Herrin Massacre: Men given head start — into barbed wire
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[About 65 miners and guards worked at the Lester strip mine on the day before the Herrin Massacre on June 22, 1922.
After the ambush of a mine truck carrying new workers around noon and the shooting between the union and the mine guards later that afternoon an outline of an agreement had been reached that evening to surrender the next morning and be escorted to the train station in Herrin.
But union blood had been spilt. During the night UMWA members maintained a steady stream of shooting into the mine. As a revenge for the aerial attacks on their union brethren in West Virginia nine months earlier at Blair Mountain they added a plane dropping bombs.
At least 15 and maybe as high as 25 of the men at the mine slipped away, most of them guards.
The sun rose early the next morning on one of the longest days of the year. After spending a night hiding under coal cars for their protection the remaining workers at the strip mine were more than ready to leave for home. They quickly raised a white flag and by 7 a.m. they were on their way out.
The union members outside took command of the prisoners and led them out of the mine and up a country lane two by two north to Crenshaw Crossing. There Otis Clark, a Spanish-American War veteran and a former union local president waved his "high-powered gun" and gave a "blood-curdling talk," as described by Chatland Parker a year later in his book.
"I have been in this fight for five days, and I believe in starting at the head to stop a proposition and I believe in taking everyone out, kill them and stop the breed," he proclaimed according to multiple witnesses.
At this point Clark remained in the minority. Someone, a courageous man whose name was never given during the trials, shouted back, "where's the humanity."
The voice didn't turn the tide, but weakened it a bit. Clark's speech had so worked up the crowd that they began beating their prisoners. Finally, cooler heads convinced the more radical group to stop and take the prisoners to the railroad station as promised.
At Crenshaw Crossing the men turned west on what is now Crenshaw Road. The Coal Belt & Electric Railroad ran parallel along the route. About three-quarters of a mile to the west they came to Moakes Crossing.
"At this point the mob was very much under the control of the cool miner," Parker wrote, "who was hoping to get the men to Herrin... All hopes were blasted when on arriving at Moakes Crossing the mob was met by another mob of radicals."
This new mob included "many women who were encouraging their husbands to get rid of the prisoners."
Particularly, the mob included Clark's wife who squealed with glee when she saw they had the mine manager C. K. McDowell among the prisoners. "They've got old 'Peg Leg,'" testified the farmer's wife who lived at the corner there.
McDowell wasn't really that old, but he did have an artificial leg. The miners believed him responsible for ordering the machine gun fire the day before and had targeted him in their beatings. By this point he was cut several times and "rapidly losing strength from the loss of blood."
"If you are going to kill me, do it now and don't let me suffer any longer," he exclaimed.
Clark and another man complied. They took him down a side lane and shot him four times.
With their bloodlust temporarily satiated the now larger mob continued west down the road until a point opposite the power house for the electric railroad. There they met yet another mob coming from Herrin and included Hugh Willis.
Willis was the second-highest ranking union leader in the area after William J. Sneed who also served as state senator and was conveniently absent from Williamson County that day.
The day before Willis had led the striking miners in their looting of local hardware stores for rifles and ammunition. At a meeting with miners prior to the attack, he allegedly claimed Sheriff Melvin Thaxton was on the miner's side: "What I am most interested in is prevailing upon the Sheriff not to get the troops there... The Sheriff is our friend and he told me: 'Damn them, they scabs ought to have known better than to come down here, but now that they are here, let them take what is coming to them!'"
Rather than calm down the men Willis at best only convinced them to not shoot the prisoners on the road in the presence of the women and children. At worst, he initiated the massacre when he told them to do so in the woods behind the power house.
They gave the prisoners a head start but not much of one, particularly when a barbed wire fence stretched out of sight just within the woods. The command to fire went out. Eleven men died almost instantly and many others were wounded as they struggled to get through the barbed wire.
Those who survived and remained at the fence were then often shot again.
One of the survivors, Will Cairns, later pointed out Peter Hiller to the jury as the "man he saw shoot down wounded men" after the initial massacre at the fence. Cairns had been shot twice at the fence, before he fled through the woods. He eventually took five bullet wounds before "a man knelt down over him with a pocket knife and slashed his throat and then left him in the road to die."
He was finally saved with the sheriff arrived and took him to the hospital.
In George Harrison's woods then southeast of the city, but now within its borders, a group of 25 men with a prisoner entered the woods south of his house which would have been in the vicinity of the current First Baptist Church. There, Harrison later testified, about eight of the men opened fire and killed the man.
Thirty feet away he saw another group of 15 or so men with two more prisoners. As they went deeper into the woods Harrison heard more shots.
Harold K. Graves was just a boy of 10 living on a 40-acre or so farm on what's now the south side of Clark Trail, a road that didn't exist at that time, a quarter-mile to half-mile west of Bandyville Road. He and his mother were out hoeing strawberries on the east edge of the property when the shooting started.
"When we observed a man running near us being pursued by others who were firing at him we left for the house. We were a comical sight falling over the rows of corn we crossed in our haste," Graves wrote in his memoirs, privately published in 1985 under the title of "We Remember: Reflections on Early Experiences in Herrin, Ill."
His father later testified that saw two men run across his fields "and saw dust being kicked up around them as bullets hit."
When his wife and son reached the yard his father "was greatly relieved when he saw us and showed us the yard full of men with their weapons of various sorts. It was a true mob scene, a mob of otherwise good men now ruled by the lowest common denominator, hatred for those 'scabs,'" he added.
Later that afternoon Graves and his younger brother walked to the mailbox and discovered two men who had been shot "lying under some trees and bushes near the northeast corner of the property."
One of the man had already died. The other suffered a broken leg.
The squads of union miners eventually captured six men that day including a prisoner named Howard Hoffman.
One of the six was R. J. O'Rourke. He'd managed to get past the fence and made it to a farm house where a woman tried to hide him but the mob found him and took him into town. There he, Hoffman and four others were made to crawl on the burning hot bricks of the street without any shoes.
R. P. Poole lived at 615 S. 13th St. He watched a mob of about 500 wait along the street in front of the house for the prisoners to arrive. Sometime before 8 a.m. about 75 men arrived with six surviving prisoners.
"These prisoners were bareheaded, barefooted, panting, bloody, dirty and wore only their pants and shirts," Parker described Poole's testimony.
The men were marched past his house in the direction of downtown, then turned east toward the cemetery on what's now Stotlar Road.
Poole said the crowd around his home included the city's police chief Robert Herron who watched the procession, but did nothing.
When they arrived at the cemetery they were all shot again at least once.
"Oh, men, men! What are you doing?" Hoffman cried out to his tormenters, according to later testimony.
"If you have ever said your prayers, say them now, damn you, for you won't have much longer," someone responded.
Members of the press also began arriving. Don Ewing, an editor with the Associated Press arrived when only three of the six were still breathing. Two of the men asked for water. When he started to give them some, one of the miners, Bert Grace, intervened.
"The first man to give them water will get the contents of this gun," he promised.
O'Rourke ended up surviving the encounter. Most of his fellow workers did not.
Eventually, the sheriff and soldiers from the Illinois National Guard arrived. They were late. The bloodlust was over.
NEXT: The Trials.