The Colorado Coalfield War was a major labor uprising in the southern and central Colorado Front Range between September 1913 and December 1914. Striking began in late summer 1913, organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) and other corporate mining enterprises after years of deadly working conditions and low pay. According to the 1915 U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations Report on the Colorado Strike, "The struggle in Colorado was primarily a struggle against arbitrary power, in which the question of wages was secondary, as an immediate issue". The strike was marred by both targeted and indiscriminate attacks from both strikers and individuals hired by CF&I to defend its property. Fighting was focused in the southern coal-mining counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, where the Colorado and Southern railroad passed through Trinidad and Walsenburg. It followed the 1912 Northern Colorado Coalfield Strikes.
Tensions climaxed at the Ludlow Colony, a tent city occupied by about 1,200 striking coal miners and their families, in the Ludlow Massacre on 20 April 1914 when the Colorado National Guard attacked. In retaliation, armed miners attacked dozens of mines and other targets over the next ten days, killing strikebreakers, destroying property, and engaging in several skirmishes with the National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville, north of Denver. Violence largely ended following the arrival of federal soldiers in late April 1914, but the strike did not end until December 1914. No concessions were made to the strikers. An estimated 69 to 199 people died during the strike, though the total dead counted in official local government records and contemporary news reports is far lower. The labor dispute was the bloodiest in the United States and Colorado historian William J. Convery called it the "bloodiest civil insurrection in American history since the Civil War". The Colorado Coalfield War is notable for the number of company-aligned dead in a period when strikebreaking violence typically saw fatalities exclusively among strikers, and contributed to the rapid escalation of violence in the later Battle of Blair Mountain.
Background
In 1903, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was taken over from its founder, John C. Osgood, by a group of Colorado-based board members and investors with the support of John D. Rockefeller. Osgood was the wealthiest Coloradan at the time, and founded the Victor-American Fuel Company later that year.
Colorado Fuel and Iron's treatment of its workers worsened after its sale to John D. Rockefeller, who gave his portion of the company to his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. as a birthday gift. The company already had a history of buying political figures and banking "graft", but Lamont Montgomery Bowers, who was hired to "untangle the mess", caused additional issues. Bowers, made chairman of the CF&I board in 1907, admitted that the company had "mighty power in the entire state." Under his leadership, every employee—regardless of citizenship status—as well as company mules were registered to vote. The workers were coerced to vote for the company's interests. He cut the Sociological Department and embraced the idea of a hands-off approach to employee management. This caused rampant dishonesty in middle management, to the detriment of the mine workers. Despite the reduction of the Sociological Department's involvement in some aspects of employees' lives, there was still enforcement of certain societal regulations. A later federal report would claim CF&I was censoring literature in the company towns, prohibiting "socialist" texts as well as books described by a CF&I spokesman as containing "erroneous ideas," including Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Miners were generally paid according to tonnage of coal produced, while so-called "dead work", such as shoring up unstable roofs, was often unpaid. The tonnage system drove many poor and ambitious colliers to gamble with their lives by neglecting precautions and taking on risk, with consequences that were often fatal. CF&I was accused by both miners and federal investigators of occasionally not assigning checkweighmen "in order that the miners might be cheated of part of their earnings."
Between 1884 and 1912, Colorado's fatality rate among miners was more than double the national average, with 6.81 miners killed for every 1,000 workers (against a national average of 3.12). In the decade preceding the 1913–1914 Strike, CF&I mines had been involved in several major accidents. These included the 31 January 1910 explosion that killed 75 at the Primero Mine and the Starkville Mine explosion that killed 56 on 8 October of that year. Both of these accidents took place in Las Animas County, part of what became the strike zone and where the Ludlow Colony was established. These incidents raised the fatality rate in Colorado to above 10 deaths per 1,000 workers, three times the national average. Due to jury tampering by the companies, very few accident lawsuits were launched; between 1895 and 1915, no personal injury lawsuits were launched against coal mining companies in Huerfano County. In the case of the 1910 Primero accident, a coroner's report issued after five days absolved CF&I of any civil or criminal responsibility. Additionally, a high rate of disease afflicted the minefields, with at least 151 inhabitants of CF&I company towns contracting typhoid in the year preceding the 1913–1914 strike.
In April 1912, the Northern Colorado Coalfield Strikes slowly ended following several years of striking and negotiations. This strike had seen internal tensions between different districts of UMWA miners, as some members of neighboring districts were recruited as strikebreakers, leading some members of the Industrial Workers of the World, through their publication Industrial Worker, to claim "autonomous district organization is on par with scabbery." In its aftermath, the National Guard prepared for additional violence by constructing fortifications, including the large cobblestone Golden Armory in June 1913.
