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One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think of Druids (if they think of them at all) is to picture them as bearded men wearing white robes and holding a staff of office as they hold court in a circle of standing stones. The facts are much more interesting than that. Druids were not just priests – and most of them weren’t priests at all. How did this all get so confused to the point where, in popular literature, Druids are portrayed almost universally as priests of a pagan, pre-Christian people?

The first was Caesar’s book. His “Gallic Wars” was the first many had ever heard of Druid. That was a pity because that book was written to 1) bolster Caesar’s reputation, 2) portray Celts and their civilization as a broken, degraded one that needed Rome’s “help” and, 3) give him reason to ask for more funds and soldiers to subdue the Celts. In other words, he was not a reliable source. It would be somewhat like getting your first glimpse of America from an Al Qaeda video; the bias would be massive but undetectable since you had no other sources.

The second reason we view Druids as white clad priests is the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church (and to a much lesser extent, their Eastern Orthodox counterparts) had, from its conception, a strategy of absorbing pagan places, saints, and ideas and “Christianizing” them. Whether that was wise or not is arguable but it was certainly effective in many instances. For example, they absorbed the ancient midwinter celebrations found worldwide and turned them into Christmas. Jesus was not born in December but since that was when the world was celebrating the winter solstice and the return of light to the world, it made sense to speak of the True Light that came to the world…and say we had been celebrating Him all the time, just in ignorance. They used this tactic for saints as well. Many of us can remember how Vatican II “unsainted” a host of saints. They declared them unhistorical myths and removed them from the Catholic pantheon to whom prayers could be sent. The saints who remain on the list might have been historical, but many weren’t Christian. For example, a healer or administrator in the past might have become a legend with many stories made up about them long after they died (if they weren’t entirely mythical to begin with). When the Catholic priests came, they found the people venerating their hero. The priests would say that their hero was really a Christian – well before Christ came to this world – and that he would want them to follow the Lord now. They would often change the name of the hero/legend – giving them a Christian name – and then declare that hero a saint to whom the people could pray. That way, they didn’t have to let go of the old to embrace the new, they just redeemed it. Examples of this run into the dozens but one of the most famous is that of Brigid (sometimes “Brigit” or a variety of Irish Gaelic spellings). She was probably a historic Celtic leader but by the time we meet her in the literature, she is a goddess. The Catholic Church took that story and turned her into St. Brigid, one of the most popular saints in the pantheon.

The Catholic priests did not view this as lying or playing fast and loose with the truth because the vogue of that period of history was to read everything metaphorically and symbolically, even scripture. The early church fathers, such as Origen, read scripture so symbolically that it really lost all solid meaning but that was the way things were done for centuries. Anything, any leaf, stone, cloud, story, or whisper on the wind could become anything – it just needed to be interpreted.

Here’s another example of how the Catholics absorbed Celtic ways and, by so doing, changed them: Druids had distinctive haircuts as did other classes among the Celts. It was a way to establish who you were talking to in the same way badges of rank in the military do today. At least two different classes – the Druids and the military/mercenary class – had tonsures. A tonsure is a shaved portion of the head. You might have seen paintings of monks with the crowns of their heads shaved bare. Tonsures are an ancient idea – a way of showing rank but also a way to indicate that you are special to the gods (this is a long story which I’m skipping for brevity). Druids shaved the front part of their heads in this way – imagine a line from the middle of the top of one ear to the other. Shave everything in front of that line and you have a Druidic tonsure (also known as a Celtic tonsure). Early Christian missionaries were highly regarded in society and they adopted the Druidic tonsure. This was acceptable because they represented intelligentsia, an upper class with special wisdom. When later missionaries from Rome came, they were appalled to see the Celtic Christian priests copy the tonsure style of the Druids. You see, they had their own tonsure style by this point. They demanded that the leaders of the church shave their heads only in the style of Rome. This wasn’t sorted out until hundreds of years later when the Celtic Christians and the Roman Christians and their leaders held a huge confab at Whitby in 664AD to determine questions such as these and the dating of Easter. Rome won the contest and Celtic Christianity, which had flowered for hundreds of years and won Ireland, Scotland, much of Wales, and England would rapidly fade away and be replaced by the Roman system. What Caesar failed to do with Roman armies, Roman priests accomplished through their money, power, and influence.  (for a list of differences between the Celtic Christian Church and Rome, go here: http://www.cushnieent.force9.co.uk/CelticEra/Nature/nature_differences.htm)

Now something had to be done with the Druids and their place in society so Rome did what it always did – it appropriated them and changed the story. Druids were said to be ancient priests who welcomed the Christ child by seeing his birth in the stars and in the clouds. Their history was changed by official Roman fiat. Now, Druids were just like Roman priests. They were all male, all celibate, took vows of poverty, and were not involved in anything but priestly matters.

The facts were quite different. Druids were usually married with children. In fact, being a Druid often ran in a family with the children taking up the knowledge of their parents and passing it on to their children in turn. And women were Druids, too. (more on that in the next installment) It seems the only people barred from every becoming Druids were soldiers and foreigners. A variety of Druids were everywhere the Celts were…but not just in Celtic territories.

When Columba (known to Scots as Colmcille) “brought Christianity to Scotland” Christianity had already been established in the south of Scotland for at least a hundred years (see Candida Casa). What Columba did was bring Christianity into the wild, unknown lands of the Picts. Columba, an Irishman, became a priest after a young life full of wild oats, war, and, eventually, a murder. In the 5^th century, he sailed with a group of followers to the Island of Saints (I-Shona), or Iona. Using that windswept island as a base, he pressed into the west of Scotland where other Irish had created a colony called Airer Ghaidheal (Argyll) or Dal Riada (the followers of Riada, an Irish chieftain). From there, he moved northwest along the Great Glen and came into contact with the painted people – the Picts. The Picts are not considered Celts but certainly allied with them from time to time. They did not share a common heritage or language but Columba found Druids among them, proving that Druids were not just a Celtic phenomenon. These Druids served in the same way that Druids served back in Ireland – as doctors, lawyers, teachers, administrators, and leaders.

This is not the first mention of Druids in the Pictish lands of Scotland. Long before Columba, Cormac Mac Art sent for help to Alba (the ancient name of Scotland but, at that time, a kingdom along the north of the Clyde river near modern day Glasgow), asking the Druids to help him fight the king of Munster.

Columba found the Picts led by a king who was also a Druid, Bruide Mac Maelchon. Although he never converted to Christianity, Maelchon was welcoming to Columba and gave orders for safe passage to be given to all Christian missionaries and monks. It needs to be noted here that this was a very, very forward looking and advanced concept. Even in our present day, most countries do not have open door policies to any religious teachers who want to enter, but the Druids did. They were not priests and, therefore, did not consider it their duty to protect one religion against all others. Their welcome of the Christians is, in fact, one of the few times in history such a welcome was given.

This is not to say that the Druids did not contest some of the teachings of the Christians; they did. Maelchon’s teacher was a great Druid named Broichain and Columba (or his followers) wrote of the saint’s great battles against him. They were said to have engaged in contests of miracles to see whose word was true but these tales are almost certainly apocryphal. In one, Columba raises a young man from the dead. It was said the young man died because his family converted to Christianity and the gods were angry with him. To prove the Christian God as superior, Columba raised him from the dead. More likely, the Druids and Christians argued over everything from the structure of society to medicine. Sometimes, the Christians’ ways of doing things proved better, perhaps even “raising” a young man from his sick bed when all thought he was lost. The story got better in the telling through the years and became a great series of contests between Druids and Christians. One reason to think that these stories were exaggerated over time and that they were not great enemies is Columba’s own story of the time Briochan became ill and asked Columba to heal him. If they were fighting for the religious soul of the nation, it would be unlikely that the Druid would allow the Christian anywhere near him. Instead, they were intellectual combatants but friendly enough to reach out to each other and negotiate with each other. In his own writings, Columba said he healed the Druid willingly, but required in return that the Picts release an Irish prisoner they had held for some time. Why would the chief, most powerful Druid in the area go to Columba for healing if they were locked in mortal combat?

Columba did write a song or two that seems to make fun of the Druids but we need to remember that Columba was a difficult man when it came to everybody else, too. He famously said “My Druid is Christ, the son of God” but that shouldn’t be read as a rejection of all Druids but, rather, a way to show the superiority of Christ. To reinforce that superiority, Columba claimed many of the Picts’ sacred wells and sites for Christianity, appropriating them as we mentioned above. His tactics worked and the Picts were generally Christian within eighty years.

As Christians progressed through Celtic lands, some accepted the Druids, some Druids became Christians (while remaining Druids), and others found themselves locked in arguments. We find Druids still mentioned in literature in Ireland as late as the 1100s, in Scotland until the 800s, and in Cornwall and Brittany until the late 600s. Wales is a special case. Welsh literature doesn’t mention Druids at all, though it is assumed they were there, until the 11^th and 12^th century at which time they are said to be poets and prophets, more like a fraternity of folklorists than civic leaders. The Isle of Man is sometimes called the center of the Druids but the literature doesn’t support that. It seems they had some Druids but they faded away by the late 800s.

But while Christians and Druids could get along well with each other, Rome didn’t like some of the influences Christians were falling under. One of the most offensive things about the Druids was their teaching that women were equal to men. More on that next time.  

Writers from Alexandria to Rome wrote of the Druids but much of their work is unreliable. Some confused the Germanic tribes in northern Europe with their Celtic neighbors or even assumed they were the same people. Their confusion led to generations of people confidently declaring this or that about the Celts only to be absolutely wrong. Others wrote to make the Celts look like savages that needed to be brought under the civilizing wings of the Roman Empire. They trumped up bizarre charges against them or made up things out of whole cloth such as this quotation from Caesar’s Gallic Wars:

“…many of the inland Britons do not grow corn. They live on milk and flesh and are clothed in skins. All the Britons stain their persons with a dye that produces a blue colour. This gives them a more terrible aspect in battle. They wear their hair long, shaving all the body except the head and upper lip.”

