Among the men who testified before the Senate committee was Lee Calvin, a mine-guard of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Calvin later made an affidavit, in the course of which he told of his experiences on board the "Bull Moose Special," an armored train which was taken up and down the railroads of these valleys, to shoot up the homes and tent-colonies of the strikers with a machine-gun. This "Bull Moose Special" was at the disposal, not merely of the state militia and of the mine-guards, but of the mine-operators as well. Calvin tells how he was invited by Quinn Morton, the largest coal-operator in the Kanawha Valley, to join a shooting party on the night of February 7, 1913. There were two or three dozen men with several boxes of guns; also the machine-gun. I quote from an affidavit by Calvin:
When we got near Holly Grove the brakeman commenced turning
down the lights. When the engineer came in front of Holly
Grove he gave two short blasts from the whistle. I was leaning out
of the window and they commenced firing out of the baggage car.
Flashes, lights, reports and cracks from the machine-gun took me all
at once, and the train was a long stream of fire which commenced
coming out of the Gatling gun. In about twenty or thirty seconds
there came a flash here and there from the tents. About four came
from the tents altogether, and they were about 100 feet apart, it
would seem to me. No shots had been fired from the tents prior
to the time the shots were fired from the train.
Do not imagine that these incidents rest upon the credibility
of Lee Calvin alone. They were sworn to by numerous persons
of all classes. Mr. Quinn Morton himself admitted before
the Senate committee that he had called up the superintendent
of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and ordered the "Bull
Moose Special" for that night; also that he had gone to a
hardware store and purchased thirty Springfield rifles and
taken them in a taxi-cab to the train. He objected to the train
being referred to as "his" train—explaining that by the objection
he meant that he did not own the train!
Also there was introduced the evidence of many persons who happened to be at the muzzle-end of Mr. Morton's thirty Springfield rifles: for example, Mrs. Estep, wife of a miner in Holly Grove:
Senator Kenyon: "Had there been any disorder in the settlement
that night? Had you heard any shooting before that time?"
Mrs. Estep: "No, sir."
