Chapter 1
Before the blood spilled in my life, it was soaked into the ground of Southern Illinois.
Herrin. Johnston City. Carterville. These names are etched in soot and memory, passed down through generations of my family like sacred and damned scripture. This is coal country—but beneath the coal lies something deeper: a legacy of violence, control, and carefully orchestrated silence.
My ancestors weren’t just miners. They ran the mercantile for the mines. That made them gatekeepers to survival. Bread. Boots. Bandages. Dynamite. In the midst of union strikes and coal riots, my grandfather and his brothers didn’t just sell supplies. They decided who got to eat and who would starve. And with that power came blood.
This wasn’t a place of clean labor and fair wages. This was Bloody Williamson—a name not given in metaphor but born in massacre. The Herrin Massacre of 1922 wasn’t the only violence to mark the land, but it was the one that bled loud enough to make national headlines. Gunfights in the streets. Union men executed by mobs. Bodies dumped in strip pits.
These weren’t just strangers to my family. They were clients. Cousins. Enemies in the day, allies in the night. My grandfather’s store sold supplies to both sides of the labor war. Whether they wore union badges or carried hired guns, everyone needed what the Yuills had.
But this isn’t just about coal. The mines were a cover for something more. Underground tunnels weren’t only carved for extraction—they were used to move contraband, hide bodies, and conduct rituals. Whispers of Masonic rites echo through those tunnels even now, buried under foundations and time. The deeper I dig, the clearer it becomes: this land was not only mined for coal, it was mined for power.
In the interview before his passing, my father, Robert Yuill, spoke with measured pride about those days. He didn’t speak of it as horror, but as heritage. He spoke of the mercantile as a family triumph, a symbol of grit. But I heard what he didn’t say. I watched his eyes flicker at certain names. I saw the silence stretch too long before he shifted to safer memories.
Power in Williamson County never changed hands. It changed costumes. From coal suits to courtrooms. From moonshine trails to masonic lodges. From the barrel of a gun to the handshake of a banker.
This was my inheritance. Not land. Not money. Not stories of love and legacy. But a knowledge that the ground beneath our feet was never ours—and it has always been watching.
The coal beneath our feet was never just fuel. It was the first sacrament in a long ritual of dominion.
And my family held the torch.