This quotation is remarkably accurate except in one sense: everything attested to here is false. The Celts were farmers and had been engaging in agriculture long before the city of Rome was founded. Even Strabo, a contemporary of Caesar, tried to get Rome to take on Britain not as a province but as a full on trading partner since, he said, they had riches in food and products that would enrich Rome and all of those would be lost if it was subjugated by the Empire. So…they grew corn (wheat, to us in the modern world).

They also were masters at weaving wool. Even as Caesar wrote this, the most expensive clothes available to the upper classes were British wool cloaks. It seems that Caesar’s editor failed to catch this transparent slander. Some Celts certainly wore skins but those were more utilitarian such as aprons and leggings.

Were they dirty (another slander from Caesar not in the quote above)? No, the Celts were famous for bathing and being clean. In fact…they invented soap making and their word for soap – sopa – is still our word for it today. They tended to bath in streams and open bodies of water, not the enclosed pools adopted later by Rome. To this day, Celts tend to prefer showers to baths and most Europeans have taken on this preference, shaking their heads at people who want to sit in their own dirty water and declare themselves “clean.”

Did they dye themselves blue? In times of battle, they used woad, an herb common throughout their territories, and applied it to the arms, legs, and face. It was not done to terrify their enemies – though it probably did – but because woad is a natural antiseptic and it also stops bleeding with the same basic mechanism that styptic power does when someone cuts themselves shaving. It also contains a compound that works as a pain killer for surface cuts. Rome considered the blue dye a sign of barbarism when it was a sign of advanced medical and scientific knowledge…passed on to each generation in turn by their intelligentsia, the Druids.

The Celts had a long tradition of learning that elevated the sciences and downplayed paganism. Superstition and the worship of gods and spirits was certainly present in every tribe, but the Druids treated the stories as more metaphor and symbol than depictions of reality and encouraged learning how to use herbs, leaves, seeds and foods for medicine while the “educated and civilized” nations of Egypt and Rome were still using donkey urine, manure, vomiting, exposure, and bleedings to “heal” the sick. Celts have been portrayed – along with other ancient people such as Native Americans – as guardians of the planet, proto-environmentalists. This seems to have merit as Celts believed everything on the planet – animal, plant, or rock – was here to teach us something. If a plant grew in abundance near one of their villages, it would be studied until it was understood why the gods blessed them with that particular plant. They were medical herbalists – the first in the west (there is evidence that Asia had quite a few using herbs appropriately even earlier and current research in Africa leads us to believe there might have been early herbalists there as well).

One of the first named Druids of power and influence in ancient Ireland worked with the Nemedians (an early tribal kingdom in an island made up of tribal kingdoms). His name was Mide, pronounced the same as my last name. While some of my relatives say we descended from him, it is more likely that our name (Mead) comes from living in a meadow or brewing mead (a fermented, honey infused wine or beer) or both. Of course, I guess we could have descended from a Druid who grew malt and wheat and made beer, rather like a Catholic monk might do later at a monastery. But that’s a bit of a reach…

Mide is known for beginning the process of moving the tribal kings from their isolationistic ways and toward a united Ireland (Eire). He was the one who lit the fire at Uisneach, now called Rathconrath in County Westmeath. That fire was said to be at the exact center of the country and was a symbol of the unity of the Celtic people who lived there. It burned for seven years and is said to have been the source of every fire in Ireland. After it had burned as long as it needed to burn (remember that the word “seven” is not always to be taken literally. It often meant “complete” or “holy” as it did in Jewish and Christian scriptures) it was remembered once a year when Druids from the various tribes came together on May 1^st – Beltaine – to light the fire and conduct schools, courts, and supervise religious observances. This was certainly pagan in that it venerated Bel, a solar god worshipped not only by Celts but also by Gauls.

Eventually, the importance of the place where Mide lit the fire and the Druids continued to gather would be called the center – Midhe – of Ireland. It is now the County of Meath, or “middle.” The High King, the Ard Righ, of Ireland was then appointed and ruled from that province, not his own, in order to make every province equal in his heart and in matters of justice. The importance of this site cannot be overstated. Geoffrey of Monmouth would later use it in his Arthurian legend story and claim that Merlin came from Midhe and magically took stones from there to build Stonehenge. Cool story but please remember that Druids didn’t build Stonehenge and we have no evidence they ever used it.

Wherever Celts lived, the area Druids would gather in these annual meetings, whether in Germany, France, Galatia, or Spain. Going without the Druids to adjudicate matters, retell the stories, and more was just unthinkable. So interwoven was the need for advice and counsel from Druids that the Irish gods even had their own Druids counseling them! One cycle of tales about Cathbad, the Druid and counselor of the king of Ulster, said that no one could speak at court or any assembly until he had spoken. Kings didn’t make a move without talking with a Druid. Why? That limited the decisions they would make to those that were in character with the history and nature of the Celtic people. Think of it this way: it is somewhat like consulting the Constitution of the US before making a law (which I wish our lawmakers would do). The Constitution was plainly written to keep the character of the fledging USA the same through the ages. Druids performed that function in the Celtic world.

Not every Druid was noble, of course. It was a Druid who invited Caesar to invade Britain in order that he could use Rome as an ally against another Druid and thereby consolidate his own power. In the 9^th century books about the life of St. Patrick we find a story about eight or nine Druids who tried to assassinate him. This latter story is probably made up to create a Christian-Druid conflict that the Christians won rather like the English tale of St. George and the Dragon (interesting, isn’t it, that the English flag is the cross of St. George whereas the flag of the Celtic Welsh is…a dragon?). By contrast, Patrick himself speaks of two Druids, Ida and Ono, who gave him their house which he then converted into a religious community center. Stories abound in ancient Irish literature of Druids hearing the gospel story and dropping their staffs, rejoicing, and saying that they have been waiting for this Jesus to come. The weight of evidence would indicate a great many Druids did, indeed, immediately follow Christ, telling their people that the signs in the sky and the ancient knowledge of their people told them that this savior would one day come. It makes me think of the time that Jesus told the Jews of his day that “My Father has sheep in other pastures.”

The most successful Christian missionary to Scotland got his start at the home of a Druid. Colmcille – known to us as Columba – was taken as a baby to the home of a Druid to get a prophecy about his life and to find out when it would be best to start his formal education. The Druid said he would be famous in both Scotland and Ireland. The High King at this time was Diarmuid MacCearbaill and he had both Druidic and Christian advisors. Later, his chief Druid would be made a saint. It seems that the two groups did not see each other as enemies after all.

When it comes to the origin of the Druids, historians are all over the map. It used to be the vogue to believe that the Druids were part of an earlier, aboriginal religion practiced by people that the Celts conquered. According to this theory, the Celts then took on their priests and religion. There is no evidence for this as far as I can see. Others say that Druids only existed in southern Britain and northern Gaul until the Northern Celts conquered other Celtic tribes and imposed their religion on them. There is no evidence for that, either. Well, okay, they give two reasons for saying this: 1) Caesar says Druids were unique to the Celtic people of Britain and 2) there is no mention of the Druids in Celtic tribes in Italy, Spain, or Galatia. The answer to these is that 1) Only Caesar says that and 2) Druids were absolutely in place in those other Celtic areas but they were not called by the name Caesar gave them – Druid. The class was consistent but the name for it was not.

The Galatians had an upper class called Semnotheoi which linguists and historians now believe was a synonym for Druid. Several ancient writers, in fact, call them Druids. The Semnotheoi worked out of an oak sanctuary…just like Druids. They held the people together with story and they also served as doctors, lawyers, lawgivers, and administrators…just like Druids.

One thing Druids and Semnotheoi were not called by any ancient or classical writer was “priests.” That kills the idea that the Celts just adopted the priesthood (Druids) of a people they conquered somewhere before 400BC. Still, it is amazing how pervasive the idea of Druids as priests is in popular literature. Why? In the late 1700s and through the 1800s, a Celtic, Neo-pagan revival swept through England and, to a lesser extent, Wales, Scotland, and America. Suddenly, neo-paganism, Wicca, and folk magic were being taken seriously by the educated classes and in their fervent imaginations, all of these “earth religions” needed a center, a priesthood. They declared Druids to be those mysterious priests who disappeared under the heel and sword of evil, joy-killing Christianity. Even today, people who should know better don white robes and walk around Stonehenge every Summer and Winter Solstice even  though Druids didn’t build Stonehenge, there is no evidence they ever used it, they didn’t wear white robes, and they usually had enough common sense not to do such things. Yet, this “awakening” of the neo-pagans in England soon spread through the world via Theosophy, Wicca (a completely made up religion with no historical roots), Steinerism, Aleister Crowley, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Thelema and a host of other attempts to find a race or history based religion devoid of Christian rules. Most of what people “know” about Druids came out of this mess, not history. (before you ask, yes, this continues in the modern New Age and sometimes turns very ugly as it did with some in Hitler’s circles who were devotees of neo-paganism and myths about magic, secret/lost science, and hidden knowledge in Aryan mountain redoubts)

The Druids fulfilled the same role as Hindu Brahmins do today in their society. They were not priests. Rather, they were the intelligentsia whose name is somehow related to the oak groves they used as bases for learning and administration.

