On August 26, 1921, in the union coal camp of Clothier about ten miles south of Madison, a miner named Lewis White hijacked a C&O train at gunpoint and ordered the conductor to take him to Madison, where UMWA District 17 leaders Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney were urging miners to disband; a few hours later White passed back through Clothier on his way to Blair with three hundred armed miners on the train ready for a fight. On August 27, Keeney and Mooney appeared to have succeeded, miners were heading home, Sheriff Don Chafin’s entrenchments on Spruce Fork Ridge and Blair Mountain stood empty, and the US Army's negotiator, General Bandholtz, returned to Washington DC, but Chafin then sent State Police Captain James R. Brockus to Clothier with more than a hundred men, and on the outskirts of Sharples state troopers fought armed miners, killing two, wounding another, taking five prisoners, and losing four deputies to capture. News of the clash spread quickly, along with rumors that Chafin’s raiders had fired on women and children in Sharples, and thousands of miners who had been going home turned back to rejoin the fight. From August 28 to September 2, 1921, Ramage, Jeffrey, Clothier, and Sharples became important operational bases for the Redneck Army as it assaulted Spruce Fork Ridge, with thousands passing through toward the front, volunteer nurses establishing field hospitals, others setting up kitchens and ammunition depots, a schoolhouse on Crooked Creek serving as a command post, roads crowded with marching men, more arriving in overflowing automobiles and hijacked trains from across the state, and the miners organized into companies or regiments according to their local unions as they climbed the mountainside toward the heavily armed defensive positions of the Logan Defenders.