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Tuesday March 20, 1906
New York, New York - A Reporter Tells of Travels with Mother Jones in West Virginia

From New York City, a reporter describes, for the Pittsburgh Evening Leader of Kansas, a journey with Mother Jones throughout West Virginia. The reporter describes a similar journey with Mother in 1901, back before Mother's break with John Mitchell, while she was still employed as an organizer for the United Mine Workers. Who sponsored this trip, the reporter does not say, nor is the identity of the reporter revealed, but what is made obvious is the love of the coal miners and their wives for Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel.

From the Pittsburgh Evening Leader of March 17, 1906:

There Will Be No Strike says Old Mother Jones
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New York, March 17.-There will be no coal strike. Mother Jones says so, and 50,000 miners of West Virginia believe her prophecy.

Five years ago Mother Jones, acting as a special organizer for the United Mine Workers, under the direct instructions of President John Mitchell, preached the gospel of unionism. Today she is again in the coal fields, on the eve of what apparently threatens to be the greatest coal strike in the economic history of the country.

However, in the face of this, Mother Jones is carrying the good news that there will be no coal strike to the blackened coal diggers, who, heavy-hearted, with dark forebodings, crowd to the pit's mouth to greet her on her pilgrimage. That is the happy news she shouts aloft to the tipplemen, who hang over the dizzy edge and listen with straining ears, ask, "What cheer?" That is the good news she returns to the anxious women folk who poke their heads out of the windows of their eeyrie cabins to cry, "Howdy," or gather in their doorways to grasp her hand as she trudges by on the railroad ties.

Mother Jones is Their Oracle.

For it may be said, without charge of exaggeration, that every miner in the state of West Virginia-whether union or non-union-and every miner's wife and daughter regard Mother Jones as an oracle of this subject. When last week we stepped off the train at Montgomery, which was to be the starting point of our expedition, Mother Jones appearance was a signal for a general excitement among the people on the platform, most of the miners coming to town for a Saturday evening holiday, or to buy the Sunday dinner, or to get the mail at the little postoffice, but chiefly and in all cases to gather in groups on the street corners and in saloons to discuss the threatened strike.

"Howdy, Mother Jones, be we going to have a strike?" came in a chorus of both men's and women's voices-while up and down the dark, muddy street, the little children forgetting their springtime games, came running and shouting at the top of their lungs, "There's old Mother Jones and her black bag, and now we can bet your life we all's going to have a strike."

Undaunted by Injunction.

Such is the impression made everywhere by old Mother Jones and her bag, by the woman who has devoted her life to organizing the workingmen in strikes against the "plutocrats" and "leeches" and "parasites of capital," as she calls them. She has led a strike army of 7,000 men up and down the coal-grimed Katawha valley, and so potent was her influence that the coal operators, in self defense, got the courts to issue a perpetual injunction against her, which forbids her to enter the state of West Virginia. Nothing daunted, however, she is again in the coal fields, taking care of her ""people."

And right here I wish to say a word in explanation of the significance of that old black bag with which Mother Jones is associated. Once having seen this doughty little white haired old woman is to receive an indelible impression of the importance of the capacious shopping bag of black silk which she always carries in her hand or suspended from her wrist.

Made the Pilgrimage before.

It is five years since I first made the acquaintance of this bag and its owner, the occasion being the identical with that of the present expedition-a pilgrimage afoot together through the New River and Great Kanawha coal fields. Then, as now, it contained all Mother Jones' posessions-a change of underwear, a slender purse, and what is of the utmost importance, a bit of fresh white ruching for her collar, a curling iron and a box of face powder. And it is with all sincerity that I say of the utmost importance are those "wimples and crimping pins" in old Mother Jones' black bag. For, as Mother Jones will tell you herself, it is largely by these very means-by the simple magic of a bit of white at the throat, of a soft coiffure, of a chin and forehead guiltless of soot and dust, that she owed her success as an organizer in this most difficult of all territory to win to the cause of union labor.