When you read the earliest mention of Druids in classical literature, it is important to remember who is writing. For example, the great historian, Poseidonios, wrote 52 books on history about 160 years before Christ. He was a Greek but he was a huge fan of the Roman Empire and that flavored his writing as much as Shakespeare’s need to please the current monarchy flavored his writing, turning Macbeth and Richard II into villians. As a Stoic, Poseidonios believed the Roman Empire was the best hope of the world when it came to organizing the nations, ending war, and enforcing a code of the brotherhood of man. Anything that threatened the Empire or its goals he considered uncivilized or evil…and that included the Celts. As he is one of the first writers to write about the Celts (he traveled extensively – not that usual among historians of his day) we have to take what he says about the Druids with a grain of salt, much as we do with the writings of Caesar.

Poseidonios said that the Celts had three upper levels – Bards, who were the singers and poets, the Vates, who were the scientists, and the Druids who were scientists as well as administrators and lawgivers. In reality, these were probably all Druids, but with different specialties. He said that the Druids were so highly regarded that they were able to stop wars between Celtic tribes just with their words and authoritative presence. About the same time, other writers expanded on the role of the Druids calling them historians and saying that they taught that mankind and the universe was eternal, perhaps troubled by fire or water at times, but never to be destroyed. Then we come to Caesar and his calling the Druids priests. It seems that he confused them with the priests of the Celts which would include some of the Vates, not the Druids as a whole. One of the reasons he might have made this mistake is the assertion of Strabo that no sacrifice was made without the presence of a Druid. What Caesar and Strabo failed to notice was that the Druids did not make the sacrifices but supervised them as a representative of the people.

Be careful with Strabo. He wrote for one reason – to give Rome reasons to attack and conquer the Celts. He painted them as savages who embalmed the heads of their enemies (nothing like this has been found in Celtic lore, art, or burial sites) and described horrific, gory human sacrifices (also completely missing from the historical record) and said the entrails and blood splatter of the poor victims were used for divination. Caesar was not much more accurate at times but he got some things right such as the Druids keeping their teachings oral rather than written. He even got the motivation right – “they did not want their doctrine to become public property, and in order to prevent their pupils from relying on the written word and neglecting to train their memories…”

The Celts DID write, by the way. Caesar says they wrote using the Greek alphabet and that was sometimes true, but they also used Ogham script, a series of lines intersecting a central line. They adopted various alphabets from surrounding peoples and left behind “books” as well as tablets and engravings that we are finding in bogs and forests to this very day. Caesar said that Druids taught that souls transmigrated upon the death of their bodies. In other words, when someone dies, their soul enters another person who is being born. This version of eternal life is not new or particularly unique; it forms the basis of much of the teaching of the Dalai Lama, for example, who was chosen after “proving” that he was the reincarnation of the last Dalai Lama. Caesar had it partially correct here as that WAS one form of eternal life to the Celts but not the only form. They also believed that the soul would travel underground to the place of their birth (or the homeland of their people). There, it would become a permanent part of the landscape – a tree, a rock outcropping, a brook, or an animal that lived in a forest. Or…it could walk its homeland as a benevolent spirit, speaking wisdom to its family for generations before entering another person or a landscape feature. There was a Celtic version of hell but it is hard to nail down. The closest thing to it I can find is the Nordic version of hell – a lonely place of eternal darkness and bitter, deep cold. Endless winter was hell for the people of the north.

In the classic Scottish song “Loch Lomond” you hear a prisoner of the Jacobite wars singing a remembrance of this ancient Celtic belief. The story of the song is that two soldiers were captured in the failed War of Scottish Independence in 1745. Taken to England and jailed, one was scheduled to hang while the other was going to be released. The one who is going to die is the one singing the song. “You’ll take the high road, but I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye” means that the one who is released will have to take the high roads across the northern moors of England and over the southern Uplands of Scotland but the singer, the one who will be hanged, will travel the low road, under the earth, and be in Scotland first.

The call of the ancient beliefs was so strong – only weakening in more recent centuries where skepticism is often confused with virtue – that most churches in Scotland have a Green Man carved somewhere inside. Even in that harsh form of Calvinism and joyless Protestantism that took hold in Scotland, the common working men who built the churches tucked in the face of a wild man in the woods, a spirit that walked unseen by most of the clergy, but seen by their congregants as they walked along the lochs and burns, up the bens (mountains), and through the old forests of Scotland.

I said I wouldn’t try to turn this into a comprehensive history of the Celts and I am going to stick to that decision…but…we need to talk about how the Druids arose, why, and what function they served and that means we need to know a few more things about the Celts.

The Celtic people once covered Europe from the Iberian peninsula to Turkey and from Northern Italy to the northern shore of Germany. They existed in major tribal groups but they considered themselves one people. They shared a set of languages that allowed them to understand each other (and quickly mark who were brethren and who were strangers) and they set down roots. They were not nomads, neither were they uncultured or uncivilized. They were farmers, herders, artisans, and poets without equal. They were also among the first to make iron tools and they became experts in building roads even in swampy bottomlands or high Alpine passes.  In fact, in recent decades, historians have found that many roads that were once considered Roman roads were really much older, made by the Celts and later used by Romans. The more you know about them, the more you wonder how they could retain such unity across vast distances and how they maintained a highly structured society that stayed the same whether they were living in Switzerland or Denmark. The answer is simple…

They had a story.

Many historians have commented on the similarities between Hindu and Celtic cultures when it comes to organization. Some have tried to trace these ideas back in time to see if the two groups co-existed in the same place at some time or if they came from the same place. They most likely shared some proto Indo-Aryan roots but much of that has to be established through linguistics, artifacts, and DNA studies and those are ongoing. There is something to be gained by looking at the Celts and Hindus to see how they continued to exist despite migration, invasion, and frequent domination by more powerful tribes/nations. Both had a “footprint” that covered a great amount of territory, constantly changed, and yet they kept their identity.

Through story.

I won’t get into the nuances and horrors of the Hindu caste system here but allow me to say that the Celtic system, while it had similarities, was quite different. Druids were the top class (or caste) in Celtic society and being a Druid often ran in families, but Druids were just as frequently voted into their position. They were the doctors, priests, educators, lawyers, historians, and philosophers of the Celtic people and they held the people together through story.

It is one of the few facts that most people know about the Celts – they didn’t write down their history until after the fall of the Druids. Why was the writing down of their story forbidden? Some Romans (and modern day Roman apologists such as Nora Chadwick) will tell you that that was a power move by the Druidic class. As long as they held a stranglehold on the people’s story, they tell us, they could control them. Should the story fall into the hands of the common folk, they tell us, then the Druids would lose their power and fade away. Chadwick, in fact, tells us that that is exactly what happened.

And she’s wrong. Most historians would back me up on this one.

Without stories, we would just be meat eating machines with shoes. Stories elevate us, give us meaning, place us in the universe, give us direction, give us community, and give us hope even in the middle of the darkest night. And nights get very dark indeed in the northern climes.

The Druids were the ones who told the story. They supplied the glue that held the Helvetii, Andecavi, Taurini and the rest of the Celtic tribes (for a fairly good list, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Celtic_tribes).

We do not know what the word “Druid” means. Some have written confidently that it refers to oak trees – where Druids were said to sit and recite the stories – or forests in general – where you might suddenly come upon a wise Druid – and others claim that ancient Celtic words for “knowledgeable ones” look a bit like “Druid.” As you can probably tell, I am not convinced by any of these explanations. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that it was connected with the oak, acorns, or the forest for every Celtic tribe had a sacred tree and all of them gathered by trees to hear their stories, settle disputes, contract marriages, or engage in tribe-wide celebrations. Whomever built the standing stones and stone circles in the Celtic lands (before the rise of the Druids…we think) might have been creating artificial trees/forests as a permanent place to call their own.

Tree worship – or worship centered in the middle of trees – competed with Yahweh throughout the Old Testament and there are numerous incidents recorded in those 39 books where God calls upon the people to cut down their groves and return to Him. Some Celts believed that their souls migrated into trees (individual or a particular wood or forest) upon their deaths. To this day, the rowan tree is sacred in Scotland though, to be honest, not one out of a hundred could tell you why. As others came near the Celts and found their wise men walking in or around the woods, their encounters entered their songs and stories. It is where Tokien’s Gandalf and J.K. Rowling’s Dumbledore came from.

Still, wherever their class name came from, they were the guardians of the character of the people. The stories were not dry histories or just long recitations of genealogy (though Lord knows there were plenty of those); they were the stories that shaped what it meant to be a Celt. Those stories belonged to the Celts and to no one else. To keep them from becoming the stories of others and to keep them from changing, they were never written down. The Druids would study the stories and songs for years – most say seven or eight – before they were allowed to tell them. This was an intense period of study rather like that undergone by prospective taxi drivers in London. For those who don’t know about that, to get a license to drive a taxi in London, you have to pass a verbal test where you are grilled about going from this address to that address. You literally have to memorize every single street, alley, dual carriageway, close, and cul-de-sac in one of the largest, most complex cities in the world. They say it is equivalent of an American master’s degree. The Druids spent all day, every day in the study of the story so that the story could be guarded and passed on to the right people.

Modern day equivalents of this exist. In Islam, it is forbidden to translate the Quran. While Arabic has moved on and taken several divergent forms, the language of the Quran is never allowed to be updated or harmonized. If you have a copy of the Quran in English or French on your bookshelf you need to understand that that is NOT considered a Quran by any Muslim. I read the Quran in English (I have no Arabic beyond simple greetings) and have been reminded time and again by Muslims that I have not read their book because I did not read it in its ancient form. Many schools teach the Quran to young boys who show a gift for memorization. They memorize it, often by sound, without understanding the words they are saying. They, and most Muslims, rely on their own priestly caste to tell them what is or what is not Islamic. (Before you look down on them, remember that most Christians are Biblically illiterate. It doesn’t matter if you CAN read your book if you never DO)

The Hindu scriptures and many of their religious ceremonies are entirely in Sanskrit (this also applies to some Buddhist texts and rituals). Sanskrit is considered a dead language though it is still spoken in some villages. It would be considered sacrilege to translate the Hindu texts into more modern languages because the story and the language and its power are all considered parts of one whole.

