew surveillance missions; one Martin bomber crashed on its return flight, killing four of its five crew members. Gatling guns and machine guns thundered on both sides of the mountain.

Federal troops arrived on September 2, and the battle ended. The miners -- many of them veterans themselves -- refused to fire on U.S. soldiers. Bill Blizzard passed the word to go home. Miners hid their firearms in the woods before leaving Logan County; archeologists later recovered many of them, along with spent cartridges that helped reconstruct the course of the fighting. Afterward, 985 miners were indicted for murder, conspiracy, and treason against the State of West Virginia. Most were acquitted by sympathetic juries, though some were imprisoned for up to four years. In the short term, the coal operators won decisively: UMWA membership collapsed from over 50,000 to roughly 10,000. It took fourteen years -- until the New Deal in 1935 -- for the union to fully organize southern West Virginia. But in the long term, Blair Mountain changed the trajectory of American labor. The battle's legacy helped drive passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave workers the legal right to organize and bargain collectively. The UMWA went on to help build the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Blair Mountain itself was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, removed due to a clerical error, and restored to the Register in 2018.