12 Deputies Drove That Road. 2 Came Back. | The Battle of Evarts, 1931

The men who shot him were hidden behind those railroad ties and the trees along the road. Most of them were coal miners. Within a year, two officers of their union would be serving life sentences for what happened on that road — convicted in a county on the other side of Kentucky that had no coal in it at all.

This is what the record actually says about the Harlan County mine war — who died, who was charged, what a jury decided, and the parts the record never settled.

Harlan County sits in the far southeastern corner of Kentucky, against the Virginia line. In nineteen thirty-one it ran on coal, and almost nothing else.

The houses belonged to the coal companies. So did the stores, and often the roads. When the Depression cut the price of coal, the operators cut wages. Miners in the district were working for thirty and forty dollars a month.

That spring the miners began organizing. The operators began firing and evicting the men who did. By April the county was already coming apart.

In late April, a federal judge, A. M. J. Cochran, issued a temporary order restraining roughly four hundred miners from trespassing on mine property. The law had already picked a side, and everybody in the county knew which one.

Weeks before the ambush, a deputy sheriff named Jess Pace was killed trying to make arrests at Evarts. Sometime after that, mine guards and a band of men hidden in the hills fought a gun battle in which several thousand shots were fired and nobody was hit at all.

A few days before May fifth, sixteen empty houses in a mining camp burned. The fires were believed to have been set. This was the condition of Harlan County before anything that anyone would later call a battle had happened.

On May fifth, the deputies were driving back toward the town of Harlan. Just outside Evarts, the men hidden behind the railroad ties opened fire on the car.

Daniels went down first. Deputy Otto Lee was among the first to fall and was believed dead where he lay. A commissary clerk named Howard Jones was killed as well.

Deputy Estes Cox took bullets in the arm, the side, and the face. He and Deputy George Dawn returned fire from the other side of the road, then drove for Harlan to get help. Cox said that when they left, at least five deputies and three or four of the men who ambushed them were lying dead or wounded on the road.

When Sheriff J. H. Blair got word, he assembled about twenty-five deputies, armed them with machine guns, tear bombs and rifles, sent them to Evarts, and ordered them to use whatever means were necessary to restore order. The police department at Lynch sent a squad of its own.

Four men died at Evarts. The next morning, a special Harlan County grand jury was called to investigate. Within weeks, more than three hundred National Guard troops were in the Harlan coal fields.

What happened next is the part most people don't know. The mine war stopped being a Kentucky story.

In November, the novelist Theodore Dreiser arrived in Harlan County with a committee of writers, investigating reports of what the newspapers called terrorism and blackjack rule against striking miners.

Miners' wives testified that their families were living on beans and bread. One miner testified he had been chained to a radiator in a cell in the Harlan County jail.

Sheriff Blair told the committee he was not prejudiced in favor of the coal operators, nor against the unions — that he was simply determined to enforce the law.

Then the hearing turned. Dreiser had been questioning a Kentucky editor, Herndon Evans of the Pineville Sun, about his religion and his income — asking whether it was fair that Evans earned what he did while miners in the district worked for thirty and forty dollars a month. Evans put the same questions back to Dreiser. Dreiser's own income came out, and the fact that he gave none of it to charity.

The most famous writer in America had come to Harlan County to put the coal operators on trial, and left having been cross-examined by the editor of a small-town paper. It made national copy. It did not change a single wage in the county.

The prosecutions did not stay in Harlan County either. Ten of the trials were moved on a change of venue to Mount Sterling, in Montgomery County — northwest, out in the bluegrass, far from any coal field.

The defendants objected. They argued the move put them at a disadvantage, because they had no money to pay to bring their witnesses that far.

Then the original indictments were quashed. On November twenty-third, nineteen thirty-one, a Montgomery County grand jury returned new ones against ten men — Harlan County miners, union officials, and former Evarts officers. In all, the case would run to nearly thirty defendants.

Among them: William Hightower, president of the local miners' union at Evarts. William B. Jones, its secretary. Asa Cusick, the former chief of police at Evarts, and his former assistant, Al Benson. And six miners — Jim Reynolds, Floyd Murphy, F. M. Bratcher, Bill Turpin, Bill Hudson and Otto Mills. The charges rested on three deaths: Deputy Sheriffs James Daniels and Otto Lee, and the commissary clerk, Howard Jones.

Jones was tried first. He was convicted on December tenth. Hightower's case went to the jury late the following month.

They deliberated about two hours and forty minutes. On January fourteenth, nineteen thirty-two, they convicted him of murder conspiracy and fixed his sentence at life imprisonment.

Under Kentucky law the jury set the penalty, and Judge Henry Prewitt had given them only three options: conviction with the death sentence, conviction with life, or acquittal. The jurors said afterward that they took a single vote, on the morning of the verdict, and every one of them was for life.

William Hightower was seventy-seven years old. He had been a coal digger for forty years. Under the sentence the jury handed him, he would be eligible for parole in eight and a half years — at eighty-five. He heard the verdict read without any visible reaction. His wife and Mrs. Jones sat near him. The judge had warned that he would jail anyone who made a demonstration, and the courtroom stayed quiet.

There is one more thing in the record from that day. Judge Prewitt had barred the reporters of one newspaper, the Knoxville News, from his courtroom for the duration of the mine trials. The paper was in front of the Kentucky Court of Appeals seeking an order setting that ban aside.

The same day, Prewitt sent the remaining Evarts murder cases back to Harlan County. He said the transfer had already cost the Commonwealth a great deal, and that he had met his obligation by hearing three of them: Jones, Hightower, and a man named William Burnett — who was acquitted of killing Deputy Sheriff Jess Pace.

So here is what the record establishes. Four men died on a road outside Evarts on May fifth, nineteen thirty-one. Two union officers were convicted of plotting those deaths and sent to prison for life by a jury in a county with no coal in it.

And here is what it doesn't. It never establishes who fired the shot that killed Jim Daniels. The men behind the railroad ties were never all identified. The convictions were for conspiracy — for planning — not for pulling a trigger. And the rest of the cases went back to Harlan County, where the first set of indictments had already been thrown out once.

The people of Harlan County called what followed Bloody Harlan, and it went on for most of another decade. It is remembered now mostly through songs. The paper trail is still there, in the county records and in the newspapers of the time, and it does not always say what the songs say.

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