That is the way it was with the Druids and their stories. Stories were too powerful to be allowed in the hands of just anyone. What if another tribe appropriated their story (as many white people do when they claim to be Native American) or what if their stories get lost and watered down (as Nordic myths turned into comic book superheroes such as Thor)? To keep the people together, they need a common story and that story had to be pure to retain its power. That was the main role of the Druidic class.

Before we get into part 2, here is a list of the main books I am using for sources. I also use my private collection of songs, histories, interviews, and explorations.

“The Celts” by TGE Powell

“In Search of Ancient Ireland” by Carmel McCaffrey and Leo Eaton

“Who Was St. Patrick?” by E.A. Thompson

“Carmina Gadelica” by Alexander Carmichael

“The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World” by Ian Barnes

“The Ancient Celts” by Barry Cunliffe

“The Celts” by Jean Markale

“The Druids” by Peter Berresford Ellis

“Caesar’s Gallic Wars” by Julius Caesar

Back to our story…

Christians entering Celtic lands did not try to stomp out pre-Christian beliefs. As they did elsewhere, they absorbed them and changed them, giving Christian names to sacred wells, rivers, and mountains and transforming ancient tales of gods to sacred tales of the saints. Several of the early saints had Druidic names or family members who were Druids – and who were accepted, not condemned.

Christians had a hand in crafting the oldest surviving Irish legal code, the Senchas Mor, in 438AD quickly followed by the criminal law, Book of Acaill. In both, Druids are mentioned and given legal status by the Christian-influenced law of the land. They were not burned, imprisoned, or banished; that is a slander told by New Age Druid revival groups and modern witches.

It IS true that, after the arrival of the Christians, their status changed. In Irish law, Druids were no longer the top rung of the social ladder. Irish society, like all societies, was stratified by law and custom  – ever watched Downton Abbey or studied the caste system in India? Legal stratification of culture and professions exists in all developed countries. Some of this is understandable and necessary such as laws that say who can practice medicine or law. Some of these caste/strata type laws don’t make much sense – such as the English system declaring who is a gentleman and who is not (it is a matter of bloodline, not money or behavior) or the fact that members of the US government in Washington, DC are not subject to many of the laws they make for the rest of us. Even in the USA where “all men are created equal” it is true that “some are more equal than others” – to borrow from George Orwell’s classic “Animal Farm.”

In Irish law, all occupations were listed and regulated so that you knew exactly where you fit in the social strata. A Druid was at the same level as a satirist (cainte) or a prophet or soothsayer . They were also the same rank as a brigand…and that has caused some confusion. In modern English, a brigand is a bandit or gang member but in the time of the Senchas Mor, “brigand” referred to an independent soldier, similar to what would later be called a mercenary. It was considered an honorable – but not the most honorable – profession.

Studying the Senchas Mor shows us that Druids were allowed to rise higher, but not as Druids. They could become Christian priests and bishops and they could become magistrates and judges; they were not held down by holding high positions in pre-Christian Ireland. However, if they became ill and needed care, they would only receive the amount of food and money that was given to lower level magistrates such as the boaire (literally, cow magistrate. It meant something roughly akin to a town mayor). Irish law is very specific about how much care each member of society is to receive when in need (and none are excepted). Seven hundred years later, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, Irish law was once again given a massive overhaul, resulting in the famous Leabhar na hUidre (see photo). Druids were not written out and the laws concerning their status and rights were unchanged. That would argue strongly for a peaceful coexistence between Christians and Druids and a considerable overlap between them (as in – many Christians were Druids and many Druids were Christian).

An important note about that last bit: some believe nothing was changed in Irish law because the Druids were gone by then. There is an argument to made for that but I find it unconvincing. So far.

Remember this: Druids were not priests of pre-Christian religions. They were the upper class, the intelligentsia, the wise people, the social leaders. There was a hereditary component to who was allowed to be a Druid but it seems that you could go to school and learn enough to become one even if you weren’t from the right family. They did not enslave the people nor did they execute them ritually or otherwise, regardless of what Caesar said. He was writing to 1) enlarge his reputation among his people and 2) justify his “heroic” deeds in warring against the Celts.

Ah… the Celts. Perhaps I have raced ahead and not talked about the Celts and their origins and travels enough to give this tale some context. Let’s go back and do that.

While the ultimate origins of the Celtic people is forever lost to us, we know that they were a people with their own customs, organization, and language very early in recorded history. Herodotus wrote about the Celts in the 450s BC. He didn’t give us much detail, which is a pity, but he mentioned a village they inhabited by the Danube. We now believe he was referring to Styria in Austria (see photo). His geography was a bit confused but it seems clear today that he placed the Celts as living in lands from Asia Minor west to the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal, Spain) and up past Austria. That would put them right up against Rome and the Germanic tribes of northern Europe or, in other words, between a rock and a very hard place. He, and other ancient historians, counted the Celts among the four major barbarian tribes along with the Libyans, the Persians, and the Scythians.

Most Celts would not have called themselves Celts. Most of them would have used local tribal names (as we saw among the pre-Roman tribes of Scotland in that series printed here, e.g. The Kindred Hounds). One major tribe of the Celts DID call themselves the Keltoi, the hidden people, and that name eventually became used for all Celts. The languages these tribes used are easily shown to be related when we examine their writing, coins, and place names but they would have found it difficult or even impossible to understand other tribes of Celts even though they consider them brothers. Even today, there are several versions of Irish Gaelic (the official form is a compromise mash up version) and the Gaelic of Scotland is quite different from one island to another… and none of those Gaelic languages have anything in common with Cornish, Manx, Welsh, or Breton. We can only imagine the scores of forms of Celtic language during the time of Christ.

Their origins are lost to us. Theories abound. We know that they lived not only west of Rome but east, serving as mercenaries to various barbarian tribes as early as 390 BC. They seemed able to easily travel by river or through mountain passes in the Baltics, Alps, Apennines, or Cairngorms when other tribes considered those ranges impassable. They lived in many of the same regions as the Gauls and are often confused with them by historians – but give them a break, there was much intermarriage between the groups and the Celts nearly filled some Gaulic territories, displacing the native tribes for centuries. Alexander the Great met them in Bulgaria. When they entered Macedonia in 150BC they were called the Galatae. They joined with two other Celtic tribes and moved into Asia Minor where they were known as bandits and troublemakers for nearly a hundred years before settling in Northern Phyrgia, afterwards known as Galatia. Paul would write them a letter which survives in our New Testaments.

By this time, the Celts were well established in Ireland and Britain. We know this by a record kept by Pytheas of Massilia (325-323 BC) who sailed from Massilia (modern day Marseille in France) around Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast to the British Isles. He didn’t get to Ireland but was told about it and had someone draw a rough map, literally putting Ireland on the map for the first time. He assumed the same people lived on both islands (only partially true) and reported their name as Pirtani. That was probably his take on the name they called themselves, Prydain – the Welsh word for Britain. It was hearing the word “Prydain” and mispronouncing it that gave rise to Caesar reporting that the island was Britannia, occupied by the Britanni.

How did the Celts become so widespread and where did they come from? The second part of this question is still being very widely argued and there is no consensus. I believe the bulk of the evidence indicates that they came from the Western Mediterranean region. It seems that wars and weather moved them west and east and even somewhat to the northeast but the major factor in their migrations was weather related – the Ice Ages that moved across Europe several times. Just as native tribes on the other side of the world moved across ice bridges from Siberia and the Orient to the North American landmass, Celts moved up through mountains and established themselves in northern Gaul as the ice sheets retreated. The Celts were into agriculture fairly early in their history and didn’t mind settling down when the weather was good or moving on (with seeds and plants in tow) when it wasn’t. They were warlike but no more so than most tribes and certainly nothing like the Norsemen. They did not take most of the lands they lived in by conquest – they just got there first when the weather changed. They were highly mobile and, in fact, one of the characteristics of Celts even today is that they are likely to be on the move.

I have heard it said many times that the greatest export of the Irish and Scottish nations are not souvenirs, songs, and whisky, but its people. They have covered the earth with their children – explorers, inventers, soldiers, sailors, settlers. Gaelic is spoken more outside of Scotland than in it because Highlanders and Islanders (Hebrideans) moved to new countries early and often – willingly and unwillingly at times (see the Scottish Clearances and the Irish famines).

If you want more on Celtic history, art, language, and migrations I can provide that to you…but we are going to get back to the Druids next time. It will be soon.

I have been a blue salmon

I have been a wild dog,

I have been a cautious stag,

I have been a deer on the mountain

And a stump of a tree on a shovel

I have been an axe in the hand

A pin in a pair of tongs

A stallion in stud

A bull in anger

A grain in the growing

I have been dead, I have been alive

I am a composer of songs

For I am Taliesin

After a long break, I decided it was time to start a new series. I will try to make this one shorter than the last two. I will give you a short history of the Celts by looking at their leaders, the Druids. Look at the bottom of this blog for the books I am using. Of course, I am adding to the knowledge found there the things I have learned by traveling, listening, and absorbing the songs of the Celtic people.

The Greeks were the first to write of the Celts, calling them the Keltoi after a name the Celts called themselves meaning “hidden people.” In Irish Gaelic, the word “ceilt” means to hide or conceal and it comes from the name of the people themselves. They were the original Hidden People.

