Since July 23, 1913 what has come to be known as the Strike of 1913 has reached mythical proportions. To this day, conversations on the topic can lead to fights, even though no one living today experienced the event first – or even – secondhand.

When considered in the context of Copper Country labor/management relations, it was a milestone in the history of the Copper Country, and is most notable for the December 24th Italian Hall Disaster.

Yet, when compared to labor relations in other U.S. mining districts during the early 20th century, the Copper Country strike was, relatively mild, particularly when considered against labor/management relations in the West Virginia coal industry. In the Copper Country, management was referred to either as mine managers or mine owners. In the coal region, they were referred to as operators.

As stated, the Copper Strike began on July 23, 1913. While it was officially called off by the locals of the Western Federation of Miners in April, 1914, it had already fizzled out months before.

In West Virginia, there was a series of strikes between 1912 and 1921 that have collectively come to be referred to as the West Virginia Coal Wars. In that nine-year period, the series of strikes became armed conflicts resulting in the deaths of between 100 and 133, most of whom were miners. The coal wars began with the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes in 1912.

In the Paint Creek Valley in Kanawha County, WV, coal operators rejected a call from the United Mine Workers of America Union to raise wages to a par with other regional companies. Workers went out on strike.

As was common in most labor struggles of this era, says the National Park Service, mine owners and operators fiercely resisted the workers’ efforts. In 1912, the conflict came to a violent head in the Kanawha and New River coal fields with a “wildcat” strike in which workers launched a work stoppage without union assistance. When operators in the Paint Creek Valley in Kanawha County refused to grant union workers a modest pay raise that was on par with what other regional companies had given to their unionized employees, thousands of nonunion miners went on strike. Soon, 7,500 nonunion miners in nearby Cabin Creek joined them, spurred by the oppressive rule of the coal operators.

The strike that ensued followed the typical pattern of a work stoppage. The coal operators responded by recruiting strikebreakers from the South and New York, and hiring 300 Baldwin-Felts company mine guards to bust the strike. The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was a private security firm hired by coal mine operators throughout the country to violently suppress strike activity in mining areas of Appalachia and the West.

According to the NPS, the Baldwin-Felts guards constructed iron and concrete forts outfitted with machine guns throughout the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike area. They continued to evict mining families from company housing, destroying $40,000 worth of personal property including furniture in the process.

On the night of February 7, 1913, coal operator Quinn Martin, along with Kanawha sheriff Bonner Hill, turned off the lights and drove a train, the sides of which were reinforced with iron plating with machine guns installed inside, through Holly Grove, a tent colony the UMW had established for striking miners and their families, firing into the homes and tents.

The Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912 turned into a 13-month long struggle that resulted in the death of 12 strikers and 13 company men.

In the Michigan Copper Strike of 1913, mine managers contracted with a similar agency, the Waddell-Mahon Agency, but nothing like what had happened in the Paint Creek Valley coal strike occurred in Michigan.

The nine-year running Coal Wars strikes all played out in a repeat pattern throughout West Virginia.

In 1920, a nationwide coal strike, settled during the winter, had won unionized miners a 27% wage increase, but the settlement didn’t help most miners in southern West Virginia, the largest non-unionized coal region in the country, according to the WV Department of Culture and History. When the UMW increased its efforts to organize Logan, Mingo, and McDowell counties, owners of the Stone Mountain Coal Company followed their pattern of hiring private detectives to crush union activity, beginning with forced evictions of miners and their families from company-owned homes.

On on May 19, 1920, according to the NPS, 13 Baldwin-Felts detectives arrived in Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. Matewan chief of police Sid Hatfield confronted the agents on the town’s main street. The gunfight that ensued left seven agents, the mayor, and two miners dead. Hatfield and his deputy, Ed Chambers, were tried for murder, but were acquitted.

On August 1, 1921, Hatfield and his deputy, Ed Chambers, were on their way to court in McDowell County on other charges. While walking on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse with their wives, C. E. Lively and another Baldwin-Felts agent shot Hatfield and Chambers to death in full view of witnesses. No charges were filed for the double murder, which led to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, 10,000 miners began a march to Mingo County to confront mine operators. They set out from the small hamlet of Marmet, with the goal of advancing upon Mingo County, a few days’ travels away to meet the coal companies on their own turf and demand redress.

On their way, they, faced opposition from deputized townspeople and businesspeople who opposed their union organizing, along with local and federal law enforcement who brutally shut down the march.

To get to Mingo County the marchers had to cross Blair Mountain in Logan County, where the fighting reached its peak in the last days of August, says the Economic Policy Institute. The miners had the greater numbers, but the coal companies’ private army had better weapons and airplanes, which dropped bombs and poison gas on the miners.

In pitched mountainside battles in the days afterward, according to the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the miners aimed their rifles at local and federal law enforcement, who responded with machine guns, bombs and poison gas, exchanging thousands of rounds of ammunition. Sheriff Don Chafin actually directed aerial bombings on the mountain. Dozens of men were killed. Eventually, the U.S. Army was called in to break up the battle.

When the army arrived, the miners surrendered their arms. The Battle of Blair Mountain remains the largest armed confrontation on American soil since the Civil War.

While the Copper Strike was the region’s most violent clash, its end brought an end to violent labor disputes in the Copper Country.

While coal operators used the strategy of employee evictions, according to a federal document titled Strike in the Copper Mining District of Michgan: Letter from the Secretary of Labor, at the beginning of the strike, mine managers declared they would did not intend to evict strikers from company-owned houses. While the Copper Range company mines, the Trimountain, Champion, and Baltic companies subsequently did serve eviction notices on tenants, the evictions were suspended by a restraining order issued by Circuit Court Judge Patrick O’Brien. The Quincy Mining Company also served eviction notices, but very few were executed.

The 1913 Copper Strike is notable for its violence in its opening days, resulting in the Houghton County Sheriff requesting National Guard troops from the Michigan governor to protect mine property and non-strikers, at no time did company management employ private armies with machine guns and iron-reinforced railroad cars, nor did they evict striking miners and their families, compelling them to create tent cities. At no time were airplanes employed to drop bombs and poison gas on strikers, nor was it necessary, as no strikers formed large armed resistance bands to oppose the companies.

When compared to the West Virginia Coal Wars, if the Copper Strike is notable for anything of consideration, it is not for its violence, but rather for its lack of violence.