The Battle of Stanaford (February 25, 1903) was an armed raid against striking miners in the village of Stanaford, West Virginia, United States. It was the final episode of the 1902 New River Coal Strike.
The raiding party was led by Deputy U.S. Marshall Daniel Webster Cunningham, Raleigh County Sheriff Harvey Cook, and Howard Smith of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Six miners were killed.
The Labor Leader Mary Harris Jones saw the aftermath of the attack, writing in her autobiography:
"I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came nearer the miners’ homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner’s shack the clay red with blood. I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets.
In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father’s corpse. When the little fellow saw me, he said, 'Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him.'
The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company."