Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Folks.
Speaker 1: Let's face it, we as a society do love a
Speaker 1: heart throb. We have teen magazines, celebrity fan clubs, even
Speaker 1: GQ's Sexiest Man Alive. Back in the turn of the century, though,
Speaker 1: Americans were just as hungry for tabloid tales about ladies men.
Speaker 1: And in Seattle, one of the last bastions of the
Speaker 1: Old West, the toast of the town was Harry Allen.
Speaker 1: Harry was unique. He was audacious, unpologetic, and open about
Speaker 1: who he was. He lived life exactly on his own terms.
Speaker 1: Not Perhaps that doesn't sound that unusual, but for a
Speaker 1: time it was because Harry was someone who, if he
Speaker 1: lived today, might call himself a trans man. The Old
Speaker 1: West was a haven for people who didn't always fit
Speaker 1: in to society back East. This went across the board
Speaker 1: from rough and Tumble Mountain men to women who wanted
Speaker 1: to call their own shots. The freedom of the Old
Speaker 1: West was especially attractive to many queer people. While life
Speaker 1: on the frontier could be difficult, it was a lot
Speaker 1: easier to live the way they wanted. Survival was the
Speaker 1: most important order of the day, not gender roles, so
Speaker 1: the Old West was especially perfect for Harry Allen. Harry
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen eighty two to a family of
Speaker 1: poor ranchers working in Indiana. While initially his parents treated
Speaker 1: him as a girl and gave him a female name,
Speaker 1: it became pretty clear that Harry saw himself as a boy.
Speaker 1: His mother later recounted that from an early age, Harry
Speaker 1: didn't like to go along with the typical gender roles
Speaker 1: of the day. He wanted to wear trousers, not dresses,
Speaker 1: and he'd much rather ride horses and shoot guns than
Speaker 1: learn embroidery. He had no interest in all things that
Speaker 1: were mostly traditionally part of a woman's realm. Harry told
Speaker 1: the newspaper many years later that I did not like
Speaker 1: to be a girl. I did not feel like a girl,
Speaker 1: and never did look like a girl. To Harry, he
Speaker 1: was always a boy. Soon after his family moved to
Speaker 1: the Seattle area. Harry formally changed his name to Harry Livingston,
Speaker 1: and while the name fit him much better, it didn't
Speaker 1: exactly last long. You see, Harry quickly became infamous as
Speaker 1: a pretty tough guy. He ran with some street gangs
Speaker 1: and committed petty theft. So once the name Harry Livingston
Speaker 1: had too many arrests attached to it, he changed it
Speaker 1: once more to Harry Allen, And while he still hung
Speaker 1: around the fringes in Seattle, Harry Allen started searching for
Speaker 1: legitimate work. He served stints as a bartender, a boxer,
Speaker 1: a longshoreman, a barber, even a cowboy. But he was
Speaker 1: also a fastidious dresser who always wore a silk hat,
Speaker 1: a tie, and carried a walking stick. And then, as
Speaker 1: a handsome young man, he quickly attracted a gaggle of
Speaker 1: female companions. Harry's background was common knowledge to his friends
Speaker 1: and his dates, but once the papers and the police
Speaker 1: caught win, he became a target. He was arrested frequently
Speaker 1: for wearing quote unquote male clothes, although there was no
Speaker 1: law against that. He was also often picked up for
Speaker 1: vagrancy more air quotes. There a vague law that was
Speaker 1: commonly used to harass people outside the norm, or simply
Speaker 1: people the police did not like. That's not to say
Speaker 1: that he didn't sometimes come by those charges. Honestly, Harry
Speaker 1: still liked to fight and steal and occasionally bootleg. But
Speaker 1: in retrospect, it really feels like the cops and the
Speaker 1: papers had an agenda with Harry. Seattle was a boomtown
Speaker 1: at the time, with plenty of gambling, drinking, and a
Speaker 1: bustling red light district. Public reformers were casting the city
Speaker 1: as a den of sin. When Harry popped up, living
Speaker 1: openly as a man, he was everything these crusaders thought
Speaker 1: was wrong with the world, so they wanted to make
Speaker 1: an example of him. Soon, Harry's escapades became tabloid fodder.
Speaker 1: They reported when he drunkenly played the piano at a saloon,
Speaker 1: or when he broke up with his many girlfriends. More
Speaker 1: than one newspaper claimed several women ended their lives after
Speaker 1: he broke their hearts. Whether this was real or more
Speaker 1: tabloid sensationalism isn't clear, but the message was Harry and
Speaker 1: everything he represented was dangerous. From nineteen hundred to his
Speaker 1: death in nineteen twenty two, Harry appears in the Seattle
Speaker 1: Papers dozens of times. In most of those reports, the
Speaker 1: papers refused to call him by his preferred name, even
Speaker 1: when the article was about how he didn't want to
Speaker 1: be referred to as a woman. In fact, most of
Speaker 1: these stories weren't particularly newsworthy. For example, several of them
Speaker 1: are just the writer speculating why certain women with good
Speaker 1: parents were dating him. The true story was Harry Allen
Speaker 1: was a man who, although troubled the stealing and fighting
Speaker 1: are a big hint there, he was mostly just trying
Speaker 1: to live a normal life, which at the time was
Speaker 1: a pretty extraordinary thing for him to do. The real
Speaker 1: story wasn't who he might have been, but who he was.
Speaker 1: And to the ladies of Seattle, well, they liked Harry
Speaker 1: a heck of a lot. And that, my friends, is
Speaker 1: all the news that's fit to print. The song sixteen
Speaker 1: Tons by country singer Merle Travis is famous for its chorus.
Speaker 1: The singer shouts, I owe my soul to the company store. Now,
Speaker 1: a modern audience might hear this and have no idea
Speaker 1: what he is talking about, and that could be by design.