"The West Virginia miner," she once explained to me, "is a most simple minded man, particularly the native-born miner, and there is no hope of gaining his allegiance without first making an impression upon his respect. To do so I must always appear neat and decently dressed, whether I am addressing them at their meetings or talking to them on the tipple."

On our former journey, which was taken in midsummer, I have often seen her wash her clothing in the brook, hang it on the bushes to dry, curl her hair by the fire which we had built to cook our dinner, powder her smooth, handsome old face in the mirrored depths of a glassy pool, all the while, in her own inimitable style, with all the learning and logic of a college professor, expounding to me and to the listening birds, the first principles of social and political economy and the rights of the laborer-not to his hire, according to the old doctrine, but to every dollar of the wealth he produces. For, be it understood here and now, Mother Jones is a socialist of the most radical sort.

Drudgery, Hunger, Toil.
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That was in the summer of 1901. Where we then had stifling heat and humidity to contend with, we have now rain and spittings of snow and chill March winds, with a touch of frost in the mornings. Otherwise everything is the same-the same terrible same-that we found here five years ago. There is the same endless, underpaid drudgery; there is the same hand-to-mouth struggle for existence on the part of the coal diggers; there is the same dearth of proper feeding and clothing and housing for the toilers who live in the thick-clustered valley camps or live like hermits in lonely cabins on the mountain sides.

Up and down the Great Kanawha's yellow current trails the same funeral procession of black barges. Up and down the valley, hugging the mountains on one side and clearing the rivers' edge on the other, roll along either bank the same endless freights, now shrieking and bellowing, now moaning and lamenting. But most impressive and terrible of all else, the same interminable miles of coke ovens stretching from Quinnemont [Quinnimont] in the far south to Charleston in the north-league upon league of smoking altars, tarnishing with their black vomit the sunshine of day, but filling the night with the ruddy glory as of myriad sacrificial fires burned to appease some wrathful god.

But while there seems to have been no change either in topography, in conditions or in the people affected by those conditions, nevertheless they have taken place. Just what these changes are, and their effect upon the threatened coal strike, there is no better or surer way of determining that just that which we have adopted in our present investigation-that is , by going over the same territory, mile by mile and step by step, visiting the same mining camp, talking with the same miners and gossiping wherever possible with the same miners' wives and daughters, whose hospitality was extended to us five years ago.

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[Photographs added.]

Note: Edited to eliminate reference to gender of reporter. Assumption that reporter was a man could very well be incorrect, not to mention sexist!

SOURCES

Pittsburg Evening Leader
(Pittsburg, Kansas)
-Mar 17, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/71357833/

Mother Jones speaks: collected writings and speeches
-ed by Philip Sheldon Foner
Monad Press, 1983
https://books.google.com/books?id=T_m5AAAAIAAJ

IMAGES
Mother Mary Harris Jones, Miners Angel
http://www.biography.com/people/mother-jones-9357488
Mother Mary Harris Jones Standing, 1902
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005688160/
West Virginia Miners, Monongah Mine, 1906
http://www.miningartifacts.org/West-Virginia-Mines.html

See also:

For contract negotiations ongoing at time this article was written.
Minutes of the Special Convention
Indianapolis, IN
March 15-30, 1906
https://books.google.com/books?id=9KM4AQAAMAAJ
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=eRA-AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcove...

For more on Mother Jones in West Virginia:

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Feb 23, 1903 Mother Jones and the Massacre of the Raleigh County Miners
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/17/1256099/-Anti-Capitalist-Meetup...

Hellraisers Journal: "Has any one ever told you, my children, about the lives you are living?"
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/9/11/1324735/-Hellraisers-Journal-Has...

For more on dispute between Mother Jones and John Mitchell:

Hellraisers Journal: John Mitchell a Traitor, Is Charge of Delegate at Convention of U. M. W. of A.
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1/24/1359778/-Hellraisers-Journal-Joh...

Hellraisers Journal: In Pittsburg, Kansas, Mother Jones, Socialist Orator, Denounces John Mitchell
Note: Pittsburg, Kansas, was the home of the militant District 14 of the United Mine Workers of America.
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/12/1405620/-Hellraisers-Journal-In-...

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