On May 19, 1920, newly-unionized coal miners confront a detective agency hired by the mining companies to evict strikers from company-owned houses in Matewan, West Virginia, in the ancestral territory of the forcibly-removed Shawnee, Cherokee, Lenape, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

The pro-union mayor and police chief present arrest warrants for the detectives, and, in response, the detectives present a warrant for the police chief’s arrest. After an exchange of heavy gunfire, two miners, the mayor, and seven detectives lie dead. Nobody is convicted of any crime, the police chief marries the mayor’s widow, and a lot more violence occurs between the union and the mining companies, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain in August 1921.