The Ludlow strike in the Colorado mining fields in 1913–14 is one of the clearest examples of the use of armed force by employers to oppose labor organization. The Ludlow coal mine owners had long resisted unionization, but in 1913 the United Mine Workers decided to try again. The union asked the Governor to arrange a conference for them with the mine operators, but the operators refused. The union called a strike on September 25, 1913. Of the reforms demanded, five were simply that state laws which the owners ignored be put in force. Some of these, for example, dealt with safety regulations while others guaranteed workers’ rights, such as the right to trade at stores of their own choosing. To break the strike, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company imported agents from Texas, New Mexico, and West Virginia who were deputized by the local sheriff as soon as they arrived and thus given official powers. Spies were sent among the miners who had been evicted from company homes and now lived in tent colonies set up by the Union. Automobiles were fitted with armored plate and machine guns mounted on them. On October 7, 1913, guards attacked the Ludlow tent colony, killing a miner and wounding a small boy. At Walsenberg several days later they fired into a meeting, killing three. The next day one guard was killed, and the miners fired on the “Death Special,” an armed locomotive, and forced its retreat.
At this point Governor Elias M. Ammons sent in the Colorado National Guard to prevent further violence. The strikers welcomed them, convinced that they would be preferable to a private army. But under pressure from the mine owners, the Governor reversed his policy. Under John Chase, the anti-union commander of the National Guard, the troops harassed and arrested the miners, and molested their wives and daughters. After a time, the private guards were allowed to join the National Guard to replace those regular members who wanted to return to their homes. Thirty-five of these newly recruited guards, under the command of Lt. K. E. Linderfelt, drove to Ludlow on April 20, 1914, and fired on the tent colony with machine guns. Five men and a boy were killed. Linderfelt next fired the tents with coal oil, and eleven children and two women were smothered to death. Three prisoners, one of whom was Louis Tikas, a Greek leader of the strike, were murdered. Linderfelt broke a rifle over Tikas’ head before the soldiers shot him.
The massacre provoked a bloody counter attack by the miners, who rampaged from mine to mine destroying and killing. Seven hundred to one thousand armed strikers, organized by union officials, soon gained control of large areas. By April 29, when President Wilson sent in federal troops, seventy-four people had been killed.
Wilson tried to settle the strike, but the operators refused to budge. On December 30, 1914, the miners gave up and called off the strike.
The account which follows was written by George P. West for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations’ investigation into the Ludlow massacre: Report on the Colorado Strike (1915), 101–38. See also Graham Adams: Age of Industrial Violence (1966).
… by April 20th the Colorado National Guard no longer offered even a pretense of fairness or impartiality, and its units in the field had degenerated into a force of professional gunmen and adventurers who were economically dependent on and subservient to the will of the coal operators. This force was dominated by an officer whose intense hatred for the strikers had been demonstrated, and who did not lack the courage and the belligerent spirit required to provoke hostilities. Although twelve hundred men, women and children remained at the Ludlow Tent Colony and Linderfelt’s immediate force consisted of not more than thirty-five men, the militiamen were equipped with machine guns and high powered repeating rifles and could count on speedy reinforcement by the members of Troop “A,” which numbered about one hundred. The Ludlow Colony had been repeatedly searched during the preceding weeks for arms and ammunition, and Major Boughton’s testimony before this Commission indicates that Linderfelt believed the strikers to be unarmed.…
On April 20th militiamen destroyed the Ludlow Tent Colony, killing five men and one boy with rifle and machine gun fire and firing the tents with a torch.
Eleven children and two women of the colony who had taken refuge in a hole under one of the tents were burned to death or suffocated after the tents had been fired. During the firing of the tents, the militiamen became an uncontrolled mob and looted the tents of everything that appealed to their fancy or cupidity.
