The Ludlow Massacre: The History of the National Guard’s Attack on Striking Miners during the Colorado Coalfield War

As labor unions and movements began to form and coalesce in the 19th century, the tensions between workers and companies led to demonstrations, encounters, and even conflicts that descended into violence. Among those, few were as notorious as the fight that took place on April 20, 1914 at Ludlow in the southern Colorado coalfields, during which two units of the Colorado National Guard had a firefight with striking miners who lived in a United Mine Workers (UMW) camp. The Guardsmen had at least one machine gun, and the strikers were also armed. The gunfire lasted most of the day, and at the day’s end, the miners were routed and fled the camp with their families.

Perhaps as many as a dozen miners in the camp were killed during the fighting, but after it was over, the Guardsmen cautiously entered the camp, did some looting, and then soaked the miners’ tents with kerosene in order to burn the whole camp to the ground. The Guard’s arsonists were unaware that in one tent, four women and 11 children had hidden themselves in a sort of cellar under a tent, seeking protection from the gunfire. After the camp burned, a deeply disturbing aspect of the fighting was discovered: two of those women and all 11 children had been asphyxiated from the smoke of their burning tent.

These grim deaths marked Ludlow as more than just another regrettable coal war battle and earned it the title of the Ludlow Massacre. In the previous several decades, there had been a number of violent incidents during strikes in several states that killed more people, but in 1914, Victorian sentimentality about women and children was still prevalent, and the Ludlow tragedy deeply shocked the nation.

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