In Lens Creek Valley at Marmet, more than four thousand miners gathered in a charged encampment that stretched for miles up Lens Creek as they prepared to march toward Mingo County to free more than a hundred union miners they believed were unjustly imprisoned there. Journalists portrayed the camp as filled with mountaineers from towns across the New River region, Fayette County, and counties farther north, many wearing blue overalls or pieces of khaki uniform and carrying rifles, with red bandanas marking their commitment; one reporter estimated that a quarter of them were African Americans. Near Hernshaw, five hundred miners assembled on a hillside where Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, one of the UMWA’s best-known organizers, told them she had a telegram from President Warren G. Harding promising that if they abandoned the armed march he would use presidential power to address their grievances. When UMWA District seventeen officials Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney arrived and asked to see the paper, Jones refused, and after they returned to Charleston and contacted Washington D.C., they confirmed that no such telegram had been sent. Why Mother Jones chose to fabricate the document remains unclear more than a century later; she soon left West Virginia by train, never to return, and that night the miners began their march to Mingo County.