National Perspective: A century ago: Backlash and bloodshed in West Virginia

One thing had led to another, and one confrontation of company-dispatched detectives and miners had led to another — truly the tensions were high and 10 were dead — and eventually open warfare broke out in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The security forces were determined, the miners armed, the conflict brutal and deadly. President Warren G. Harding dispatched single-propeller De Havilland-4 World War I bomber biplanes from the Army Air Service's 88th Aero Squadron as a show of force. Miners commandeered trains and used them to bring combatants to the front. Some of them traveled on the roofs of the train cars themselves.

The conflict is known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, but it is more accurate to say that the uprising — the largest domestic armed insurrection since the Civil War — is hardly known at all today, all the more remarkable given the scope of the combat: As many as 100 people were killed in fighting pitting massive military and volunteer forces against 10,000 miners. Even the legacy of the episode is a matter of contemporary contention, though the battle occurred exactly a century ago — and though the ripples from that 1921 conflict reach us still.