An hour’s ride from Charlestown, in the Kanawa mountain, are two ragged gulches eight miles apart and divided by a sharp ridge. One is the Cabin Creek mining settlement, and the other the Paint Creek settlement. A decade or more before the trouble of 1912 the miners along Cabin Creek had, after much travail, been organized, but an ill-advised strike had wrought their ruin and resulted in the restoration of the old non-union conditions aggravated now by the hate born of the victory over them. This settlement had come to be known as “Russia.” The mine owners had here established an ideal feudalism. They owned everything in sight but the country road, which was the bed of a creek. Thus it was practically impossible to visit Cabin Creek without trespassing on company ground and being roughly handled by the whisky-crazed gun-men called “guards.” A miner or his family could only call at the shack of a neighbor by suffrance, since he could not reach the neighbor’s house without trespassing on company property. Here the gun-men were supreme. The men were slaves in all but name. They submitted to being robbed of the fruit of their labor, to extortion in the matter of rental and in the purchase of food in the company stores, and organizers of the miners understood that he who ventured into Cabin Creek would probably be carried out upon a stretcher. The miners of Paint Creek had been organized, but in the spring of 1912 the coal barons determined to extend the feudalism of Cabin Creek across the ridge. The opportunity came when the time for the signing of a new contract was reached. In the conference between the miners and the operators at Charlestown the miners submitted many demands, all of a kind conceded in other mining states such as Indiana and Illinois, but after more than a week the operators refused to sign. In the interest of industrial peace the miners thereupon agreed to continue under the old contract with the old prices and conditions, provided the operators would agree to the full recognition of the union. This, too, was refused, and a strike was ordered. Within ten days the miners were asked to meet with representatives of the coal companies in an effort to adjust the difference, and this, agreed to by the miners, resulted in a further compromise and the signing of a contract by the operators and the miners. The operators almost immediately broke faith, the strike was renewed and the fight was on. The issue was clear from the beginning--whether or not the conditions in Cabin Creek domineered over by drunken gun-men, should be established in Paint Creek.