10,000 Coal Miners Armed Themselves and Marched on West Virginia. The Government Sent Warplanes.

In late August 1921, roughly 10,000 men with rifles encamped at the base of a mountain ridge in Logan County, West Virginia, preparing to fight their way through to the next county over. They were coal miners. The thing standing between them and their destination was a private army assembled and funded by coal operators, commanded by a county sheriff whose actual employer was the industry he was supposed to regulate.

What followed is the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War, and almost nobody knows it happened.

The miners lived under a company-town system that was, in practice, total institutional control: company-owned housing, company-issued scrip usable only at company stores, company-hired guards, and a county sheriff, Don Chafin, whose salary was quietly supplemented by coal operators to keep union organizers out of Logan County. After years of escalating violence, including the 1920 Matewan Massacre, a running gun battle that left several dead, thousands of miners, many of them World War I veterans, decided to march 60 miles to confront Chafin's forces and free imprisoned union miners.

They were met with machine guns along the Blair Mountain ridgeline. Aircraft were deployed overhead; private planes hired by coal operators reportedly dropped improvised bombs on the miners' positions, among the first uses of air power against civilians on American soil.

President Harding eventually ordered federal troops in. The miners largely stood down. They had been willing to fight a private army. They were not willing to fight the United States Army, a distinction that says something complicated about who they thought their actual enemy was.

The battle was a short-term defeat for the union. Fourteen years later, the National Labor Relations Act passed.

Read the full story at National Park Service

Hot Take: A private army with machine guns and aircraft could not break the miners in ten days, but the mere sight of federal soldiers did in an afternoon, which says less about the miners' resolve than about how thin the coal operators' authority actually was.