investigation of the hostilities in the West Virginia coalfields.22

On July 14, 1921 the Senate's Committee on Education and Labor, chaired by Iowa Republican Senator William Kenyon, began a three-month investigation of the recurring crises in West Virginia's coal mining industry. Interviewing scores of witnesses, including Sid Hatfield, union officials Fred Mooney and Frank Keeney, and Captain James Brockus, the Kenyon Committee's hearings aired innumerable abuses by the operators and kindled short-lived hopes among the miners for immediate reforms. In its October 1921 report, the committee condemned, among many other things, the practice in Logan County of paying the sheriff and his deputies from funds contributed by the coal operators instead of exclusively from the public treasury, but no immediate reforms were forthcoming.23

While in Washington testifying before the KenyonCommittee, Sid Hatfield learned that he and thirty-five miners had been indicted by a West Virginia grand jury for their alleged role in an attack on a non-union mining camp the previous summer. Although Hatfield suspected the charges were trumped-up by the state at the urging of the Felts family, still seeking vengeance for Hatfield's role in the Matewan Massacre, he returned to West Virginia to stand trial. On the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse in Welch on August 1, 1921, the gunmen of the Baldwin-Felts Agency avenged the deaths of Albert and Lee Felts and their colleagues by shooting to death the unarmed Sid Hatfield and an associate, Ed Chambers, as the two men and their wives prepared to enter the court building. The death of