of the time, the members of the UMW were determined to maintain wartime gains and to make new advances in the immediate post-war period.4

After the November 1918 Armistice, the UMW anticipated a sharp decline in membership in the wake of demobilization, government deregulation of industry, the increased cost of living, failed industrial strikes, and resurgent efforts of the mining industry to resist unionization with strikebreakers, injunctions, and yellow dog contracts. While 50 percent of the mines in West Virginia were unionized, most of these operations were in the northern half of the state. To strengthen the UMW throughout West Virginia, local union leaders launched a new recruiting drive in two anti-union strongholds, Mingo and Logan counties. Coal operators counted upon political connections in the state capitol and inthe county sheriffs' offices to resist unionization by manipulating the machinery of local law enforcement against union organization efforts. If these methods failed, brute force was often the next recourse.5

Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan County, a popular figure to most local people except miners and union men, embodied both the legal and violent aspects of the operators' anti-union campaign. In the pay of the operators, "Boss" Chafin misused his deputies to assault and evict union organizers as soon as they set foot in the county. Provoked by this opposition, the local branch of the UMW, District 17, organized from two to five thousand miners in September 1919 for a march on Logan County to unseat Chafin. Taking advantage of the wartime arrangement for direct access to federal troops