From the United Mine Workers of America, KXRM Colorado Springs. and Bob Rossi:
(TRINIDAD, Colo.) — The National Park Service (NPS) announced on Wednesday, July 10 awarded grants to eight recipients to help preserve battlefields and other sites of armed conflict, including the site of the Ludlow Massacre in Las Animas County.
“The diverse grant opportunities provided through the American Battlefield Protection Program help our preservation partners study and protect almost 400 years of conflict history,” said National Park Service Director Chuck Sams. “By supporting these localized efforts, all Americans gain the opportunity to learn from these conflicts and understand their impact on the foundation and growth of this country.”
According to NPS, one of the projects funded will support the development of a comprehensive preservation and interpretation plan for the Ludlow Tent Colony Site, where an armed conflict occurred between the United Mine Workers of America and the Colorado National Guard, known as the Colorado Coalfield War, or the “War of 1914.” This was one of many such conflicts at the time that took place in coal and other mining fields in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914 took the lives of at least 21 people, including women and children who were living in the Ludlow union Tent Colony after having been evicted from company-owned coal camps. The Tent Colony was one of many such worker refuges at the time. It is a must-see for union members and their families who visit Colorado.
The strikes that became the Colorado Coalfield War began in 1910, although it can be said that Coloado coal mine workers frequently engaged in strikes from the time that the state's coalfields began to open in the later decades of the 19th century to the early 1930s. For much of this time the mine workers were employed in competing coalfields and the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), most often associated with the Rockefeller interests in popular memory, and the railroads held a great advantage over the workers and their families and communities.
It was difficult to achieve unity between the mine workers, and the union hesitated to call a statewide strike in the 1910-1914 years. Colorado's coal mining communities spoke scores of languages and were quite diverse, even though forms of racial and ethnic segregation were in place. Different, and sometimes competing, microeconomies existed within the state's coalfields, and it was not always easy for mine workers and their communities to understand that mine workers had common interests despite the competitive arrangements that they had been forced into. Turnover was high, there was often competition for jobs, the companies controlled the police and the courts and exercised great influence over state politics, and company stores ripped off workers. Large numbers of mine workers and their families engaged in seasonal agricultural labor, ranching, and railroad work when the mines were not working. The 1910-1914 strikes and the drama and violence of those strikes reflected a deep and abiding anger among working-class people and a nearly-desperate attempt by those in power to continue on with semi-feudal economic and political relations.
On April 20, 1914, National Guardsmen and gun thugs aligned with the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company attacked the Ludlow Tent Colony. The day fell on Greek Easter and workers at the Tent Colony were playing baseball. Louis Tikas, a popular leader of the mine worker insurgency in Southern Colorado, was brutally mudered by gun thugs when he sought to negotiate a truce. Most of those who died that day were suffocated or were burned to death as they sought shelter from the gunfire directed at them by the company gun thugs and National Guardsmen and as their tents caught fire and they were trapped in dugouts under their tents that they had used for safety and for storing their belongings. One of the dugouts survives at the Ludlow Memorial can can be seen by visitors.
That terrible event provoked at least 10 days of continuous warfare in Colorado, with mine workers and their allies using sophisticated military maneuvers. President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal troops to disarm both sides and restore order. Mass blacklisting took place. The union was able to maintain a base in the Northern Colordo coalfields and a skeletal underground structure in the centeral and Southern coalfields, and unionism survived among some key workers at the huge CF&I steel mill and rail system in Pueblo.
The mine workers and steel workers continued to press for unionization and carried out important strikes in the aftermath of the First World War, despite facing heavy repression. The first coordinated statewide coal mine workers strike in Colorado occured in 1927 and 1928, when mine workers struck under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then became for a short time the highest paid coal mine workers in the world. The IWW was defeated, again through violence and blacklisting and company-dominated courts, and the United Mine Workers of America gained a foothold. The UMWA eventually came to represent Colorao's mine workers.
It was difficult to achieve unity between the mine workers, and the union hesitated to call a statewide strike in the 1910-1914 years. Colorado's coal mining communities spoke scores of languages and were quite diverse, even though forms of racial and ethnic segregation were in place. Different, and sometimes competing, microeconomies existed within the state's coalfields, and it was not always easy for mine workers and their communities to understand that mine workers had common interests despite the competitive arrangements that they had been forced into. Turnover was high, there was often competition for jobs, the companies controlled the police and the courts and exercised great influence over state politics, and company stores ripped off workers. Large numbers of mine workers and their families engaged in seasonal agricultural labor, ranching, and railroad work when the mines were not working. The 1910-1914 strikes and the drama and violence of those strikes reflected a deep and abiding anger among working-class people and a nearly-desperate attempt by those in power to continue on with semi-feudal economic and political relations.
That terrible event provoked at least 10 days of continuous warfare in Colorado, with mine workers and their allies using sophisticated military maneuvers. President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal troops to disarm both sides and restore order. Mass blacklisting took place. The union was able to maintain a base in the Northern Colordo coalfields and a skeletal underground structure in the centeral and Southern coalfields, and unionism survived among some key workers at the huge CF&I steel mill and rail system in Pueblo.
The mine workers and steel workers continued to press for unionization and carried out important strikes in the aftermath of the First World War, despite facing heavy repression. The first coordinated statewide coal mine workers strike in Colorado occured in 1927 and 1928, when mine workers struck under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then became for a short time the highest paid coal mine workers in the world. The IWW was defeated, again through violence and blacklisting and company-dominated courts, and the United Mine Workers of America gained a foothold. The UMWA eventually came to represent Colorao's mine workers.
The UMWA was awarded $151,976.15 for the project.
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