The earliest writers to mention the Celts were hostile witnesses – Greeks and Romans. They were not interested in a passionless, “just the facts”, look at Celtic culture and history. They were propagandists writing to justify their wars against the Celts and the subjugation of the Celtic people in the name of the higher and better people of the world. It was as if the only early history we had of Native Americans was written by the cavalry men who led massacres of their villages or as if the Germans circa 1940 wrote the only surviving history of the Jews.

I came across Julius Caesar’s “Caesar’s Gallic Wars” when I was ten. I was frustrated to see it was in Latin and there was no English or Gaelic version of it available. I hunted it down eventually and read one of the first accounts of my people and their customs, religion, and social organization. Even then – around the age of 12 – I knew to take his book with a huge grain of salt. Still, it was what was available, and it did show some light on a dark and hidden piece of history.

The Druids – who were not priests, as is commonly assumed, but social leaders – are assumed to have had a blanket prohibition against writing down their history and songs. It was only after Christianity displaced the ancient Celtic religion(s) that Celts began to write their own story. How much had been lost by then is open to argument – and scholars have certainly been arguing about it. Fortunately, for the Celts and for historians, the Irish language became the third major language of all European civilization about this same time (after Latin and Greek) as tribal conflicts and the Northmen (often also Norsemen or Vikings) turned out the lights of culture and language throwing the whole continent into the Dark Ages.

The Romans said that they stomped out the Druids because they were appalled at their blood sacrifices but anyone who knows the Romans knows that excuse doesn’t wash. It is true that they repressed the Druid class but that was because it was the highest class – the Brahmans of the Celtic world, if you will – and the people looked up to them for guidance. They had to be controlled or eliminated so any excuse would do. Rome pursued the Druids and the Celts physically relocated again and again to protect their leaders and, by that, their own culture and history. They left Galatia (where we get the word “Gaul” and, of course, Gaelic) and points east to head north and west. The Romans pursued them into Gaul (think Germany, France, Austria, and surrounding areas) and the Celts moved into the British Isles. Eventually, the Celts would only survive on the edges of the continent: the Irish in Ireland, the Scots in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the Welsh behind their fortress of mountains, and the Kornu in Cornwall. Other Celtic lands would be the edges of Spain and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.

Pliny the Elder, who lived during the time of Jesus and the apostles, wrote of the decline of the Druids and said the Romans repressed them because they practiced human sacrifices. The fact is, no Celtic society has ever been shown to practice human sacrifice…but Roman societies often did, either as an act of worship or as an act of repression. Leaders and rulers of nations subjugated by the Romans were often dragged to death, chained and left to die of exposure, crucified, torn apart by beasts, ritually strangled, or beaten to death. Druids never did such things – either to Romans or to their own people.

The reasons Rome abolished the Druids and killed them when they could was because Druids were the educated class who could and did organize resistance to Rome. Caesar, Augustus, Tiberias, and Claudius all issued decrees to banish or kill Druids. The Celts usually responded by moving outside of Rome’s reach or allowing their Druids to go underground, pretending to obey the decree while keeping their culture alive. How alive? Several Roman scholars in the first few centuries AD wrote treatises on numbers, weather, or nature that were copies of the teaching of the Druids. That indicates that the class and its information were not lost and, in fact, were powerful enough to influence and educate their conquerors.

When Christians came, they were widely welcomed by the Druids. Later Christian writers made up stories of great battles (intellectual and via miracles and signs) between missionaries and the Druids but history contradicts this. T.G.E. Powell says unequivocally that there are no examples of Christians being martyred in Ireland and several early Christians wrote of the Druids hearing the gospel including the story of Jesus and his birth, death, and resurrection only to break out in rejoicing, telling the missionaries that they had been waiting for them.

When Columba “brought Christianity to Scotland” by landing on Iona, there were two Druids there who told him they had already done so and, in fact, they were bishops. Columba drove them off forcibly (he was a warrior at heart and had killed in battle before). Many early Christian priests and teachers were called Druids. The earliest extant life of a British saint, “A Life of Samson” (425-505 AD), refers to the saint as a “most wise Druid.” A 7^th century British saint’s story, St. Beuno, has him looking up as he died and seeing the Holy Trinity, the saints, and Druids waiting for him in heaven.

This connection with the word “Druid” and with the concept and people of “Druid” would factor in early controversies in Christianity. That, next…

In the aftermath of the Battle for Blair Mountain, rumors persisted about the number of dead and injured miners. After all of these years we still don’t have firm numbers. The best estimates run from a dozen to fifty. Those are very low numbers for a battle that had forces of this size, aircraft, howitzers, machine guns, and grenades but the numbers were huge in the eyes of the residents of the tiny communities of West Virginia. The total size of the forces involved – miners and government – is also impossible to state with any certitude. The best guesses run from ten thousand to twenty thousand. This blog is being written in mid February 2013. Just the prior week, the National Geographic Channel had a program focused on this battle, but in a strange way. The show is called Diggers and focuses on two men with metal detectors who go around the nation getting way too excited about finding a coin or a nail. This time, they were all around Blair Mountain and were shocked that no matter where they pointed their detectors they found brass from fired cartridges – most 30.06 but other calibers were represented as well – and more than a few live rounds.

The fact is that the miners lost and lost big. They didn’t even win a moral victory for national press outlets painted them as reds and wild mountain men with guns going against their government. The nation sighed in relief that their troops had reestablished law and order. Miners appealed to Washington to hear their reasons for taking up arms and also begged the government NOT to pull back federal troops for, now, they feared retribution from Baldwin-Fett goons, sheriffs and deputies on the take, and the economic power of the mine company owners.

Washington held meetings for weeks – the Kenyon Committee – but got nowhere. No action was taken, no recommendations made.

You might be wondering why John L. Lewis wasn’t mentioned in the last couple of blogs. The reason was that he was pursuing a different path. He felt that someone high up in the union – that would be him – should become friends with the ruling Republican administration in DC. There is every reason to think his plan was a failure. He asked Harding’s labor secretary to keep the troops in West Virginia and have them disarm the coal company operators and create a safe place for miners to engage in collective bargaining. He got nowhere. Another union leader got an audience with President Harding himself and asked him to set up a conference where both miners and mine owners could meet and work out their differences, perhaps bringing an end to the struggle between them. Harding said he was sympathetic to that goal but that, as president, he had done his job by bringing peace back to West Virginia and that anything else had to come from the state’s own leadership (the nation was more federalist then than it is today). This worked against the miners in this case but in their favor in another case: coal company owners and others called for Bandholtz to use his troops to arrest miners but Bandholtz replied, correctly, that federal troops could not be used to arrest people who broke state laws.

Stalemate? Not so much. The coal company owners changed their tactics then and asked Bandholtz to arrest the miners for violating federal laws. Bandholtz turned to his military law expert, Colonel Walter Bethel, for an opinion and got a dandy one handed to him. Bethel said that since the president had asked the miners to disperse and disarm and since they did not, they were guilty of insurrection – a federal crime that could be punished by death. It looked like this tactic would work until President Harding refused to approve of it. Some conspiracy theorists say he was afraid that any investigation would shed light on the close ties that existed between the government and the mine owners. I think that is overreaching. In my opinion, Harding was a committed federalist who believed he was only to get involved in matters of national import and, then, only when given express authority in the Constitution.

I could be wrong, however. One assistant attorney general is on record as saying Harding refused to let his Department of Justice get involved because “it may embarrass the state officials.” But he might have been speaking for himself.

But while the president didn’t want to get involved, West Virginia’s Republican governor – Morgan – was ready to get revenge on the miners for embarrassing him and causing him to spend money, time, and political capital on driving them back from Blair Mountain. Mooney and Keeney returned from Ohio in order to avoid extradition. After a time hiding in this or that miner’s home, they turned themselves into the Governor himself on September 18^th 1921. They were charged with murder. Neither man had wanted the insurrection and both had publicly and privately fought against their own membership in an attempt to get them to go home and lay down their arms and neither of them were in the state when the battle occurred but Morgan was out for blood. John L. Lewis sent a telegram to Morgan asking him to provide protection for them (for he was sure some hired assassin would shoot them down in jail) and received a blistering reply from Morgan who called Keeney and Mooney Leninists, Trotskyites, and Bolsheviks.

Keeney and Mooney were able to post bail but were soon faced with a new charge: treason against the state of West Virginia. This was the nuclear option. It was designed to be a charge so heinous that even their friends would pull away from them. The problem was that the treason clause in the West Virginia Constitution is almost exactly the same as that in the US Constitution and both of them were written to make it very hard to convict someone of that crime unless there were many witnesses and their actions fell into a narrow definition of “levying war…adhering to its enemies…giving aid and comfort.” When legal authorities in other states heard about the charge levied against Keeney and Mooney they unanimously hooted in derision. The New York Times said “In West Virginia indictments for treason seem to be thrown about as carelessly as if they were indictments for [stealing] a chicken.” Some lawyers appointed by the state to press the case withdrew saying the charge was inappropriate and a waste of time since it was doomed to fail.

The governor finally found a prosecutor ready to press the charge, but he wasn’t a government prosecutor. He was Anthony Belcher, the chief lawyer for the association of coal companies! He would press the government’s case. They decided to go after an easier target first – William Blizzard, the miner who lead the battle after being told to stand down by Keeney and Mooney. They moved the trial from Chafin’s Logan County in order to find a fairer jury pool. By some ironic twist of history, they sent it as far from southern West Virginia as they could – to the eastern edge of the eastern panhandle. Why was it ironic? Because 63 years before in that same Charles Town courthouse they held the trial for John Brown, charged with treason and murder at Harper’s Ferry.

