Rumors soon spread that the union was smuggling weapons to miners on both the Kentucky and West Virginia sides of the Tug River. Governor Morgan sent Captain of Constabulary James R. Brockus with sixty state police to Mingo County to investigate. Defiant miners greeted the state police with sporadic rifle fire up and down the banks of the Tug from May 12-14, an incident known as "The Three Days Battle." Skirmishes between miners and constables, company guards, and non-union strikebreakers, raged along the river and the surrounding hills near the villages of Merrimac, Rawl, Sprigg, and Matewan, West Virginia, and McCarr, Kentucky, resulting in the deaths of at least four people and the wounding of many more.18

Despite Governor Cornwell's promise to Secretary of War Baker two months earlierthat West Virginia would rapidly reestablish a National Guard force, the state legislature had only begun to take steps in that direction. Perhaps presuming that the new Secretary of War James W. Weeks would permit direct access one more time, newly-elected Governor Morgan asked General Read on May 12, 1921, for five hundred troops, "to prevent wanton slaughter of innocent citizens." The next day, Governor Edwin P. Morrow of Kentucky, whose state also suffered from intermittent gunfire along the Tug River, made a similar request. Read declined to send troops to either state pending approval by President Harding. In anticipation of such approval, however, Read, on his own authority, alerted the Nineteenth Infantry for a return to Mingo County and dispatched his intelligence chief Major Charles F. Thompson