John C. and Hiley

Thirteen-year-old John C. McCoy slips into the cold water of the Tug Fork River and swims through the darkness to the West Virginia shore and his future. It is 1909, and in a dozen years, he and his wife, Hiley, and two daughters struggle to survive, and the couple joins the fight for food, shelter, and safety in the coal fields. In 1979, shortly after John C. dies, his grandson, an Army colonel, seeks the story of the mine wars, denied to him in public education, and the role of his grandfather