Since the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–1904, CF&I had spent $20,000 annually () on private detectives and security to monitor and infiltrate unions. Baldwin-Felts spy Charles Lively was among the most successful in his infiltration, rising to the position of vice-president of the UMWA local. Bowers viewed these private investigators as “grafters” and sought to cut ties with them. However, local CF&I fuel manager E. H. Weitzel retained Pinkerton detectives in the Southern Colorado coalfields to monitor the collective organizing of miners in the region. Federal investigators would later cite these armed guards and spies, as well at their utilization of "the whole machine of the law" in the "persecution of organizers and union members," as among the primary reasons for strikers taking arms against CF&I.
The Copper County Strike of copper workers in Calumet, Michigan, for nine months from 1913 to 1914, ran concurrently with the Colorado strike, and both strikers and Guardsmen were aware of the events in Michigan through coverage in Collier's and other nationally circulating publications.
Beginning of the strike
The Coalfield Strikes of 1913–1914 began in the late summer of 1913 when the United Mine Workers of America organized its regional District 15, led by John McLennan, to represent Southern Coloradan coal field workers and put forward demands to Colorado Fuel and Iron. Demands that emphasized enforcement of new regulatory laws were not met. Among the demands unheeded was the enforcement of a mine-safety bill passed in 1913 which required better ventilation in the mines, but which had no enforcement provision. On 16 September 1913, miners with and union members with District 15 adopted demands for a seven-step improvement to the wage scale of miners and company recognition of the UMWA.
In December 1912, the UMWA had sent 21 "recruiting teams" to the Southern Colorado coalfields. These recruiting teams generally consisted of two union men: one who would embed himself among the miners and another who would find employment with the local management. Working in tandem, each pairing would locate miners who were opposed to unionization and report them to the company as union sympathizers—an offense that generally resulted in contract termination—in order to covertly replace them with genuine union members. It is possible that up to 3,000 UMWA members were introduced to the coalfields in such a manner.
In Southern Colorado, an expanded strike began on 23 September 1913 during a rainstorm. That day, the strike peaked with up to 20,000 miners and family members being evicted from company housing. Prior to the eviction, there had been plans to move them all into union supplied tents. Eight tent colonies were supposed to have been constructed with materials from the UMWA in anticipation such an eventuality, but most of the tents arrived late, leading some families to resort to using furniture as improvised shelters. Despite internal statistics at CF&I that suggested only 10 percent of miners were union-members, Rockefeller was informed soon after the strike began that between 40 and 60 percent of the miners in the strike zone had left work, which became roughly 80.5 percent—7,660 men—by the 24th.
Jesse F. Welborn, the president of CF&I, announced he would not meet with the strikers and that the confrontation “would be a strike to the finish.” The day the strike was declared, Mother Jones led a march on the Trinidad town hall, giving a brief speech outside and inside:
During this initial stage of the strike, Governor Ammons met several times with Welborn, Osgood, and David W. Brown—representing CF&I, Victor-American, and the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company respectively. Ammons intended to facilitate a summit between these corporate leaders to several of the union heads so that the strike might end quickly. However, following belligerent statements on both sides, such a conference never transpired.
Most sheriffs and deputy sheriffs in the area were affiliated in some fashion with CF&I and the other major mining companies and acted as an initial force against the strikers. Their numbers were bolstered as the strike began by recruiting of new sheriffs and deputies, including Karl Linderfelt, who later led the militia. Many of those deputized, and at least 66 in two days, were from Texas, while others were from New Mexico.
General John Chase had been the leader of the National Guard units charged with the suppression of the 1903–1904 Cripple Creek Strike and was disposed positively towards the mine guards and hired detectives that would eventually supplement his ranks. CF&I vehicles and other infrastructure were regularly employed by the Guard for the duration of the strike. Chase, in his position at the head of the Colorado National Guard, embraced an aggressive stance against the strikers.
Though there were strikes in places such as Walsenburg and Trinidad, the largest of the strike colonies was in Ludlow. It had around 200 tents with 1,200 miners. The escalating situation caused Governor Elias Ammons to call in the Colorado National Guard in October 1913, but after six months all but two companies were withdrawn for financial reasons. However, during this six-month period, guardsmen were allowed to leave if their primary livelihood was threatened and many of the guardsmen were "new recruits"—mine guards and strikebreakers in National Guard uniforms.