Excerpt: After the Battle of Stanaford
"I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford [sic] Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I cam nearer the miners' homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood. I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets.
"In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse. When the little fellow saw me, he said, 'Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him.'
"The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company.
"The coroner went. The men were buried on the mountain side. And nothing was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives."
Source: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).
Related Articles
|
|