Ludlow Remembered: A Century of Shame
At Least 18 Workers, Women, Children Cut Down in Grisly Massacre 100 Years Ago
By Phil Goodstein
This month marks 100 years of a slaughter that will long be remembered as a most dark day in Colorado.
The standoff started seven months before. On Sept. 23, during a raging blizzard, 12,232 coal miners and their families went on strike in southern Colorado.
Staging the walkout at the beginning of the winter heating season, they protested the miserable way the state’s largest employer, the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), had treated them. Not only were their wages extremely poor, but the workers, and their families, were forced to live in company towns, complete with the supervision of an omnipresent private security force.
Most of all, CF&I bitterly combated unions. The company refused to allow the workers or their representatives to have the slightest say about work and living conditions.
Most of the strikers were immigrants. The Pueblo-based CF&I had recruited many of them in the wake of a previous strike in 1903–04. In addition to numerous men and women from southern and eastern Europe, there were a sizable number of Hispanics, some of whom were from Mexico. CF&I also brought in African-Americans from southern states. It cynically employed divide-and-conquer tactics to keep its workers from challenging the company’s complete dictatorship over their daily lives.
At this time, the United Mine Workers (UMW) had made considerable advances in the East in gaining union recognition for the men who dug coal. The labor organization had also had some success in organizing workers in the northern Colorado coalfields around Lafayette, Boulder and Louisville. It knew that none of its contracts were secure as long as CF&I could undercut union employers. The Wall Street firm deliberately sold its coal for a loss in certain markets as a way of forcing union firms out of business.
From the time the UMW launched the organizing campaign, CF&I was blunt. If the workers walked off their jobs, they would be evicted from the company towns. In response, the union leased government lands in barren parts of the Front Range close to the coal mines. It proceeded to purchase camping equipment. In about 10 instant tent villages, the workers stayed for the duration of the strike—many had no other place to go.
Surviving a bitterly cold winter
The supporters of the UMW showed an incredible fortitude. In response, CF&I beefed up its security force. It hired notorious gunmen of the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency, an outfit that had previously shot down striking coal miners in West Virginia. The goons sought to intimidate striking workers while they escorted scabs into the mines.
The workers fought back. Before long, violence flared through the strike zone. In response to company pleas, Gov. Elias Ammons mobilized the National Guard to keep peace in southern Colorado. He had won the statehouse in 1912 in an overwhelming Democratic sweep. His only hesitation about sending in the militia was the heavy costs it involved.
The soldiers immediately demanded the disarming of the workers. No such constraints were placed on CF&I’s gunmen. Even so, the presence of the National Guard temporarily led to a stalemate. The workers and their families remained in the miserable tent colonies through the extremely snowy, bitterly cold winter of 1913–14.
As they shivered on strike duty during which they hoped nothing would happen, many of the members of the National Guard complained about the assignment. They had signed up to defend the country, not to serve as the private army for a Rockefeller-owned corporation.
In response to their laments, Gov. Ammons ruled that they could get out of the service if they found a replacement soldier. Most had no trouble doing so: In their place the National Guard readily enlisted gunmen who were already in the pay of CF&I.
‘They fired at anybody trying to flee’
Now that the militia was essentially the private army of the mine owners, violence once more escalated. Attacks by the soldiers destroyed some of the tent colonies. Still, the workers stayed on strike. CF&I, in response to union offers to accept arbitration, stated there was nothing to negotiate.
By April, only two militia companies remained in the strike zone—that was all the deeply indebted state could afford. Both were filled with professional soldiers and avowed haters of labor. Still, the workers held firm. Their main quarters were Ludlow. This was the colony of approximately 1,000 workers and their families located near a railroad crossing about halfway between Walsenburg and Trinidad.
As a measure of self-defense, the miners had dug bunkers under some of the tents. That was where women and children were to go for safety if the militia attacked. Random beatings and arrests of strikers were common. Local law enforcement officials were at one with CF&I in fighting the union and the strike.
The workers took it as a moral victory that they had survived the winter on Greek Easter, Sunday, April 19, 1914. Amidst their festivities, soldiers arrived. They claimed the workers were holding a kidnapped boy. If the residents did not turn him over the next day, they promised retribution.
This was the situation on the morning of April 20, 1914. The National Guard prepared to attack Ludlow. First they arrested and murdered Louis Tikas, the UMW camp leader. Soon gunshots rang out. The workers, as part of their defense plans, sought to fold off the soldiers by heading to the hills where, though completely outgunned, they held off the attack for most of the day.
Out of ammunition, the workers retreated in the late afternoon. The National Guard thereupon invaded Ludlow. After looting the settlement, the troopers poured kerosene on the tents and set them afire. Using machine guns, they fired at anybody trying to flee. Only the arrival of a freight train, blocking the soldiers from the camp at a crucial moment, limited their slaughter.
Making sure no one forgets
At least 18 children, women and men were killed at Ludlow. No final tally could ever be done, as many people – particularly single men – simply disappeared. Whether they escaped, left, or were killed is unknown.
In the wake of the ruins, searchers found the bodies of two women and 11 children suffocated to death in an underground bunker. On its discovery, the workers literally went on the warpath, attacking and destroying mines and CF&I property through southern Colorado.
The National Guard was completely helpless in the face of the revolt. In consequence, President Woodrow Wilson had to send in federal troops to quell the disorder. He had previously mobilized them to attack on Mexico to crush that country’s revolution. The aftermath of Ludlow prevented the president from engaging in that adventure.
The strike lingered on until December when the union, and the workers, conceded defeat. Not until the 1930s, amidst the massive organizing drive of the New Deal, did the UMW gain recognition for coal miners in southern Colorado. The union and virtually all backers of labor well remembered Ludlow.
To make sure nobody else forgot it, around 1934 the Colorado Labor Historical Committee commissioned a Park Hill resident, Barron B. Beshoar of 2342 Elm St., to write the pioneering account of Ludlow, Out of the Depths. An instant classic that was repeatedly reprinted, it still quickly disappears from used bookstores.
Beshoar, a founder of the Denver Newspaper Guild, went on to be a foremost reporter for Time-Life. After stints in New York and Los Angeles, he later moved to the Montclair neighborhood. He was living in Montrose by the time of his death in 1987.
His passion is still obvious in Out of the Depths on the centennial of the shame of Ludlow.
Author Phil Goodstein grew up in Park Hill. He treats the Ludlow Massacre in his book on early Denver, Denver from the Bottom Up: From Sand Creek to Ludlow. His Park Hill Promise is a thorough overview of the origins and evolution of greater Park Hill. Both volumes are available at the Park Hill Bookstore. Goodstein also leads walking tours of Denver neighborhoods: See sidebar for a schedule of April tours, including Park Hill.