Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1913 — MINE HORRORS TOLD [ARTICLE]

MINE HORRORS TOLD

"Mother” Jones in Washington , Tells Her Experiences. West Virginia Operators’ Guards Said to Tyrannize Over the Coal Region Regardless of Law—Woman Brutally Treated. Washington.—" Mother” Jones, the aged labor leader, who from the senate gallery has listened to the debate on Senator Kern’s resolution for investigation of mine peonage in West Virginia, tells harrowing stories of brutality against strikers and their families here. “I saw women and their babies — thirty or more of them,” Bhe said, “driven out of their miserable mine company shacks at Marcy, which go under the title of homes, forced to sleep under the sky in cold weather, until wej the miners’ organization, got tents for them. “1 know of a case of a woman in the Sheltering Arms hospital at Holly Grove, beaten and bruised by guards. “Outside the bullpen, in which 1 I was, I have seen mothers calling piteously for their husbands; I have seen children weeping in their arms, pleading for a chance to Bpeak with their fathers. But the guards turned a deaf ear to all the entreaties and sent the women away. “Children are forced to go into the coal pits as breakers. Their meagre wage is needed for the home. “Big, strong men have come to me pleading for help.; They came by night, for they knew that the mine guards would blackjack them in daylight. “I have known of cases of boys shanghaied for mine work. I have seen the asylums fill because of the terriljie system that sapped soul and body. "I know that the authorities have threatened tq arrest two newspaper men if they came within the martial law zone, but I do know that this

story is now going out to the civilized world, and that the press can not be blocked by such methods.” W. R. Fairley, in outlining conditions, said: “I found only a few weeks ago in the Paint Creek district the case of a seventeen-year-old girl, Claypool, forced by the guards to wade an ice-cold stream rather than take a-road to the bridge a short distance away. Her case is the subject <jf an affidavit in the West Virginia state commission’s investigation. “I saw another woman, whose feet had been shot by the guards. She will be a cripple for life. She was hidden behind her own door in a back room. Her husband, a miner in the Paint Creek district, had bidden himself in the cellar. Mine guards

deliberately fired on the house. The bullets ricocheted through four rooms, struck a Bible and a table and finally wounded the woman. “1 know of still another case where the guards in the Paint Creek district were beating a husband to death when the wife interfered. They turned on her. She was ill and when her child was born 1t was dead. “I know that for years the mine guards have been stopping strangers as they got off the trains throughout the coal field districts. They asked the visitor’s business. If he did not answer, or if the answer was unsatisfactory, he was told: ‘Get back on the train,’ or, if the train had moved on, he was ordered to keep going down the track and ‘to be d —HI sharp about it.’