In May, 1921, union miners in the Tug Valley area of West Virginia had pretty much had enough of mine owners\u2019 tactics, so they began a full-scale assault on non-union mines in the area. Over three days the conflict had pretty much spread throughout the Tug Valley. <\/p>\n
That conflict was ended by a flag of truce and the imposition of martial law by the governor. But this didn\u2019t put an end to things.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of miners were soon arrested, causing others to return to battle using what we would call guerrilla warfare tactics.<\/p>\n
On this day one hundred years ago state police approached a miner\u2019s tent colony at Lick Creek, near Williamson, with the intent to arrest men who were suspected of having fired upon a car carrying county deputies and state police the day before. This sparked a gun battle in which Alex Breedlove, a miner, was killed and two others, West Virginia State Trooper James A. Bowles and Martin Justice, another miner, were wounded. <\/p>\n
47 of the miners were arrested and placed in the Mingo County jail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In May, 1921, union miners in the Tug Valley area of West Virginia had pretty much had enough of mine owners\u2019 tactics, so they began a full-scale assault on non-union mines in the area. Over three days the conflict had pretty much spread throughout the Tug Valley. That conflict was ended by a flag of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mine-wars"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6TX4A-iW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesofappalachia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}