T 0 UR 1 9 4 3 5
B tition for labor raised the wages of miners to abnormal heights. Men
flocked down from the hills, where many of them had never seen $100
a in cash in the course of a year, to earn much more than $100 in the
1 course of a month. The companies hastily built shacks and barracks to
5 house them and opened stores to get their trade. The new industrial
;l workers were a bit like sailors on shore leave; cash for something to
h spend and there seemed no limit to the How. Many, unaccustomed to
e paying rent and buying foodstuffs, spent the whole of their wages the
r day they received them and had to go in debt to provide themselves
a with room and board until the next pay day. In no time their igno-
»f rance of money-values had put them into the hands of those willing to
·- profit by it. ·
is The end of the boom came when the war was over and the demand
n for huge quantities of coal fell off. The first to suffer inthe deflation
2, of production and prices toward peacetime levels was the miner. Men
.s were laid off and wages cut. The uprooted hill people either had no
d land to return to or could not face return to the isolated cabins; miners
ll who had poured in from other fields found no other fields that wanted
.e their labor. Bitterness flared in every coal district. The absentee
g owners who demanded profits were often represented locally by natives
it of the district or by the kind of men who always flock to boom towns,
r, and the old feud spirit flared up with a bitterness equal to that of the
as most spirited days of the Hatf1eld—McCoy war. Strikebreakers were
sent in from outside to guard closed mines or to keep mines open during
se strikes, and people on both sides of the struggle used guns, as they had
h long been accustomed to do in times of stress.
S, Well-meant attempts to mediate by "furriners" were notably unsuc- _
re cessful, in part, because of unfamiliarity with the local people and cus-
>f toms, and in larger part because of the complicated economic problems
a involved. The post-war flare-up gradually became less violent, though
>d the struggle continued; the economic collapse that came on after 1929
·b brought it to white heat again. In 1938 a Congressional Committee
zd studying violations of civil liberties brought hill-people from the area
ir to Washington for testimony and focused national attention on the
r- labor-industrial warfare (see Labor).
:0 Small coal diggings with their gaping black entrances and makeshift
ie tipples are frequently seen along the roads of this mining region. For
is the most part they are worked by one or two part-time miners who gain
al a meager livelihood by selling the coal in the vicinity or by hauling it
to near-by markets.
S- , US 119 crosses the West Virginia Line, 0 m., at Williamson, West
>d Virginia (see West Virginia, Tour 11), on a bridge over the Tug Fork ·
16 of the Big Sandy River, and follows Pond Creek through a drab coal-
ll$ mining area. At this point the road is an artery of the area once known
5* as "the billion dollar coal f1eld" of which Williamson is the heart.
>¤ BELFRY, 3.6 m. (668 alt., 410 pop.), one of the coal-mining com-
€‘ munities that are strung out along Pond Creek for approximately 15