The strike against Colorado Fuel and Iron had been running since September 1913, and by April of 1914 neither side had given way. The United Mine Workers had pulled eleven thousand men off the coal seams across Las Animas and Huerfano counties, and Colorado Fuel and Iron — the Rockefeller operation that owned not only the mines but the company towns surrounding them, the housing, the stores, the schools, and in practical terms the law enforcement — had responded by evicting the strikers from their company-owned houses and bringing in replacements. The strikers built tent colonies. The largest was at Ludlow, a flat patch of ground off the Colorado and Southern rail line north of Trinidad, where roughly twelve hundred people lived through the winter in canvas, through wind and frost and the ordinary misery of the southern Colorado high plain in January. The accounts left by those who lived there through that winter describe a community that organized itself with the discipline of people who understood they were being watched and judged and could not afford disorder.
The Colorado National Guard had been present in the coalfields since October 1913, initially deployed as a neutral force by Governor Ammons and quickly becoming, by the testimony of the miners themselves and the documented record of the period, an extension of the company’s enforcement apparatus. The labor recruitment notices that Colorado Fuel and Iron ran in European and Eastern newspapers through the early 1910s described Colorado as a place of wages and advancement for families willing to work. The men who answered those notices — Greek, Italian, South Slav, Mexican — arrived to find wages paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores, housing controlled by the company, and a system designed to keep them dependent enough to stay and controlled enough to be replaceable. The tent colony at Ludlow represented the first time many of them had existed outside that system, and that fact was not lost on Colorado Fuel and Iron.
April 20 was Colorado Day, a state holiday, and the colony had organized a celebration — dancing, games, a festive mood that the day’s events ended in the early morning. Before noon, National Guard units had positioned a machine gun on a ridge above the colony. The first shots came from that position, and the question of who fired first — the Guard or the armed miners at the colony perimeter — was disputed immediately and has been disputed in every account since. What is not disputed: the machine gun fired into the colony. Tents were set alight in the afternoon. By evening the colony was burning.
Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the colony who had spent months managing negotiations and keeping the peace within a community of men who had every reason for violence, was captured, beaten, and shot. His body was found on the field the following morning. Two other men were killed with him. Beneath one of the burning tents, in a pit that families had dug as a shelter against gunfire, investigators found the bodies of two women and eleven children who had taken refuge there and died of suffocation and fire. The death toll across the day was nineteen to twenty-one, depending on which account and which identification is accepted. The names confirmed by this archive include the children recovered from the pit: Elvira Valdez, Frank Petrucci, Joe Petrucci, Lucy Petrucci, Rodgerио Pedregon, Cloriva Pedregon, and others whose ages ranged from three months to nine years. The death records maintained by this archive’s correspondent note that three names appearing on the Ludlow monument do not appear in Las Animas County death records of the period, for reasons that have not been explained.
What followed was ten days of open warfare across the southern Colorado coalfields, miners attacking mine installations and company facilities throughout Las Animas and Huerfano counties. President Wilson deployed federal troops on April 30, and the active fighting ended. The National Guard withdrew. The strike continued until December 1914, when the union called it off without having secured recognition. Colorado Fuel and Iron did not negotiate with the United Mine Workers. It introduced what John D. Rockefeller Jr. called the Colorado Industrial Plan — a system of company unions and employee representation committees that gave the appearance of worker input while keeping actual authority with management. The plan was studied and imitated nationally as a model for avoiding genuine labor organization.
No member of the Colorado National Guard was prosecuted for any death at Ludlow. The subsequent investigation was conducted by a congressional committee that heard testimony for months and produced a report that assigned partial responsibility to multiple parties and decisive responsibility to none. The tent colony was never rebuilt. The site is now a monument maintained by the United Mine Workers, on a stretch of flat ground off the highway where the wind still moves in the way that wind moves through a place that has been emptied and not refilled.