A hundred and five years ago this week, ten thousand men picked up their rifles and started walking.

In the southern coalfields a mine was its own little kingdom. You lived in the company's house, bought from the company's store with the company's paper money, and if you so much as breathed the word "union" you were gone — out of the job and out of the house the same afternoon. Men called Baldwin-Felts guards saw to it, with clubs and with rifles.

On the first of August, 1921, two men the miners loved — Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers, unarmed, their wives on their arms — were shot dead on the courthouse steps in broad daylight by those guards. Nobody answered for it. The governor wouldn't so much as reply to the miners' letters.

So they quit writing letters.

That third week of August they started gathering at Lens Creek, near Marmet, just outside Charleston. By the hundreds, then the thousands. White men and Black men and immigrants who barely had the English, a lot of them just home from the trenches in France, and they fell in and organized themselves like the army outfits they'd been. Every man tied a red bandana around his neck so he'd know his own in the brush. That's where the word redneck comes from, or so the story goes.

They were marching on Logan County. Waiting on the ridge of Blair Mountain was Sheriff Don Chafin — on the coal operators' payroll — with three thousand men and machine guns dug into the hill. Before it was through, the operators hired airplanes to drop homemade bombs on their own workforce. American planes, dropping bombs on American men, on an American mountain.

Biggest armed uprising this country's seen since the Civil War. It broke up only when the President sent in federal troops, and the miners — most of them soldiers themselves — wouldn't raise a rifle against the flag they'd just fought under.

Ten thousand men climbed a West Virginia mountain to get shot at.

Some say twenty thousand. Nobody kept a clean count. Either way it was the biggest armed rising on American soil since the Blue and the Gray quit fighting.

And most folks never heard a word about it.

Here's how you make a man walk uphill into a machine gun.

You pay him in scrip. Not real money — coupons, good only at the company store, where the company sets the price. You put him in a company house. Send his kids to a company school. Let a company preacher tell him God favors the man who doesn't complain. You make him sign a paper swearing he'll never join a union, and if he signs anyhow, or even talks to a union man, you send the guards.

The guards were Baldwin-Felts men. A detective agency, they called themselves. Down in the coalfields they were closer to hired guns with badges. They threw families out of company houses at gunpoint. Furniture and babies both, set out in the mud.

Then came Matewan.

Spring of 1920, the town's police chief — a scrappy fellow named Sid Hatfield — stood up to the Baldwin-Felts men when they came to do their evicting. Words first. Then guns. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead in the street, seven of them detectives.

To the coal operators, Hatfield was a murderer. To every miner in the hills, he was David with the giant's blood still wet on him.

A year later they killed him for it.

Shot him down on the courthouse steps at Welch. His wife on his arm. No trial, no jury, nobody so much as arrested. The message landed exactly like it was meant to.

That was the match.

By late August of 1921, miners started gathering down at Marmet. They didn't stumble in drunk and angry. They came organized — veterans, most of them, men who'd carried a rifle in France and knew how to march. They tied red bandanas around their necks so they'd know friend from foe.

That's where some sources say the word comes from. Redneck. It didn't start as an insult. It started as an army wearing red.

This army was Black men and white men and immigrants who barely shared a language, all in the same ditch. In West Virginia. In 1921. When the rest of the South couldn't share a water fountain, these men shared a foxhole.

They aimed to march to the southern coalfields and free the men living under the gun. Standing in the way was one mountain and one sheriff.

Don Chafin. Sheriff of Logan County, paid better by the coal companies than by the county. He strung about three thousand men along Spruce Fork Ridge. Machine gun nests dug into the high ground. And then Chafin did something no American lawman had done before.

He rented airplanes.

Biplanes, flying over his own countrymen, dropping homemade tear gas and pipe bombs packed with nuts and bolts. Bombs. On American ground. On American men.

The fighting ran the better part of a week. Rifles cracking across the ridgelines day and night, in country so steep and thick with laurel you couldn't see the man trying to kill you. A million rounds, some say, went into that mountain.

Then Washington woke up. President Harding sent in the U.S. Army. Twenty-five hundred regular soldiers and a squadron of planes of their own.

That was the turning point.

Those miners would trade lead with Chafin's guns all day long. But when the federal boys showed up under the Stars and Stripes — the same flag half of them had followed across the ocean — they couldn't do it. Wouldn't. They lowered their rifles and walked back down the mountain.

Loyalty to that flag beat them where the machine guns couldn't.

Afterward came the trials. Hundreds hauled up for murder. Some for treason, if you can believe it, against the state of West Virginia. West Virginia juries — made mostly of people who understood exactly why a man might climb that mountain — turned most of them loose. But the lawyer bills did what the bullets didn't. The union broke in those hills and stayed broke near ten years, till the New Deal finally pried the door open.

The mountain's still there. Still holds the spent shells, thousands of them under the leaves, which is how we know the stories are true.

For a while the coal companies wanted to blast the whole ridge flat and haul off the coal underneath.

Strip-mine the graveyard.

They're still fighting over that one.