Hundreds of women and children were driven terror stricken into the hills or to shelter at near-by ranch houses. Others huddled for twelve hours in pits underneath their tents or in other places of shelter, while bullets from rifles and machine guns whistled overhead and kept them in constant terror.
The militiamen lost one man. He was shot through the neck early in the attack.
Three of the strikers killed at Ludlow were shot while under the guard of armed militiamen who had taken them prisoners. They included Louis Tikas, a leader of the Greek strikers, a man of high intelligence who had done his utmost that morning to maintain peace and prevent the attack and who had remained in or near the tent colony throughout the day to look after the women and children. Tikas was first seriously or mortally wounded by a blow on the head from the stock of a Springfield rifle in the hands of Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt of the Colorado National Guard, and then shot three times in the back by militiamen and mine guards.
The assassination of Tikas and the death of thirteen women and children at Ludlow precipitated an armed and open rebellion against the authority of the State as represented by the militia. This rebellion constituted perhaps one of the nearest approaches to civil war and revolution ever known in this country in connection with an industrial conflict.
Strikers in the Trinidad and Walsenburg Districts of Southern Colorado, and in the Canyon City and Louisville Districts, armed themselves and swarmed over the hills, bent on avenging the death of their Ludlow comrades.
Two days after the Ludlow tragedy, on Wednesday, April 22, the responsible leaders of organized labor in Colorado telegraphed to President Wilson, notifying him that they had sent an appeal to every labor organization in Colorado urging them to gather arms and ammunition and organize themselves into companies.
By Wednesday, April 22, two days after the Ludlow killings, armed and enraged strikers were in possession of the field from Rouse, twelve miles south of Walsenburg, to Hastings and Delagua, southwest of Ludlow. Within this territory of eighteen miles north and south by four or five miles east and west were situated many mines manned by superintendents, foremen, mine guards and strikebreakers. Inflamed by what they considered the wanton slaughter of their women, children and comrades, the miners attacked mine after mine, driving off or killing the guards and setting fire to the buildings. At the Empire mine of the Southwestern Fuel Company near Aguilar the President of the company, J. W. Siple, with twenty men and eight women and children, took refuge in the mine stope after the shaft house and buildings had been burned and dynamited. The strikers besieged them for two days, Siple having declined to surrender on promise of safe conduct. The party was rescued on the arrival of fresh militiamen from Denver under Adjutant General Chase on Friday afternoon.
Mine buildings were burned by the strikers at the Southwestern, Hastings, Delagua, Empire, Green Canyon, Royal and Broadhead mines.…
On Saturday strikers attacked the Chandler mine near Canyon City, on the other side of a range of foot hills and many miles from any point where disorder had previously occurred. The mine was captured Sunday afternoon and some of the buildings were burned.
On Monday night strikers attacked the Hecla mine at Louisville, northwest of Denver, and about 250 miles north of Trinidad. They also surrounded the Vulcan mine at Lafayette, a camp near Louisville in the northern field.…
On Wednesday morning, or late in the preceding night, a party of about 200 armed strikers left the strikers’ military colony near Trinidad and marched over the hills to Forbes, a mining camp which lies at the bottom of a canyon surrounded by steep hills. Most of the party were Greeks. Earlier in the strike, before the visit of the Congressional Committee, the strikers’ tent colony at Forbes, situated on ground leased by them, had been twice destroyed by militiamen and mine guards, and on one occasion it had been swept by machine gun fire and a striker killed and a boy had been shot nine times through the legs. Bent on revenge for this earlier attack and for the killings at Ludlow, the strikers took up positions on the hills surrounding the mine buildings, and at daybreak poured a deadly fire into the camp. Nine mine guards and strikebreakers were shot to death and one striker was killed. The strikers fired the mine buildings, including a barn in which were thirty mules, and then withdrew to their camp near Trinidad.
Twenty-four hours later the federal troops arrived and all fighting ceased.
During the ten days of fighting at least fifty persons had lost their lives, including the twenty-one killed at Ludlow.