Even the judge at the trial was skeptical about the charge. He charged the jury to be careful to understand the difference between riot and treason and told them that unless they were prepared to believe that the miners intended to overthrow the entire government, they couldn’t find Blizzard guilty of treason. The jury listened and acquitted Blizzard on May 25^th 1922. The coal company lawyers billed the West Virginia government $125,000 for their time. It was a complete failure by Governor Morgan’s administration. The coal company lawyers weren’t done, though. They had been searching for a better candidate for the treason charge and were convinced they had found one in Walter Allen, a minor player whose role in the uprising is even today questioned.

However…something had happened to the judge. Most sources I have read indicate he was “gotten to” by the governor and/or the coal companies. For some reason, he changed his tune in his jury instructions, allowed jury members to be seated even after they said they were biased against the unions, and ruled against most defense motions during the trial. It was a farce and a guilty verdict was brought in against Allen. The judge must have felt a twinge of guilt for he allowed Allen to be released on bail pending appeal… and Allen disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again.

The state was fed up and tired of losing (and being ridiculed nationwide). It dropped charges against the other twenty men charged with treason, dropped the murder charge against Mooney… but decided to press the murder charge on Keeney…and lost that case, too.

Failing in the courts, the coal companies decided to win in church. They brought fire and brimstone preacher, Billy Sunday, to West Virginia to rail and preach against the unions. Sunday was an over-the-top caricature of a preacher. He was immensely popular in some circles but most educated Christians viewed him as half entertainment and half embarrassment. He said he’d rather be in hell with John Wilkes Booth than to live on earth “with such human lice” as union miners. “If I were the Lord for about fifteen minutes, I’d smack the bunch so hard that there would be nothing left for the devil to levy on but a bunch of whiskers and a bad smell.” In a state where religion was entirely “old time” and full of snakes and brimstone, Sunday swayed a great many away from the unions.

And then John L. Lewis showed up and made one of his biggest blunders. The need for coal had dropped dramatically after the end of the Great War and he decided this was a good time for a nationwide strike. Why? We’ll never know. Stockpiles of coal were at all time highs across the nation. The strike went on but it was a loss for the union. West Virginia miners even lost money and had to agree to lower wages by the time it ended. Lewis was furious and declared “Not one backward step!” but Mooney and Keeney called his decision a disaster and it was. The companies cut the price they would pay for coal along with the amount of daily wages owed to the miners. Lewis wanted to be president of the union and was afraid that backing down would hurt his chances so he plowed ahead while the union crashed and burned. In West Virginia, before Blair Mountain, the UMW went from 50,000 members to less than a thousand. Nationally, membership dropped from 600,000 to 100,000. There are still people in West Virginia today who can barely mention John L. Lewis’ name without spitting.

Smelling blood in the water, courts went after the unions and issued strike breaking edicts. The AFL lost 25% of its membership. Lewis responded by grabbing control of the rapidly shrinking UMW and forcing Keeney and Mooney out. The only ones left in the union were Lewis loyalists so Keeney and Mooney were given no love and no help on the way out. Keeney ended up working as a parking lot attendant, alone. Mooney left West Virginia and drifted for years with his sons (his wife divorced him) doing carpentry work. He tried to enter politics but lost every race. He returned to West Virginia and worked in a non-union mine for a short time before killing himself with a gunshot to the head. You can read his autobiography “Struggle in the Coal Fields” by contacting West Virginia University press.

The UMW was saved not by Lewis but by FDR. He used the union to help organize the vast numbers of unemployed men who were starving during the Great Depression. Lewis abandoned the AFL and joined the radical, Marxist CIO during this time. He organized strikes at General Motors, riots against management at other car companies and steel companies, and so many other out of control “work actions” that FDR publicly broke with him. Lewis would go further during World War Two, calling for a national strike right during the middle of the fighting. He was never forgiven for that by the bulk of the nation.

I won’t try to write more on the history of unions. Others have done that. I just wanted to cover this long forgotten period of history. It explains why fiercely conservative West Virginia (and other states) would vote for liberal Democrats – their parents and grandparents taught them to distrust anything Republican.

The union members of West Virginia and – more recently – Wisconsin and Michigan — had alienated the American middle class in their attempt to better their own lives. It would take a long time for them to learn that they could not win unless the middle class backed them and were sympathetic to their cause. Some haven’t learned that yet.

To recap: the striking miners have had enough. They are marching toward McDowell County right through Logan County. The sheriff of Logan County – Chafin – is in the pocket of the coal companies. He has amassed a private army of hundred of deputies and citizens of Logan County to stop the march as it enters the valley underneath Blair Mountain. West Virginia has no National Guard (except on paper)  and Washington has turned down the Republican governors’ requests for federal troops. Washington DID send Billy Mitchell, later to become the father of the US Air Force, and some planes into the state to monitor and report on the situation.

John Wilburn, a Baptist preacher, led an small group of armed union miners up the lower slopes of Blair Mountain  and right into a patrol led by Chafin’s chief deputy, John Gore. Gore had two deputies with him named Colfago and Munsie. The lawmen had been drinking moonshine and most accounts have them half drunk when they see the miners. After shouts at each other demanding that the other group disarm both groups opened fire. All three deputies died and one of the miners, a black man named Eli Kemp, was mortally wounded.

News spread quickly in both camps. Miners rallied even more quickly toward Blair Mountain and the road that led into Logan. On the state/federal/company side of the equation (for the companies and the government were so intertwined as to be one side) the organization was fast and fierce. While the state had no National Guard it DID have a general in charge of it – William Eubanks. He recruited 250 American Legionnaires from Welch, a town so in the fist of the coal companies that Sid Hatfield could be (and was) killed on the courthouse steps and no one would arrest those who did it. The sheriff of that county made himself absent on the day of the murder, giving the Baldwin-Felts men free range and control of the city. Now, that same town was sending in men to fight the striking miners and keep them out of Logan County. Six hundred more men came from Welch and its county (McDowell). Some put the number from McDowell County closer to 800 men.

Charleston’s former police chief – another coal company employee – couldn’t find many man in the capitol that would fight against the union miners so he rounded up the 30 high school ROTC students in town and made them join the anti-union army. Government officials opened up state and local armories, equipping the anti-union forces with machine guns, high powered rifles, over a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition… and airplanes.

To differentiate themselves from the miners whom they called rednecks (for the red kerchiefs hung around their necks) they adopted a de facto uniform of khaki trousers and campaign hats (the flat brimmed hats still worn by most state police) and topped it off with white armband. Being on the government side, they were well equipped with food, gum, cigarettes, etc. all on the taxpayers’ dime.

The miners were dismayed to find out that their leaders, Keeney and Mooney, had left the state. There is no reason to believe they were cowards; they had made no secret of the fact that they thought war against the state was a bad idea. They had tried to cancel the march but the miners were tired of their lives and the lies told them by government officials. They wanted action and they wanted it now. Keeney and Mooney had also been informed that warrants were out for their arrest in connection with extortion and murder in McDowell County. They were innocent of those charges but knew they would face a rigged jury in the county where the sheriff would allow Sid Hatfield to be shot down on the courthouse steps. They crossed the river to Point Pleasant, Ohio and then on to Columbus where they monitored the situation as best as they could – which, to be fair, wasn’t that good.

Bill Blizzard, a difficult, aggressive man who was head of the union’s District 17, took control without asking anyone what they thought about it. He organized the miners as quickly as possible and sent some toward Blair Mountain from the southwest and others from the north. He told them they would all meet up in Logan where they could dance on Sheriff Chafin’s grave.

While many on both sides of the approaching conflict had military experience in the Great War, that was trench warfare. This was warfare in mountains, thick brush, woods so thick that sunlight rarely reached the ground, cliffs and ravines cut by creeks and rivers that twisted left, right, and back on themselves. No plan of battle on either side held up. There was no real communication, though the government side strung telephone wires all over the place in order to keep in touch with its men. One lesson learned from the war, however, was evident in the lack of frontal assaults. The Great War had proven that those days were over; the machine gun would rule the field and any charging army would be slaughtered before it reached halfway to the defenders.

The miners tried pincer movements to reach the defenders (that is what I am calling those who were in the defensive positions. Remember that they were Chafin’s private army, the state police, and the men they could gather and pay to fight against the union miners). Most attacks were very slow as men worked their way through the brush and trees and fired only to receive machine gun fire in return. Not much progress was made by the miners against overwhelmingly superior numbers and guns.

Every direction the miners tried to use was blocked by men with machine guns. A group of miners went after their own gun and found one in the mine company’s store. They liberated a Gatling Gun and brought it up to their lines, immediately bringing it into play against government/company forces on the other side of Craddock Fork. The battle lasted three hours with neither side gaining ground until the government’s machine gun jammed. Miners pushed through their lines and got to Crooked Creek, less than four miles from Logan.

The defenders pulled back quickly and hastily arranged defensive works with dirt, rocks, and trees. They mounted their one remaining machine gun in such a way as to block any miners who wanted to pass by them and get to Logan. About ten (the number is uncertain) miners were badly wounded in their attempt to flank the machine gun or charge the defensive works. Others were wounded when they ran out to drag their union brothers off the road.

Sheriff Chafin decided to use the planes. They had dropped flyers the day before, telling the miners that they would be crushed if they did not lay down their arms and go home. This time, they dropped tear gas canisters and pipe bombs. They weren’t too careful with either armament load. Some pipe bombs landed near women washing their clothes. Mercifully, those were duds and didn’t go off.

