Cripple Creek, Nineteen Oh Three

The gold was running out. Not entirely, but enough that mine owners in Cripple Creek and the nearby town of Victor were looking for ways to cut costs and break the eight-hour-day agreements they had signed with the Western Federation of Miners. In August of nineteen oh three, they moved against the union.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary episodes of state violence against labor in American history. Governor James Peabody, backed by mine owners and the organization they funded called the Citizens Alliance, declared martial law in Teller County. The declaration suspended habeas corpus. Men could be arrested and held without charge. The National Guard arrived in force.

Mine owners recruited strikebreakers. When strikebreakers and union men were both present at the Independence railroad depot on June sixth, nineteen oh four, an explosion killed thirteen men. The mine owners blamed the union. The investigation was conducted by investigators sympathetic to the mine owners. The cause was never conclusively established in the public record to the satisfaction of independent historians.

What followed the explosion was categorical. More than two hundred labor organizers were loaded onto trains and deported from Colorado across state lines into Kansas and New Mexico. They were told not to come back. No court authorized these deportations. No charges were filed for most of them. It was extrajudicial removal, done in the name of order.

The Western Federation of Miners was effectively destroyed in Cripple Creek. Its surviving leadership went to Chicago the following year and helped found the Industrial Workers of the World. The radical labor tradition that animated American unions for the next three decades was shaped in part in this high-altitude gold camp where the governor suspended the law so the mine owners could win.