Speaker 1: The song refers to a very dark and painful chapter
Speaker 1: in American history that has never truly been accounted for
Speaker 1: a time that some people would rather we all forget,
Speaker 1: a time when coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and
Speaker 1: Colorado were forced into virtual slavery and murdered by their
Speaker 1: own employers. Naturally, I want to tell you about it.
Speaker 1: You understand it. We need to go back in time
Speaker 1: and meet a man named Sid Sheriff. Sid Hatfield couldn't
Speaker 1: pinpoint when exactly it happened, but somehow, slowly, from about
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety to nineteen twenty, the coal companies had come
Speaker 1: to rule West Virginia. It was his job to protect
Speaker 1: these people, and he had failed. His community consisted mostly
Speaker 1: of coal miners who were forced to work deep underground
Speaker 1: in terrible conditions. If they weren't killed by Caven's they
Speaker 1: died a slow death from black lung. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: like they could just quit the coal companies. Companies like
Speaker 1: Stone Mountain and Burnwell Coal kept them in indentured servitude.
Speaker 1: In truth, that was the nice name for it, because
Speaker 1: it was actually just slavery. The coal miners had to
Speaker 1: rent their homes and their tools from the coal companies.
Speaker 1: They were paid a meager wage, but not an American
Speaker 1: dollars in script, a company voucher that was redeemable only
Speaker 1: at the company's store. The coal companies made sure that
Speaker 1: workers had just enough vouchers to buy food, but not
Speaker 1: enough to pay off their mounting debt from renting their
Speaker 1: homes and their tools. The workers tried to protest these conditions,
Speaker 1: of course, forming a union called the United Mine Workers
Speaker 1: or UMW, But as soon as the companies got wind
Speaker 1: of this, they hired thugs from the Baldwin Feltz Detective Agency.
Speaker 1: Those thugs beat and killed several mine workers, driving them
Speaker 1: from their homes, running over their tents, and firing machine
Speaker 1: guns at them. Finally, Sheriff Hatfield had enough. The detectives
Speaker 1: claimed that they had the legal authority to protect the
Speaker 1: coal companies properly, but Hatfield knew that no one could
Speaker 1: possibly have the legal authority to do what these people
Speaker 1: were doing. So in May of nineteen twenty, Hatfield, who
Speaker 1: yes was a relative of the Hatfields of the Hatfields
Speaker 1: and McCoy's feud if you were wondering, gathered a posse,
Speaker 1: including the mayor of the town of Maitland in Mingo County,
Speaker 1: where the coal companies were located. They confronted a group
Speaker 1: of detectives from the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency as they
Speaker 1: prepared to leave town via the local train station. These
Speaker 1: detectives insisted they had done nothing wrong, but Hatfield wouldn't
Speaker 1: let them leave town. Tempers escalated, no one would yield
Speaker 1: to the other, and suddenly a gun was drawn. Afterward,
Speaker 1: no one could tell exactly how it all went down,
Speaker 1: who fired first, who shot who, But when the smoke cleared,
Speaker 1: several Baldwin Felt's agents were dead, as was the mayor
Speaker 1: and multiple members of Hatfield's posse. Hatfield spent the next
Speaker 1: year desperately trying to find evidence to use against the
Speaker 1: coal companies. He wouldn't let the death of his allies
Speaker 1: go unpunished, but neither would the coal companies let the
Speaker 1: deaths of their agents go unanswered. In August of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty one, as Hatfield walked into the local courthouse, another
Speaker 1: bullet rang out, and he became the latest victim of
Speaker 1: the conflict. But his death galvanized the community. The members
Speaker 1: of the UMW rose up. Just a few days later,
Speaker 1: they marched across the county and assaulted the coal company's
Speaker 1: stronghold atop the local landmark known as Blair Mountain. Thousands
Speaker 1: of workers clashed with thousands of coal representatives. Both sides
Speaker 1: had heavy firepower, machine guns and gatling guns, either smuggled
Speaker 1: in by train or left over from their service in
Speaker 1: World War One. The workers tried to get up the mountain,
Speaker 1: but the coal companies kept them back with a steady
Speaker 1: stream of bullets. It's estimated that one million shots were
Speaker 1: fired during what came to be known as the Battle
Speaker 1: of Blair Mountain. Another local sheriff, though Don Chaffin, had
Speaker 1: always been a coal company crony, he actually arranged for
Speaker 1: small aircraft to drop makeshift bombs on the workers. He
Speaker 1: and other law enforcement eventually sent word to federal authorities,
Speaker 1: and soon the army arrived, forcing everyone to lay down
Speaker 1: their arms. It was a stinging defeat for the union.
Speaker 1: Dozens had died, and of course the blame fell mostly
Speaker 1: on them. Many union members were tried for murder, although
Speaker 1: they were ultimately acquitted. However, the union was bankrupted from
Speaker 1: their legal defense fees and eventually had to disband. Sadly, workers'
Speaker 1: rights in America wouldn't improve until President FDR created the
Speaker 1: Works Progress Administration in nineteen thirty five. Even with that
Speaker 1: in mind, the United States has continued to struggle to
Speaker 1: enforce labor laws, with many workers still fighting in court
Speaker 1: for their right to unionize. No one is selling their
Speaker 1: soul to the company store these days, but it's a
Speaker 1: curious world where history often repeats itself. If workers' rights
Speaker 1: aren't respected, then the next Battle of Blair Mountain could
Speaker 1: be in our own backyard. I hope you've enjoyed today's
Speaker 1: guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
Speaker 1: visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
Speaker 1: make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
Speaker 1: book series, and television show, and you can learn all
Speaker 1: about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until
Speaker 1: next time, stay curious.