Bloody Williamson Read Online Free

took up posts along the detour, which skirted the edge of his property, irritation turned into hostility. For several days after June 16, when they first went on duty, the guards behaved with the utmost arrogance. One old resident, picking berries by the roadside, suddenly found the barrel of a revolver against his ribs.
    “What the God-damned hell are you doing here?” the guard snarled. “Beat it, and that God-damned quick!”
    A farmer who lived in the vicinity was stopped several times. When he threatened to go to the State’s Attorney and swear out a warrant, the guard snorted: “You and the State’s Attorney can go to hell.”
    A deputy sheriff stopped near the mine, his car stalled by a blowout. He flashed his badge, only to have a guard snap at him: “We don’t give a damn if you’re the President of the United States; you move on.”
    As another local resident drove along the detour, two guards signaled him to stop and ordered him out of his car.
    “He’s a God-damned son-of-a-bitchin’ spy,” one remarked. “Yes, that’s just what he is,” the other replied.
    They slapped the man in the face, punched him with gun barrels, took his small change, and told him to move on.
    “If you ever cheep this I’ll bump you off,” one of them warned him.
    Lester’s superintendent, C. K. McDowell, was almost as arrogant as the guards. When a local man went to the mine to collect a bill, McDowell told him:
    “We came down here to work this mine, union or no union. We will work it with blood if necessary, and you tell all the God-damned union men to stay away if they don’t want trouble.”
    A powder salesman who visited the mine a day or two after the strikebreakers moved in heard the same kind of swaggering talk. When he reminded Lester of earlier attempts to operate nonunion that had ended in violence and failure, the latter replied:
    “Our operation is different. We use less men and can pay a certain amount for protection, and if the shovel is blown up we will get $800 a day insurance.”
    At that moment McDowell came into the office.
    “If McDowell doesn’t make me $7,500 a day,” Lester commented, “I’ll run him over the hill. Isn’t that right, Mac?” he added. The superintendent nodded.
    A few minutes later Lester told the salesman: “I’ve broken strikes before and I’ll break this one.” †
    Talk such as this, with the insolent actions of the guards, was intended to frighten the striking miners and their sympathizers—which meant nearly the entire population—into docility. Actually, it only intensified existing fears and hatreds.
    That disorder was likely to be the result of Lester’s venture was apparent to experienced observers from the beginning. One of these was Colonel Samuel N. Hunter, personnel officer in the office of the Adjutant General at Springfield. Prior to his appointment in 1920, Hunter had been active in politics in Perry County, which almost touches Williamson on the northwest; hence hehad had experience in gauging public opinion, and he knew the temper of southern Illinois. When he picked up the
Chicago Tribune
shortly after noon on Saturday, June 17, and read that the Southern Illinois Coal Company had started to ship coal, whatever hope he had had for a pleasant weekend vanished.
    At the moment Adjutant General Carlos E. Black was at Camp Logan in the northern part of the state; the Assistant Adjutant General was on vacation. In their absence Hunter was the ranking officer. Disturbed by the
Tribune
story, he tried to reach Black by long-distance but failed. Then he called State’s Attorney Delos Duty of Williamson County. From what Duty told him he concluded that the situation there was serious. Len Small, the governor, was at Waukegan, also in the northern part of the state, defending a suit for misappropriation of funds. After a talk with the governor’s secretary, Hunter decided to go at once to Marion, the Williamson County seat. He wired the State’s