President Harding wanted government representatives to go to the miners and ask them personally to retreat and stop this rebellion but he found no one willing to risk death working their way to the miners. Harding then went against the Constitution and ordered federal troops to enter West Virginia and fight. He chose two of the best infantry regiments in the entire Army – the 19^th and 10^th out of Columbus, Ohio and the 26^th out of Fort Dix, New Jersey. These were battle hardened warriors the federal government had not sent home after the war. They wanted to keep them around and now it seemed they had found a purpose for them. Harding also ordered a Chemical Warfare Unit into action with a large number of tear gas bombs, 21 aircraft, and artillery pieces (howitzers).

This was a scenario out of Billy Mitchell’s dreams but the rouge general had annoyed too many people in his chain of command by this time and was pulled out of the action. Major Davenport Johnson would command the federal troops. Keeney and Mooney heard about the oncoming attack by America’s finest and called for their men to disperse and return home. There are many who think they would have done just that had it not been for the actions of a group of state police who shot some innocent men who were walking along the road with no weapons. How could miners return home if the police were just going to shoot them down?

The miners decided to launch one last major attempt to take Blair Mountain on September 1^st before the bulk of federal troops and armament could arrive. They failed to blow a railroad bridge (the dynamite charge was discovered and disarmed by a deputy) and so had no way to keep the defenders from reinforcing themselves. The miners attacked anyway, feinting up the middle and then rushing in from both flanks. Machine guns fired back at them from all along the defenders’ front. The battle went on for most of the day but it was clear the miners would not take the mountain. As they backed away, the federal troops arrived. Two thousand one hundred crack troops came on to the scene.

Oddly, the miners thought this might be a good thing. They thought the soldiers would keep the private army of Chafin and the coal companies from attacking them. They were wrong. They sent out notices to all of the union marchers and then sent messages to the federal troops that no miner would fire on any of them. This seems to have been a sincere reflection of the union miners’ intention.

The troops moved into positions throughout Logan and McDowell County. They called for Bill Blizzard to come down and parlay with them. He did so and they searched him, finding a pistol. They were angry and almost arrested him but he showed them a Logan County permit to carry a concealed weapon so they gave it back to him. They told him to go home. “Does this mean you are going to only allow men with permits to keep their guns?” Blizzard asked. The soldiers said that was true (two reporters were nearby, one from the Tribune, who wrote this story down and made sure it got out). Blizzard said if that was true, what about the men on the other side? Would they also have to lay down their guns unless they had permits? The soldiers conferred for awhile and said that the other side could keep their guns if they had permits. This didn’t please Blizzard for he felt his men would be shot down on the road home if the soldiers didn’t disarm everyone on the government/company side – permit or not. They could not come to any further agreement and Blizzard left to talk to his men.

Later, reporters and witnesses said they saw tired, grubby, haggard looking miners walking along the road in groups… but no guns. When they were asked where their guns were, the answer was “When we need them again, we’ll know where to look for them.” They had cached their weapons in fear of being forcibly disarmed by the army or Chafin’s men.

Two small groups of miners didn’t get the memo, so to speak, and kept plugging away at defenders around Blair Mountain. The state police got so jumpy that they started shooting anyone who approached including two reporters who were out to interview them. Neither reporter died but they were arrested (!) and jailed for being in the way. Later, they wrote about their ordeal but were shocked to find out that the army would not let them post their report until they had censored it. The reporters protested that this was against the Constitution and were ignored. All mentions of miners or their families that might put them in a good or sympathetic light were struck from their dispatch.

By September 4^th, it was clear it was all over. Miners were openly walking to and from stores or along the rivers with their families and no one was shooting anyone any more. A thousand miners – more or less – had officially surrendered to federal troops. Many thousands just melted away through the woods. Only 400 guns were captured. The rest had been cached, ready for another day.

It seemed peaceful… but it wasn’t over.

Sheriff Chafin and his private army of coal company paid deputies and business owners held the high ground at the entrance to Logan County. A dirt road was the most direct route — and the only workable route — the striking miners could take into Logan as they marched their way to Mingo County. The Republican Governor of West Virginia appealed to the Secretary of War (now called the Secretary of Defense) for more arms and soldiers to bolster Chafin’s army but was turned down. Washington DC was convinced that this was a West Virginia problem and West Virginia needed to handle it on its own. It sounds foreign to our ears in 2013 to hear the federal government refuse to get involved in a state matter but federalism — the right of each state to govern itself in its own way — was the law of the land from the time the Constitution was written until it began to be seriously chipped away by FDR and LBJ and the Supreme Court they stacked with their political friends later in the mid to late 1900s.

Governor Morgan decided to go over the president’s head and appeal to … the New York Times. He made a public appeal for 1,000 men to help turn back an “army of malcontents…inflamed and irritated by speeches of radical officers and leaders.” President Harding was now under pressure to do something but he still refused to send the army. Instead, he sent in General Bandholtz, a true American hero. After sterling service in the Spanish-American War and the Great War, Bandholtz had served as a special ambassador to Hungary and stopped a large scale raid by Romanians intent on looting castles and manor houses in Transylvania. He was known to be a reasonable man, a diplomat, and a gentleman. His orders from Harding were simple: make the miners turn back.

Bandholtz arrived in the wee hours of the morning on August 27th and tried to get Governor Morgan to negotiate directly with the miners and their leaders. When Morgan refused, Bandholtz said that he would. He asked Morgan to come with him and, once again, Morgan refused. At 5AM, he got Keeney and Mooney out of bed and told them to come to the governor’s office to speak with him. They came immediately accompanied by their lawyer, Harold Houston. Bandholtz appealed to the two union leaders’ patriotism. He reminded them that the entire country was enduring hard times. His argument was that there were millions of unemployed men and if they followed the union’s lead, they would all rise up in armed insurrection. What would happen to America? Keeney and Mooney said they were willing to ask the miners to disperse but only if Bandholtz gave them an official request from the president. At first, he refused saying that he did not have that kind of authority but he later relented and sent a telegram that they could read to their men.

And here, politics and politicians failed their people yet again. President Harding said he would officially endorse Bandholtz’s telegram if Governor Morgan rescinded his request for troops and used his own National Guard instead. The problem was that Morgan couldn’t call out his guard because he had never gotten around to re-establishing it after the war. He had appointed an adjutant general but failed to give him any funding, staff, men, or equipment. So the president said he wouldn’t help Morgan until Morgan called out his own National Guard and there was no guard to call out. Stalemate. Except…

Behind the scenes, a precaution was taken that turned out to be a fateful error. Washington (historians argue about whether Harding knew about it or whether this came from his War Department), alerted Major General Charles Menoher to ready some planes from the Army Air Service to be ready to fly men and materiel to West Virginia in case the situation escalated. Menoher ordered a field in Kanawha (outside of Charleston, the capitol) to be readied. The senior command officer given direct command of that operation was none other than Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell — the man who would later become the father of the US Air Force and be courtmartialed for his trouble.

Billy Mitchell was loved and hated by this time in his long career. No one had a neutral view of him. High officers in the army and navy hated him because it was obvious he wanted to form his own armed force — a flying one — rather than work within the armed forces of the time. And every high ranking officer had his senators and representatives and cabinet ministers who would back him up. Some in DC loved him but most couldn’t stand Mitchell and thought he was a grandstander and self promoter. Mitchell’s wife had just left him — and divorce was almost always fatal to a general’s career in that day. Still, Mitchell was demonstrably excited about his “opportunity” in West Virginia. He immediately flew to West Virginia and stepped off his plane wearing a Colt revolver, spurs, and an elaborate uniform.

His first speech upon arriving detailed how he believed air power could end civil disturbances. Imagine hearing that today — that the government could end marches and strikes and public demonstrations by bombing and strafing citizens from the air. A reporter brought up the fact that West Virginia’s terrain was not that of France. Here, men could hide in steep walled gullies under the cover of brush. How would Mitchell get to them? Mitchell’s reply? “Gas.” He elaborated, “You understand we wouldn’t try to kill people at first. We’d drop gas all over the place. If they refused to disperse then we’d open up with artillery preparation and everything.” A general in the United States Army was casually and gleefully telling reporters that he was ready to use poison gas to kill Americans on American soil in violation of the Constitution. And he was serious. And no one was going to stop him.

Keeney and Mooney hired a car and drove all day and night, talking to every group of miners they saw, begging them to disperse and warning them of Mitchell’s plans. Most ignored them and a few even pulled gas masks out of their backpacks, salvaged from their time in uniform in the Great War. Finally, they found several men who served with Bandholtz and who respected him (as it seems all did who served under him). Those men helped them talk to other strikers and tell them to disperse. They didn’t mind fighting Sheriff Chafin and they didn’t mind fighting poison gas but they wouldn’t fight against Bandholtz. To them, he represented all that was right with the USA. It took all day and most of the next to reach the bulk of the miners. Reluctantly, with tears and anger, they turned back. Special trains were laid on to get the miners to their homes, avoiding travel through Logan County. It seemed that war had been averted and the crisis was going to pass. Bandholtz left West Virginia but, privately, sent messages to DC warning them that Governor Morgan wasn’t capable of keeping a lid on things in his state. He warned them that the crisis was NOT over. He was right.

In fact, the miners of West Virginia were not happy with the way things had turned out. They were angry and felt the full weight of the injustices of the last several decades on their shoulders and, now, the march was over and they were left with no hope of resolving their grievances. Some decided to take action regardless of the pleas of their leaders, Keeney and Mooney. They took over a train at Clothier, WV and planned to fill it with miners, run it without lights, and get to Blair Mountain for a sneak attack on Sheriff Chafin and the coal company’s men. Keeney and Mooney found out about the plan and, when they tried to stop it, their own men threatened to shot them in the head if they interfered. When other miners hesitated, they were told “To hell with Kenney! They are killing women and children up at Blair.”

