Mountain, near the Boone County line. In a confrontation with miners that resulted in a gunfight, at least two miners were killed and two others were wounded. From positions on adjacent hillsides, miners fired at the police forces who quickly withdrew. Within forty-eight hours, five thousand miners streamed back into the area to defend their homes against what they perceived as a new and unwarranted attack by those in league with the coal operators. Miners who were awaiting trains to return to their homes from the aborted march on Logan County now refused to board, and resumed their march. Chafin and Brockus, in an effort to contain and combat the new uprising, raised a volunteer force of approximately three thousand anti-union, anti-miner "militiamen," and took up positions nearthe summit of nearby Blair Mountain. With the miners deployed along a ten-mile front at the base of the mountain, determined to wipe out all impediments to their march, Governor Morgan on August 29 renewed his application for federal troops, citing an insurrection fanned by the influx of "Bolshevist" outsiders from Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. The next day Morgan appended to his request a statement that the legislature could not be convened in time to avert bloodshed.34

The ineptitude and insensitivity displayed by West Virginia officials during the raid at Sharples convinced President Harding and his principal advisors that Governor Morgan and county officials were obviously too much a part of the problem to share in its solution. On August 30, Harding issued a proclamation under RS 5300 as