Three hundred men eventually joined the train. They almost caught Chafin by surprise but a tax commissioner heard about the approaching plan and called the sheriff, catching him just before he left his office for the day. Chafin called the governor but got nowhere. Once again, Morgan was ineffectual, dragging his feet and waffling. Chafin them called the state police and got Captain Brockus to bring in a strike force. Brockus, you remember, hated the miners and had a sadistic streak in him. Chafin sent Brockus after a group of 30 miners who had annoyed him in the past. It was, in short, an excuse for him to take vengeance against some men who had stood against him.

And all of this was going on within a few hours of the peace organized by Bandholtz, Keeney, and Mooney. Bandholtz was leaving the state, unaware of what was happening an hour’s drive away from the capitol. Chafin knew he was stirring the pot and risking open insurrection but it appears he craved the battle that would result from his decisions. Brockus arrested several miners and made them march in front of his troopers as a way to shame and cow any other miners he might meet. That didn’t work out very well when he came upon a group of five miners and demanded “Who are you?” They replied, “By God, that is our business.” When Brockus decided to arrest them guns blasted from every window and doorway in town and from the open mouth of the mine pits. Three of the arrested miners were shot down by the troopers before they decided to take cover in a ravine by the road. Two died of their wounds and another would survive with three wounds. Brockus had no option but to pull back. With the darkness of the night and the confusing twist of roads and paths, quite a few troopers got lost. Some were led to homes of citizens opposed to the union and given shelter but the miners found them and led them away at gunpoint.

The next morning was Sunday, August 28th and newspapers made the battle sound like a war. They claimed scores of people killed, including women and children mowed down by gunfire (either by the miners or the troopers, according to the paper’s political bent). Keeney and Mooney had the papers print a letter from them begging the miners to lay down their arms. The letter was ignored. Miners began looting coal company stores of all their guns — including Gatling guns and other machine guns. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were also stolen and pressed into the union’s service. Cars and trucks were commandeered and used as transportation for men and weapons. Word of the uprising spread like fire and union miners from neighboring states began showing up on trains and in private cars. Some came from as far afield as Illinois. Governor Morgan stopped all train service to keep more from coming in so the miners just stood out in the road and took over any passing vehicle at gunpoint. Others pushed train engineers off the train and drove them themselves.

Miners told passers by that they were going to end martial law in Logan County and free the union members kept in jails there without trial. Others said they were going to Logan County to hang the sheriff. Tens of thousands of miners were on their way. Governor Morgan begged President Harding for help once again. This time, Harding issued a presidential proclamation ordering all armed men to return to their homes and he sent Bandholtz back to West Virginia. It was August 30th…

…the same day that a Baptist preacher named John Wilburn led a contingent of miners toward Blair Mountain. State troopers and deputies ran into them the next morning. The troopers had been drinking moonshine and complaining about the “redneck SOBs” who were causing them all this trouble when Wilburn’s men rose up and fired, killing three of them. One of the miners, a black man named Kemp, was also killed in the exchange.

The Battle of Blair Mountain had begun…

I’m leaving out a lot here. There were lawsuits filed and countersuits filed in reply. The courts found the Vigilance Committee to be an illegally formed militia without arrest or official powers of any kind. On June 27, Governor Morgan formed a new militia with orders to keep the peace until the newly reorganized National Guard could move units into southern West Virginia. Davis was put right back in charge of it. All of these moves and the scrambling for control in the state got the attention of Washington, DC and several in power there began questioning Governor Morgan’s ability to govern. Some senators called for action and told newspapers that West Virginia was in a state of civil war which could have been prevented, they added, had Washington acted sooner and held hearings on conditions in the mines. They didn’t mention that hearings such as those HAD taken place twice before and only had temporary results.

Speeches given in the US Senate compared the mine owners and state militia to British troops shooting down Irish civilians in their civil war or the Kaiser’s troops killing and raping their way through towns in Europe during the Great War. In case you think this is hyperbole, you need to comb through the archives at the capitol building in West Virginia and see the arms stacked before and after the Battle of Blair Mountain (which we are getting to — promise) and see photos of state troopers and mine guards in trenches, siting their Springfield rifles and Thompson machine guns at unseen foes across battle scarred fields. Still, the hearings were in large part a disappointment for the miners. They wanted to talk about constitutional rights but found little or no interest in the senate for that discussion. Instead, the senators wanted lurid details of violence and moonshining and dark deeds. Some things never change.

The miners saw what the senators wanted and switched tactics, bringing in witness after witness to murder and mistreatment. The unions told the senators that miners were well paid, earning $400-700 a month, a huge sum in those days. Miners were able to prove that the top rate for a non-union miner was less than $5 a day. Union lawyers accused the miners of trying to murder them. Upon cross examination, miners admitted to shooting at them but insisted they weren’t trying to kill them. “When a mountaineer shoots at you twice and doesn’t hit you, he wasn’t trying to hit you” one said. That got a laugh out of the senators to the chagrin of mine company lawyers. It became public that police officers, sheriffs, deputies, and militiamen were being paid by mine owners and that caused a huge uproar. Everyone in West Virginia and Kentucky had known that for years but only now was that being made known in the halls of the US capitol and the reaction was fatal to the mine owners’ case.

And yet… while the mine companies lost the battles in DC and while the unions thought they had won the day, the senators never got around to changing law or doing anything to help the UMW or the common miner. It was all show and sound and fury and headlines with no effect whatsoever on reality. It was shortly after returning from these hearings that Sid Hatfield was shot down on the courthouse steps in Welch, West Virginia (McDowell County) by Baldwin-Felts men. When no help came from Charleston or Washington, the miners realized they’d been abandoned again.

Sam Montgomery, a union representative and a friend of Sid Hatfield, said at his funeral “We have gathered here today to perform the last sad rites for these two boys who fell victims to one of the most contemptible systems that has ever been known to exist in the history of the civilized world.” He blamed “Sleek, dignified, church going gentlemen who would rather pay fabulous sums to their hired gunmen, to kill and slay men for joining a union than to pay like or less amounts to the men who delve into the subterranean depths of the earth and produce their wealth for them…There can be no peace in West Virginia until the enforcement of the laws is removed from the hands of private detective agencies and from those of deputy sheriffs who are paid, not by the state but by the great corporations, most of them owned by non-residents who have no interest in West Virginia’s tomorrow…Even the heavens weep…”

The miners could not control their anger. Sid Hatfield and his friend were shot down but their killers were freely walking around. Hundreds of union miners were in jails, most of them without a formal charge and without legal representation while gun thugs carried fully automatic weapons up and down the streets of coal company towns. Forty thousand miners — who were unable to work because of being blacklisted by the mine companies since they tried to form a union — volunteered to enter the county and sweep the gunmen and coal company owners out of it in one week but Keeney and others talked them out of it. Mother Jones came back to the state — older and not as mentally sharp as she had been before — and railed against Keeney and the unions for not allowing their men to go to all out war. Keeney tried to get the governor to agree to a set of demands and appoint a joint commission so as to avoid further fighting in his state but Governor Morgan flatly refused, turning down every single request made by the union leaders.

The same day Morgan was issuing his refusal to meet with the miners, the sheriff in Logan County saw miners arming themselves and telegraphed the state police for help. What happened next is so sad and Keystone Kop-like that you’d think it was made up. Twelve troopers came into a small town north of Logan to make a show of force. However, one of the troopers ran his horse into a parked car and fell off. Embarrassed and angry, he pulled the innocent driver out and started hitting him, chasing him all the way home. Armed miners were in the area and they took umbrage at this and decided to make their own show of force and they did about as well as the trooper. They fired on a state police car, riddling it with bullets before someone informed them that the car belonged to a railroad worker, not the police. More officers were dispatched but miners met them on the road, pulled them out of their car, disarmed them, and chased them away. The miners then cut the phone and telegraph lines leading into Logan, cutting the county off from the rest of the world. The police retreated and the incident ended.

Other miners were massing outside of Charleston. An estimated 600 armed men were planning a march through Logan County (they were ready to battle Sheriff Chafin) to get to Mingo County and free the union organizers being held without bail or charge in Williamson jail. Keeney and Mooney — the two leaders of the UMW — refused to have anything to do with the march or the demonstration that was planned before it. Newspapers and coal company owners laughed at the very idea that the miners could pull off such a march. Hadn’t the 1919 march failed? Wasn’t Sheriff Chafin ready with a small army of company paid deputies armed to stop them at the border of Logan County?

And yet, while they laughed, miners by the hundreds were arriving from all over southern West Virginia. Many wore the uniforms they’d worn in the Great War while most wore blue bib overalls with a red bandana — the latter becoming a de facto uniform for the march. Friends and enemies saw the bandanas and called them “rednecks” and, yes, that is where that name came from. By August 24, 10,000 armed men were ready to march.

A sad little story here: Mother Jones tried to stop the march but she did so through deceit. She had been in frequent touch with Governor Morgan, the miners’ enemy, and claimed that she had a telegram from President Harding himself asking the miners to disperse. She didn’t, of course. The miners saw through the ruse and were outraged at the lie coming from someone who once stood with them. Her reputation never recovered.

Sheriff Logan amassed his private army of 300 deputies and called on the citizens of Logan County to come out and face down the rabble headed their way. All strikebreaking miners were required to come out or be fired. He eventually got 3000 armed citizens on the line. He equipped them by raiding every store in his county. No only did they get bedding and food and clothing, they got fully automatic machine guns (legal to buy in every state in the US until the 1930s), cut down trees, and established breastworks, trenches, and barricades covering all approaches to the county line. The lines stretched for 15 miles, covering gaps between mountain ridges. One of those ridges was known as Blair Mountain and it was about to enter history.